Glastonbury 2023 has so far felt short of a big pop crowning moment: there’s no sense of a major arrival like Olivia Rodrigo last year, or a brilliant young artist ascending to headline the Pyramid stage. Alongside Fred Again, perhaps, Lewis Capaldi feels as close as it comes.
With two albums under his belt, the Scottish balladeer is in the same position as Billie Eilish and Stormzy each were when they topped the bill. You wonder if he’s been offered it – or whether he might even have turned it down, deterred by the pressure of the spotlight. Glastonbury is Capaldi’s widely reported-on return to live performance after cancelling his other June dates in order to prioritise his mental health. “I haven’t been home since Christmas and at the moment I’m struggling to get to grips with it all,” he told fans at the start of the month.
He gets straight down to business once he walks on stage in his simple white T-shirt, diving into the first line of recent epic Forget Me. The brisk start feels both cocksure – he hangs off the mic a bit like Liam Gallagher – and anxious, and he has a noticeable cough. This dichotomy is precisely part of Capaldi’s appeal: his songs dwell on his perceived inferiorities, yet that massive voice of his is a bulwark, or a port in the storm. It sounds so much better live than on record, where it’s so often straitjacketed by terrible antiseptic production: wilder and less like an alarm blaring (near enough every chorus on his new album, Broken By Desire to Be Heavenly Sent, goes off like a bomb), and helped, too, by the straightforward rough-and-readiness of his band.
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