Stalwart acts dominate headline slots at Latitude Festival

Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi apologised for arriving onstage late on Friday. Pop stars don’t often do that, but it wasn’t just a matter of a few minutes — Capaldi was a whole year late, having pulled out of his headline slot at last summer’s Latitude Festival to concentrate on writing new music. He then apologised again for not having managed to write any new music either.

Capaldi’s 2019 debut album, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, saw him rise from obscurity to selling more than 1mn copies in just over a year. His music is now so ubiquitous you’ve probably heard a lot of it even if you don’t think you have. So if he has found it a challenge to follow that level of success, you can understand why.

He launched into “Grace”, then “Forever”, two perfect examples of his knack for a mournful but dramatic melody, and followed them with the more raucous “Hollywood”, his soulful, powerhouse vocals providing the lift-off. But between numbers, Capaldi continued to make jokes at his own expense, so much so that you wondered if even the cover version he elected to play — a rousing rendition of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” — was self-deprecating. The US singer had a huge hit with her breakthrough record in 2002 but couldn’t repeat it; type her name into Google and the top question that comes up is: “Is Vanessa Carlton a one-hit wonder?”

Finishing with his two biggest hits, “Before you Go”, and “Someone You Loved”, Capaldi looked somewhat relieved. The ecstatic reception he got from the audience should reassure him that his music has already struck a chord with a large number of people, whatever that second album brings.

Saturday’s headline act showed Capaldi that when seeking invention, reinvention is sometimes necessary. Foals’ dramatic guitar music has seen them become one of the UK’s most acclaimed live acts of the past decade. But following 2019’s Everything Not Saved Will be Lost, an epic project released in two parts rather than as a double album, the Oxford rockers slimmed down to a three-piece and recently released a good-time dance record “made for communal moments”, in the words of the group’s vocalist and guitarist Yannis Philippakis. In their second headlining appearance at Latitude, they endeavoured to mix the past and present, with new bouncy numbers such as “2AM” accompanying more forbidding material such as “The Runner”. The dark side ultimately won out as the show built up to the intense and hypnotic noisescapes of “Black Bull” and “What Went Down”.

Sunday belonged to Snow Patrol, who topped the bill at the first Latitude in 2006 and looked ecstatic to be doing so again, singer Gary Lightbody beaming unstoppably throughout. A spectacular show burst into life with the anthemic 2003 hit “Run” and kept up the pace, delivering all the ballads and bangers from the band’s Noughties peak. “Set the Fire to the Third Bar”, complete with accompaniment (via video) from Martha Wainwright, was the pick of the bunch. The special guests didn’t end there as midway through a cover of Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits”, a song co-written with Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid, Sheeran himself raced on stage. A breathless finale came with a mass singalong of “Chasing Cars”, before Sheeran returned for an encore of another Snow Patrol oldie, “Just Say Yes”.

For many festivals, the constant challenge is how to pull in the crowds but still push the envelope. Suffolk’s Latitude has given a lot of artists their first headlining slots at a big festival and it will no doubt continue to do so. Yet following a Glastonbury where the main attractions included Paul McCartney, it was no surprise to find top billing on the main stages being given to several bands that have been around longer than much of the audience have been alive. Britpop veterans Shed Seven’s lead singer Rick Witter wittily captured this when he asked a very young audience member if he remembered the 1990s: “No? Too many drugs?”

But while there’s something sweet about watching performers and fans grow old together — Witter also spoke to an older fan who said it was her 28th time seeing the band live — there is an ongoing debate about how to promote today’s rising stars, especially young female artists. At Latitude, Maggie Rogers, Phoebe Bridgers and especially the London rapper Little Simz all played inventive and exhilarating sets that made the case for expanding the headliners’ club soon.

latitudefestival.com