A mere dress rehearsal for the bigger and better festival happenings to come the weekend after next it may have been, but this weekend’s Isle of Wight festival was still great. I wasn’t overly impressed with the two old blokes pretending to be The Who, and found everything post-Word Gets Around that the Stereophonics played to be, well, a touch on the dull side, but aside from that it was a really good weekend. The Manics were on top form, and I even enjoyed the two new songs they played (Empty Souls and Solitude Sometimes Is), sounding as they did like an improvement on the lyrical failings of recent new material like Forever Delayed. I was also suitably embarrassed to discover during No Surface, All Feeling that the two blokes next to me had suddenly started straining to hear me singing along (I have a tendency to sing along mindlessly at gigs without thinking that the people in my immediate vicinty might be able to hear). They didn’t seem to mind, though, describing it as being “like subtitles, only better”.
Earlier, we’d enjoyed seeing Jet play a truncated version of the set we saw at Brixton the other week. It’s definitely a shame that they’re not going to be at Glasto, but one other band that I’ll definitely be trying to see again is Snow Patrol, who played a cracking set on the Sunday (they seemed genuinely, but endearingly, overwhelmed by the [positive crowd response as well).
The only downside to something like IoW is that you have to suffer the usual it’s-not-glasto festival issues, like not being able to take your own beer in and having to queue twice to buy hideously overpriced alcohol inside the venue (whose daft money extorting idea was beer tokens anyway?), but one unusual aspect was that the crowd seemed to be one of the friendliest I’ve encountered at a festival (set against Reading 2001’s bottle throwing Sunday afternoon teenagers as probably the worst). Even when they were being wankers, and there was plently of that going on, especially around the showing of the England match on the Sunday, they were still being quite nice about it. The locals (past whose houses hordes of festival goers trudged twice daily on their way from the campsite to the arena) even seemed to be surprisingly friendly and understanding. Maybe it’s something in the island air. Then again, when David Bowie introduced All The Young Dudes during his excellent–but not quite as good as at Glastonbury 2000–headlining set, he suggested we shouldn’t sing along during the chorus “because of all the local farmers who go to bed early”. I couldn’t help thinking he’d got a bit confused about the whole thing. Perhaps he thought he was somewhere else.