“I’m quite literally s****ing my pants right now,” says Lewis Capaldi, slipping easily into his amenable onstage persona as part male Adele, part Scottish club try-out comedian having his first go at crowd work.
Capaldi’s music, let’s be frank, is pretty unremarkable standard issue singer-songwriter big balladry, of the type that used to make your nan weep to David Gray. But his image, as the normal lad down the pub who happens to be blessed with Krakatoa tonsils, makes him a particularly huggable presence, and gives lyrics that might otherwise sound like they were culled from an AI version of 19 – “Nobody said that this would last forever”, “I wanna say I wish that you never left, but instead I only wish you the best” – a believability that you wouldn’t get from a heartbreak ballad by, say, Louis Tomlinson.
Appearing to a celebratory electronic fanfare, Capaldi seems genuinely overwhelmed by the occasion, and falls back on his trademark self-deprecating wit. He shushes a crowd of “smelly f***ing b******s” singing “oh, Lewis Capaldi” in case “Jack White makes money from the situation” and looks as speechless as the rest of us when the Red Arrows stage a fly-by at the perfect crescendo moment of “Forever”.
“I feel like Iggy Pop,” he quips as he whips off his T-shirt for “Wish You the Best”, and mock-introduces Ed Sheeran ahead of their co-written – and reliably Sheeran-esque – “Pointless”: “He’s not f***ing here but it’d be cool if he was.”
Besides the persona, there’s a downplayed subtlety to the set that’s vanishingly rare among the major league lung-bursters of today. Having dedicated the elegiac “Before You Go” to an aunt Pat who died when he was young, he dissipates the overbearing mood by telling the crowd to “stop f***ing crying” to the final verse and ends with a snatch of Abba’s “Dancing Queen”. And where less stratospheric vocal talents might have expanded both “Bruises” and “Wish You the Best” into bombastic house or quasi-rock finales, Capaldi lets them exist purely as haunting piano pieces, and they are all the more powerful for it.
Unfortunately, his initial stage fright proves to be justified. Two-thirds of the way through his setlist he starts apologising for his voice giving way, and while it holds its own through “Hold Me While You Wait” he cuts his “s***show” set short amid much apology and self-censure: “I’m a bit annoyed with myself here,” he sighs, “I hope the Eavises will have me back”.
Early in his most iconic hit “Someone You Loved” it audibly collapses completely. But this is an emotion-charged singalong of everyman heartache that carries itself – as Capaldi roams the stage dejected, convinced he’s blown the biggest show of his life, 200,000 voices offer him support in one of the most moving moments in recent Glastonbury memory. He may be by numbers but he’s definitely someone Worthy Farm loves.
