"There was about 380 people in the hall, sold out. There wasn’t a woman in sight." Carl Palmer looks back on the earliest Emerson, Lake & Palmer shows

ELP — (Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

In April, Carl Palmer will undertake a North American tour celebrating the music and legacy of ELP. The An Evening with Emerson, Lake & Palmer tour will feature the 75-year-old progressive rock drum legend performing live alongside videos of the late Greg Lake and Keith Emerson filmed at the trio's October 2 and 3, 1992 concerts at London's Royal Albert Hall.

"The first three weeks of going through all the footage to make the show was really hard, very difficult," Palmer tells Rolling Stone in an exclusive new career-spanning interview. "But after the three weeks, I figured, Well, they would want this. They wouldn’t want holograms. After that, I was okay seeing them every day. It was actually comforting, to be honest with you."

In the interview, Palmer also looks back on the trio's first couple of live shows, their debut performance at Plymouth Guildhall on August 23, 1970, and a rather more-high profile show at 1970's Isle of Wight festival, which featured the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Miles Davis, The Doors, Rory Gallagher and more.

Reflecting on the English trio's debut, Palmer recalls, "We got paid 400 pounds, which would be equivalent to about, I don’t know, $500 today, which is quite a lot in those days."

"The promoter was called Dick Van Dyke, believe it or not," he continues. "I think there was about 380 people in the whole hall. It was sold out. There wasn’t a woman in sight. There was no females in the audience. They’re all guys with beards and pipes reading newspapers and things. And we thought, Well, this is weird. I can’t believe that this is just guys’ music. But yes, it was to a certain extent. And then it started to grow."

The band's second show took place less than a week later, on Saturday, August 29, the middle day of the Isle Of Wight weekender, where they were billed alongside The Who, Free and headliners The Doors.

"Our slot was 45 minutes," Palmer remembers. "Now, we’d heard that there was lots of problems getting into the festival because it wasn’t organized very well. You got to understand this. It was 1970. Nobody knew about security, what you do about getting the police, health and safety. There was none of that. We flew in by helicopter, fully dressed. The crew were already there, had everything set up. We landed at the back of the stage, ran out, played 45 minutes. We just played our asses off, jumped back into the helicopter.

"They flew us back to the hotel, which was still on the Isle of Wight," the Birmingham-born drummer adds. "And we were sitting in the restaurant looking at the menu saying, 'Oh, what are were going to eat?' We never saw the Who, we never saw Janis Joplin, we never saw Hendrix. That wasn’t the deal. We were in and we were out. And it was sensational."

“The enduring memory is the actual physical sight of that many people,” Greg Lake once recalled of Isle of Wight 1970. “I suppose before that, the only other time you’d see that many people gathered together would have been a war... There was a kind of random chaos taking place. In a way, it was all meant to be relaxed and ‘peace, love and have a nice day’, but there was kind of a tension about the whole thing."

You can read the full interview with Carl Palmer at RollingStone.com. And watch wild footage of the trio at Isle of Wight 1970 below.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

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