Isle of Wight Festival, Afton Down, Isle of Wight, Britain, 8-27-1970 to 8-30-1970 - 8-30-1970: Part 2: Donovan & Pentangle

After the hard rock of Free, the next two acts at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival had more of a folky sound: Donovan and Pentangle.

Unfortunately, just like the John Sebastian set I discussed previously, I have a recording of the full Donovan set, but it sounds terrible. It's an audience bootleg. Just like the Sebastian one, there was a near constant wind blowing on the microphone, messing with the vocals in a way that's impossible to improve. He played for about an hour, with the first half solo acoustic and the second half with his band Open Road.

But all is not lost, because three songs survived with worthy sound quality. "Catch the Wind" sounds the best, because it was included on the album "Message to Love" that went with the film documentary of the same name. The other two songs here apparently come from a better sourced bootleg.

We're lucky to have most of the Pentangle set. None of it has been officially released, nor did any of it appear on any bootlegs that I know of. However, in 2019, Colin Harper posted what he had of the set on YouTube, and I've taken it from there. Harper has written a book about Pentangle and has been involved in the rerelease of all their albums, so he's had access to material from their vaults. 

That's the good news. The bad news is, there were a number of problems with this recording. First off, the first three songs are missing: "Train Song," "Sally Free and Easy," and "Bruton Town." There was nothing I could do about that. Also, the first minute or so of "Hunting Song" was missing, and the last couple of minutes of the final song, "Pentangling," was missing. I found a good bootleg from the same year at Berkeley, and I patched in parts of that to fill in the missing sections. As a result, there are now about 37 minutes out of what had been a 55 minute set.

Pentangle was not happy with how their set went. Harper wrote: "The group always recalled the show as sub-par, to do with various offstage distractions, poor onstage sound, and someone stage-invading at one point and standing on singer Jacqui McShee's foot (indeed, you can hear her asking this person to get off her foot during 'Rain and Snow'). [However,] at this remove, it sounds like they acquitted themselves very well in the circumstances."

This album is 50 minutes long.

017 Catch the Wind (Donovan)
018 Henry Martin (Donovan)
019 Train Whistle Blues (Donovan)
020 talk (Pentangle)
021 Light Flight (Pentangle)
022 Will the Circle Be Unbroken (Pentangle)
023 Hunting Song [Edit] (Pentangle)
024 Rain and Snow (Pentangle)
025 House Carpenter (Pentangle)
026 Pentangling [Edit] (Pentangle)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15596244/IsleofWghtFestivlAftnDwnIsleofWghtBrtain__8-30-1970_Pt2DonovnPntngle.zip.html

The cover photo comes from this exact concert.