Robin Gibb in New Zealand in 1970. Photo / NZ Herald Archive
Robin Gibb in New Zealand in 1970. Photo / NZ Herald Archive
This extract from Professor Paul Moon’s new book on Auckland’s 20th century looks at the city’s Redwood 70 concert in which the Bee Gees’ Robin Gibb had a tomato thrown at him before being attacked by a fan.
A grin must have spread across the face of Phil Warren —the Auckland music promoter, agent and manager — when the idea first came to him. Just a few months earlier, almost half a million people had converged at Woodstock, near New York, for a three-day music festival, which also became a parade of American counterculture in this period. Surely, Warren thought, Auckland could host its own music festival, trading on Woodstock’s success (and infamy).
In late 1969 he began to assemble a line-up and selected a venue for this event: Redwood Park, in Swanson. It was 16 kilometres from the centre of the city, in a rural setting that had been a favourite spot for the Avondale Presbyterian Church Sunday-school picnics at the beginning of the century (and was named for the redwood trees planted in the vicinity in 1934). Warren’s timing was out, though. For all its mass appeal, Woodstock signified — as much as anything else — the end of an era. The generation of peace, love and drugs was growing up, and Woodstock represented more of a final flourish of the period of free-living hippy abandonment than a movement in the first flush of its existence.
Redwood 70 music festival in Swanson West Auckland. Photo / NZ On Screen
Redwood 70, as it was billed, took place on the weekend of January 31/February 1, 1970. The line-up of musicians was comprised almost entirely of local acts, but the “special guest star direct from London” was Robin Gibb from the group the Bee Gees, who was to be backed by a 17-piece orchestra (which was as much of a hint as was needed that this event would be far from the sort of radical countercultural outpouring witnessed at Woodstock).
As an indication of how makeshift the event was, the start of the first performance had to be delayed by half an hour because the food stalls were using up too much electricity, leaving insufficient power for the amplifiers on stage.
Eventually, the festival got under way, and as the relatively disappointing crowd of around 9000 settled in at Swanson, the compere Peter Sinclair (who had until recently presented the popular music television show C’mon) introduced the event: “Hi, welcome to Redwood 70, the first happening of a happening decade .... a love-in, a live-in, a be-in.”
Thirty-six hours of non-stop top pops. So far, so hippy, but there were soon signs that peace and love were not in ample supply at this event.
An account of Gibb taking the stage revealed that there was an uncouth element making its presence known in the audience:
International pop star Robin Gibb, on asking if the audience is “Having a luvly [sic] time?” gets pelted with a flying tomato. Then a young man dashes for the stage and is intercepted by the under-resourced police and security detail. Breaking away, one arm still held, he dances a fake foxtrot with his captor, drawing laughter from the large crowd and prompting yet more flying cans and missiles .... Soon after, a girl dressed in white makes it onstage and grabs Gibb around the neck, pushing him into the music stands behind. She’s quickly followed by a male fan who heads for the microphone before being repelled by a policeman.
Police remove stage invaders at the Redwood 70 festival. Photo / NZ On Screen
Robin Gibb, centre, with Maurice and Barry, performing at Western Springs in 1999. Photo / John
Sinclair attempted to placate the malcontents in what he thought was the patois of the audience. “Well guys and gals,” he announced with a slightly American inflexion in his voice, “you’ve been very patient out there .... but I’ve got to remind you the Police and the security service have promised to remove anybody from the grounds who creates any sort of disturbance at all .... so let’s cool it and have a groovy scene.”
Sinclair’s plea, plus the installation of an electric fence near the stage, seemed to deter most from disrupting this event any further.
The low attendance at Redwood 70 resulted in the promoter losing money on the venture, and some of the lacklustre performances failed to rouse anything like the Woodstock spirit. Instead, late on the Sunday afternoon of February 1, 1970, the audience wandered off listlessly once the final song finished.
There had been a few arrests during the festival, the usual series of scuffles, and some drug use (although perhaps slightly less than rumours suggested), but nothing more serious. As the daylight faded on that Sunday evening, the food trucks drove away, the stage was taken down, and a gang of cleaners began restoring Redwood Park to its former humdrum state.
The city’s experimentation with a youth music festival had been a moderate success, but this West Auckland Woodstock concluded with a sense of unfulfilled possibilities.
Auckland: The Twentieth-Century Story by Paul Moon, out on April 5, published by Oratia Books, RRP: $45
Paul Moon (ONZM) is a professor of history at the Auckland University of Technology and the author of more than 30 books of history and biography.
