I wanted to begin by asking about the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival. According to the Ventnor Mercury at the time you performed a song called December in Hastings?"I know right away which song they mean, but it's called Windy Morning."
What was your feeling about that day?
"That was one of the most extraordinary memories I have ever had for many reasons. One was that there was a very buoyant atmosphere there. Everyone was very happy and light. I remember playing the Wheely Festival afterwards and it was already that kind of rock feeling started to move in."
Didn't it start to move a year later with Altamont and the final Isle of Wight which you didn't go to?
"No, I barely made it to that one because I had to be in Cyprus the next day. There was a lovely party going on, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were there."
Did you go to the party?
"I was there for about five minutes. I said hi to them, I would have loved to have stayed but I had to take the ferry back over and catch a plane to Cyprus the next day. We were doing some filming there. And the ferries were all fully booked. So it was very difficult for us to get on. We were very lucky to get on. I remember being panicked about getting on."
Did you just come with your manager and your guitar? I suppose you met all the Americans there, in a sense was it like a homecoming?
"I had met Bob Dylan once before at his concert at the Royal Festival Hall, I went to a party afterwards and had a lovely chat with him. He was speaking in poetry. It was quite extraordinary. I think he was probably high on something, or maybe not. He was just very wired. I spoke to him and he said 'I heard about you'. And he said he was going to send me some songs and I never did get the songs but he had been touring and he had seen some of my posters around."
"I hadn't seen him since then so at the Isle of Wight he was much more mellow. He'd been married, he'd just got married but he hadn't sung for five years. He's a Gemini like I am but he's completely the other side of Gemini, sort of peaceful. He was a bit heavier. He looked like a happily married man and father but he was very nervous because he hadn't sung for some years. Barbara and Bert Block were really nice to me, they chatted to me like they were family or something, really nice. "
"Everyone was around Dylan. I sat on stage with the Blocks when he sang. I talked to him for a long time because the Band had gone on, and they were going down really well, it was the first big gig they had done on their own. And so they just stayed out there for an extra hour or something, meanwhile poor Bob Dylan was getting more and more nervous about going on."
He just did his contractual hour didn't he and just came off. It was quite a strange gig wasn't it?
"It was very strange. I really felt for him. The people wanted too much, in a way."
Treated him too much as a God, which in way I suppose he was in those days?
"How can you live up to that? I thought he did a brilliant set. Members of the Band were great and I loved his version of Wild Mountain Thyme."
I heard you do it in your soundcheck? Do you do it in the set?
"Very rarely. Sometimes if I get like two encores I'll sometimes go out and end unaccompanied like I started."
"There's some things I don't remember too clearly about the Isle of Wight. There are some things that are very vivid in my mind. Like I didn't even remember the year."
You had Tom Paxton who went down an absolute storm. Pentangle came on, and then you came on and you were received really well.
"Somebody was on before Pentangle?"
That would have been Tom Paxton.
"Oh yes, because I sang 'Going To The Zoo' which is his song. It's funny when I was on stage somebody came up and borrowed my guitar, I thought it was John Sebastian, I thought it was but I don't know."
There was an incident before you played? There was a guy who wrote for Oz who came up and took a guitar. There was a press report about him taking your guitar.
"Yes, he took my guitar and sang a few songs and I didn't know what to do and I said 'Yeah fine, it was like love and peace'."
Was that before you played?
"I think it was either before I played or in the middle or something."
It's strange because that was what happened to Joni Mitchell the next year when her set got interrupted and she broke down in tears. You played, Richie Havens played, and then you have the Band and then Dylan. It was quite a lead up. Your set went really well didn't it?
"I felt about two feet off the ground. I mean there were people as far as the eye could see. I never forget that. I mean I played to twenty seven thousand people in New Zealand at Western Springs, I don't remember that feeling like they just went on forever. It was a beautiful sunny day. It just felt like heaven. I wasn't at Woodstock so I don't know what that felt like but it certainly was, I suppose, England's Woodstock."
You obviously still write?
"Yes, but I didn't use to write."
You were principally known in England as the lady who came on and did covers and things?
"I went through a lot of changes. When the sixties died in the mid seventies, I guess, I felt very unattached, out on a limb, that would take a long time to tell you all about that."
Was it like a loss of spirit?
