Isle of Wight 2

We slept on the bus overnight and I woke at 11. We were due onstage at 2:30 so I had a lot to do before then. I made tea and hunted for breakfast. Today we were allowed a hotel room for our dressing room so that was good, to have privacy for the bathroom, and a shower. I did a radio interview and some television. Our time was moved to 3:30 because someone canceled.

The guys approached me about the set list. Should we still do “Behind Blue Eyes”, they wanted to know. Yes, of course, I said. it seemed a bit ballsy doing that, knowing the Who had just done it the night before, but I feel we do a good version. Plus Daltrey had forgotten the lyrics and I knew I wouldn’t.

There was nothing to lose by doing it. We were not in competition, we didn’t have to rock harder than anybody. People were expecting Luka, and the Queen and the Soldier, and Gypsy, not some big rock show from me, so an acoustic version would be a tip of the hat to the Who, as it were, and I felt it would be accepted.

A word about this song. I wrestled with whether to change the lyrics. After all I am not a man and the lyrics clearly state “No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man.” But you can’t put “woman” in there, it won’t sing properly. And a bad woman has a different connotation. A “bad woman” is one who gets drunk or is unfaithful or doesn’t look after her children.

A bad “girl” is even more insignificant, someone who gets drunk, or sleeps around. But a bad man is really evil, killed people remorselessly, someone with a hardened conscience. Of course there are bad women in life, really bad, but we don’t think of them the same way. Literature is filled with bad men who want to be redeemed. Almost no literature of the same stature for women.

When he says “man” here he means “human” and that’s what I feel when I sing it. So I keep the lyrics the same. It’s a thrill singing it, I feel connected to every line. Although I don’t know that we’ll keep doing it forever.

We fiddled with the set list and changed it around a bit. I got ready and did my makeup. One of the journalists said earlier that it was a nice crowd, they were really mellow and sitting peacefully on the ground. He said this smiling at me like that was a good thing. Oh, I thought. Hopefully they’ll get stirred up a bit, we don’t want everyone asleep.

We got to the backstage area. The Mooncusser film crew was there shooting. John Giddings, my agent, was backstage already. He has been my agent for a long time, nearly 20 years. I was tickled that he was there before me.

“We are HERE!” he shouted at me. “Yes,” I agreed, wondering for a second what he was talking about. “The moment has arrived!” he said dramatically. “I TOLD you we’d have a festival at the Isle of Wight! And you would be on it! You didn’t believe me!!”

It’s true, we had been talking about doing the Isle of Wight festival for years. But why did he say I didn’t believe him? Of course I did. When he gets an idea in his brain about something, he keeps at it until it happens.

If you have ever seen me playing on an ancient Italian windswept temple, or on the flight path in Cagliari, or a deep cave in Gibraltar (more on that later), or the Christchurch Cathedral in Dublin, you know that Giddings has been there, and decided that’s where I must play.

Usually you will also see Glynn in the background, muttering, cursing, and tearing the hair out of his head trying to fix the technical problems caused by wind and rain, dust and damp and reverberance in these romantic venues. The wind in Italy blew the chairs in the audience over, and the guitars were blowing around onstage. Glynn wonders why can’t we just play rock venues like everybody else? What’s next? Underwater? Atlantis?

John has already started thinking about this for next year. “There’s a cliff in Cornwall you must play!” he’s told me. Which apparently usually does Shakespeare plays, not music. It sounds windy and exposed to me, but I love these venues because they are beautiful, and it makes it a special gig. So even if I am singing with a mouthful of dust and my hair sticking out and the guitars falling over, it’s fine. It’s part of the story.

Back to the story at hand... Who was on before us? I don’t remember. We took the stage. It was blindingly bright, not only because of the sun but because of a huge light right at the foot of the microphone. For a second I was so dazzled I could hardly see. I put my sunglasses on and took them off all through the show, playing with them, and with the audience.

I looked out at the huge crowd. They were standing up and reached very far back. I was happy to see them standing, that gives it some energy. There was one very vocal lady down front shouting something like “don’t wait so long next time” or something. The usual girls in bikini tops at festivals were standing around waving.

I like to see people singing along and there were a lot of them. Sometimes even the security guards sing, which is funny, seeing big burly men singing Marlene on the Wall. “Even if I am in love with you...” Behind Blue Eyes went down well, despite one review saying that it went flat with the audience.

During “Left of Center” I didn’t want to make the same joke I have been making for years about how it’s the piano solo without the piano, so I looked over at Mike and suddenly yelled “Mike Visceglia on bass!” during the solo bit and everybody cheered and Mike had a big smile on his face.

We decided to do Pilgrimage, which is an older song from Days of Open Hand. It is both contemplative and a big production number, written about the years spent looking for my father, a song with different time signatures and moments of complete silence.

During this song a shriek of sustained feedback from Billy’s guitar sailed right through one of the silences in a cool sort of way. I had never heard that before. Later Chris from Mooncusser joked that it was his transmitter from the camera that set it off. It added to the feeling of everyone playing as expansively as they could, going right up to the edge of their capabilities, filling up the bright broad sunshine with sound and energy.

Everybody yelled and clapped during Luka. They went crazy for Tom’s Diner, clapping and shouting, singing and cheering. I was wondering - do I do the corny rock thing of clapping in time with my hands over my head? I did. There’s a reason people do that. It gets the audience going. It went really well. I was proud. Afterwards a great sense of relief and buzz of adrenaline.

Here’s what the Independent said:
“A long afternoon of all-male rock acts was put into perspective by only the (second?) female lead of the festival, Suzanne Vega. She stole the show, giving perfectly judged interpretations of her material, alternately hard-edged, insinuating and sly. ‘Blood Makes Noise’ and ‘Luka’ brought shivers on a hot day, while the closing solo vocal ‘Tom’s Diner’ had the crowd humming.”

It felt weird being done so early in the day. Now we went off to get food before David Bowie’s show in the evening, the big closing to the festival.


[Next: Isle of Wight - Part 3 ]