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.
The other Capaldi dichotomy, it becomes apparent this afternoon, is the divide between his unruffled wit and total vulnerability. Capaldi has Tourette’s syndrome, which manifests in quite violent physical tics, affecting him between almost every line of every song. He pauses after Forever – which includes an impromptu Red Arrows flyover – to take in the gigantic early-evening Pyramid crowd (maybe the biggest I’ve ever seen – though I wasn’t at the secret Foo Fighters set yesterday), and the crowd starts chanting: “Oh, Lewis Capaldi!” to the tune of Seven Nation Army. He brushes us off. “That’s enough! I don’t need Jack White making money off this situation!” But the crowd keep at it. Capaldi doesn’t mention his recent mental ill health until the end of the set, but it very quickly becomes obvious that the audience are keenly aware of his situation and determined to buoy him at every possible opportunity.
The first half of the set is all about that trademark Capaldi humour. He tells the kids in the crowd that swearing is “fucking cool” and that he’s “shitting my pants”; he calls those of us who have been here since Wednesday “smelly fucking bastards” and teases the imminent removal of his T-shirt. He introduces Pointless by saying that it’s a cowrite with Ed Sheeran, who has been “in America for the last little while … but we’re close friends, I phone him up, I tell him I’m playing the Pyramid stage – ladies and gentlemen, Ed Sheeran!” Everyone loses it – but in the spirit of Pyramid opener Rick Astley earlier today, it’s a rick-roll. “He’s not fucking here!” Even when he dedicates Before You Go to his late auntie, he gestures towards heaven – and then hell: “I don’t know which way she went. She was a lovely person but she could be a bitch!”
But then the tenor of the set starts to change. There’s a warble in his voice on Bruises, which contains a tender wordless cry that sends shivers down my spine. He admits, before Wish You the Best, that he’s losing his voice, and then whips his top off. “I feel like Iggy Pop!” he says, all bravado, but it makes him look defenceless, especially as his voice starts to properly slip away. “I’m really sorry, this is the last place I’d want this to happen,” he says. “This is a fucking pain in the arse, you’ve all come out. I apologise, my voice is packing it in.” He has a go at Hold Me While You Wait – a song whose message of self-loathing feels resonant after two nights on the farm – then apologises again. “I’m sorry, I’m a bit annoyed with myself here,” he says, and the chant of “Oh, Lewis Capaldi” starts again. It’s not quite in time, but that only underlines how many thousands of people are out here, willing him on. The effect is immensely moving.
The top goes back on. “I recently took three weeks off … a wee break for my mental health,” Capaldi says at the end. “I wanted to come back and do Glasto because it’s so incredible, so I just wanna thank you for coming out and watching us. I was shit scared but you’ve really made me feel at ease. I’m really sorry, I hope the Eavises will have me back even though it’s been a bit of a shit show.” Then he makes a major announcement. “I feel like I’ll be taking another wee break for the next few weeks, you might not see me even for the rest of the year – but when I do come back and I do see you, I hope you’re up for watching.”
He closes the set with Someone You Loved, and at this point, he can barely sing more than a few lines without his voice drying up. The audience belt the words out for him as he walks around the stage, taking in the view, and he saves his last ounce of vocal strength for the last, massive chorus. “Glastonbury, thank you so much,” he says. “If I never get to do this again, this has been amazing.” You feel so deeply for the guy, and it’s palpable how much the crowd want him to know that he’s OK, it’s all OK, he is loved. Although I’m sure it’s not the main stage moment Capaldi dreamed of, it is beautiful, supportive, truly communal, and a testament to the complex bond he has built with his fans; a real human triumph.
