The attendance of this festival was around 50,000, a 15,000 increase on sales of the year before, which was testament to its growing success as a British music festival.

It was the second year of Nokia sponsorship, which saw the likes of The Who, David Bowie and R.E.M.

In this year the Isle of Wight festival began to seriously stake its claim as one of the big festivals of Britain.

Attracting a line-up featuring Faithless, Travis and R.E.M.

This was scheduled to include Morrissey as the Saturday night headliner, but he had to pull out and was replaced by Travis.