"Everyone wanted me just to sing the old songs and that along with the fact that my audiences were getting less, I wasn't selling as many albums, and Bob Dylan says 'There is no success like failure and failure ain't no success at all.' Still it does get to you and I got into what I call the Aquarian arts. I started off with Yoga then I got into meditation, astrology, healing and that sort of saw me through. A sort of a spiritual base. That was an incredible blessing. Because although I felt incredibly lost and I felt I needed that spiritual support, at the end of the day it's what re-inspired me because I'd lost my inspiration."
"On a personal level I was going through a Pluto transit which is an astrological thing of an identity crisis. But I think this feeling that all our dreams of the sixties had meant nothing because in came Reagan and Thatcher."
With Altamont and onwards it all goes down the tubes doesn't it?
"Yes, and that wonderful high and I don't think I experienced more instensely than at the Isle of the Wight."
I think that was the last . . .
"Innocent?"
That's the word I was looking for . . .
"I mean like Glastonbury is incredible but there's a lot of heavy energy going along with the very beautiful energy. I remember speaking to some people about being on the Frost Report with David Frost and how that was how live television, black and white, and it was kinda before television got sophisticated. The same with the Beatles when they came, when the artistry got ahead of the industry, just for a while, then everything kicked in and everything was like predictable, harsh, marketable. I don't know but being an artist and also being a dreamer I just really long for that kind of a feel. I think we are coming to a crunch."
It always happens around milleniums doesn't it? From what I read the birth of Jesus was on one of these crunch times. For all I know about spirituality that is.
"That was like two thousand years ago but there are many wheels turning. That wheel lines up with two thousand years ago but there is also like the last time we were in the age of Aquarius was twenty four thousand years ago. So when all the wheels synchronise and there is a passage through from the middle one to the outer one."
Do you think your Mexican descent has something to do with your affinity to these things? The Mexicans are very spiritual people?
"And the American Indian which I get through my mother and my father. This wonderful connection to the land. When I'm not singing I often take groups of women to sacred sites. That has a lot to do with when the diety, when God was the Goddess and the earth was the body of the Goddess. You go back to Aquasulus and Bath, a lot of the culture in Glastonbury was like Goddess Bridget."
"The feminine which doesn't just mean women. It's the feminine feeling in men and women which has been supressed and it also parallels our disrespect for the Earth. As we become more aware of ecology, become more aware of the Earth itself then it is my hope that we will become more involved with nurturing and creativity and all those kind of attributes that are usually attributed to the mother rather than the father. A lot of people try to get into a polarity, men against women, I just feel it's time we all realised that we are all children of the earth."
"It was very difficult transition for folksingers to be thrown into the mainstream in the sixties and when the spotlight moved on and we wondering what we were supposed to do. I stopped for four years in the eighties. When I came back in it was after I went on a peace march in Central America. I think it was tuning into a spirit of things."
"We've gotten into this structure which is like an angry God, an angry male God where if you don't do things right you get punished. You have to do more and more. You have to make more money. You have to be better and better. Death of a Salesman is a play about that where his father wants him to go out and please him. It seems to be that kind of pressure that has taken us away from the natural cycles of things. You know there's Spring, there's Summer, there's autumn, Winter then you rest."
"There's a song on my last album written by Charlie Murphy a song called The Burning Times, Christy Moore recorded it. It says 'In the late of the evening they used to gather neath the stars and the meadow circled near an old oak tree at times appointed by the seasons and the phases of the moon.' The idea that the phases of the Moon, the seasons were in harmony with the solar system of the universe. Whereas if you just keep going forward and don't take that , you breathe out, you breathe in, you don't go in that cycle and everything is out there, proactive, aggressive."
In the old days we didn't work for four days at certain times, for Harvest festivals, everybody got drunk and didn't work it was a natural seasonal cycle.
"Yes like Padstow, down in Cornwall, fantastic, Beltain, there are so many of those old rituals that are considered pagan and like bad. People can be Christian and also Pagan in a way. People can believe in what they want but if they believe in the Earth and in cycles. When I take these tours they are women who are unitarian. They belong to Christian churches but they do courses called 'Wise Up and Call Her Name' and look up all the female dieties. In India, they have Cali, Shakti there is a wonderful choice of dieties rather than just one."
Mike Plumbley interviewed Julie Felix at the Nonesuch Folk Club in Bishops Waltham, Hampshire
Julie Felix homepage
Julie Felix live at Nonesuch Folk Club, Bishops Waltham