The Police closed the 10th Isle of Wight festival on Sunday after a weekend of glorious sunshine, contrary to reports of rain from the weathermen.
3 days of hot acts new and old graced the historic festival ground that has played host to legends such as Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones.
Adding themselves to this list of greats were the Friday night headliners The Kaiser Chiefs, who treated the crowd to 2 songs from the as of yet untitled new album as well as belting out classics like Ruby and Oh My God. On before them were American funk rock band N.E.R.D with frontman Pharrell Williams asking the crowd ‘How ya feeling out there’?
The Saturday kicked into gear when Coventry’s finest, ‘The Enemy’, took to the stage pummeling their way through tracks from their debut album ‘We Live and Die In These Towns’, but what really got the crowd going was a rawkess set from Iggy Pop and The Stooges. Iggy certainly lived up to his crazy reputation with his shouting, screaming, and hurling himself into the 50,000 strong crowd. Ian Brown was a lot less active, uphappy with the lack of noise coming from the crowd he played 4 tracks from his latest album and finished with Dolphins Were Monkeys and F.E.A.R. Enter the Sex Pistols who rolled back the years with Johnny Rotten spitting and snarling all the way through the set and at one point telling the polite audience ‘they should be ashamed of themselves’ for the lack of noise they were producing.
A new addition to this years festival was the introduction of The Big Top tent. The roof will have to be fixed for next year as it was blown off by an amazing set from The Music on the Sunday night. Playing songs mainly from their new album Strength In Numbers they still threw in a couple of classics like ‘The People’ and ‘Getaway’ to whip the crowd into a psychadelic frenzy. 5 minutes later, back on the main stage, The Police rounded off the festival by playing songs that spanned their entire career, kicking off with ‘Message In A Bottle’. During the set Sting told the crowd how he had been to the festival before in back in 1969 and how happy he was to be there now playing with The Police. They then finished the night of with an encore which included ‘Roxanne’ and ‘Next To You’, unsuring everyone was up on their feet and dancing their way back to their tents.
By Matthew Goodwin
