1970 was a time when all the clocks had stopped. After the technicolour explosion of and the rest, it felt like someone had turned the colour right back down. It wasn’t just TV that was black and white, it was everything.
The politicians, the football, the fashions, even the sky, smudged as it still was by a thick tar of coal and cigarette smoke. The only place where anything new and truly colourful was taking place, it seemed, was music. But even there the clock appeared to be running down.
The big event of the summer was . Held in August 1970 it starred , , and a relatively new British blues rock band called , then enjoying the big rock hit of the summer with the single , taken from their glorious third album . “We’d only just broken through, in terms of having hits,” recalled their bassist and co-founder Andy Fraser when he and I spoke in 2014.
“Suddenly we were on the same bill as all these superstar acts. But we knew how good we were. That on our day we needn’t be afraid of anybody.
” A month later Hendrix was dead, and six weeks after that Jim Morrison had given his last performance with The Doors. had also officially announced their break-up that year, and and were already long in their graves. Even Free, for whom the success of that year had offered so much future promise, were now flailing as they struggled to make a follow up to their masterpiece.
“We had the whole world in the palm of our hands in 1970. That’s what it felt like,” says drummer Sim.