Isle of Wight review, day three: Biffy Clyro rock harder than anyone else, at a festival only Jess Glynne will want to forget

From Idles’ confrontational themes to a non-stop set of Madness hits, this year’s Isle of Wight was another solid year of memory making

Simon Neil of Biffy Clyro performs at Isle of Wight festival, Sunday 16 June 2019 (Rex)

“Who’s on after us?” Suggs asks someone in the wings. “Kurt Cobain?” He’s already suggested the Spice Girls and “Half a Direction” might be following Madness on the main stage, and he’s wrong on all counts. Even if he’d listened to the boisterous crowd, dotted with more than its fair share of Ringos screaming “Jess Glynne!” at him, he’d be misled too. For the second time, Glynne will cancel her appearance at Isle of Wight at the last minute – cue an exodus of glum pre-teens from the main arena and a spike in crying-face emojis on Twitter.

Glynne cites physical exhaustion for the cancellation, having just celebrated her last night on tour with the Spice Girls, but speculation abounds. Perhaps she got a whiff of Madness’s set of non-stop solid gold hits – “My Girl”, “Embarrassment”, “The Sun and the Rain”, “House of Fun” – thick and fast they come, proving that the best way to fill a jubilant afternoon set at IoW in 2019 is to have sold more singles than pretty much anybody else in the Eighties. Marking 40 years since their first Top of the Pops appearance, the band prompt a field-wide skank to “Baggy Trousers” and capture the mood of the miraculously unsoggy weekend with a beam-inducing “It Must Be Love”. Hardly a day to be crying when you could laugh, you might think.

Or perhaps Glynne had been watching Idles’ set in the Big Top on Sky Arts, realised she’d been rendered pointless and went home. “We’re a bit like Keane, but quicker and cokier,” singer Joe Talbot warns the crowd, although we can’t remember the last time that Keane’s guitarist marched around the stage dressed only in his pants like Biffy Clyro Xtreme, bellowing bits of “Nothing Compares 2 U” and Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times” in the quieter bits of “Somewhere Only We Know”.

And their themes are a tad more confrontational too. “The best way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich!” Talbot growls through asbestos vocal chords on “Mother” – he forgets having incriminating evidence of a historical drug dabble – while “Samaritans” attacks toxic masculinity and the oppressive fathers that enforce it with a savage sensitivity: “I’m a real boy, boy, and I cry,” Talbot snarls. When the band give their instruments and microphones to members of the audience, it all goes rather wonderfully Yoko, and Talbot leaves us with some hard-bitten words of wisdom: “Don’t read The Sun, it’ll give you cancer.” Whether Glynne has left the site yet or not, she’s a universe away from here.

In the end, Madness are actually followed on to the main stage by Richard Ashcroft who performs alone on an acoustic guitar – powering through half an hour of solo numbers to the obvious pleasure of the audience of dads, who are enjoying the extra room to swing their lager now the kids have gone home. It’s a cocky move, but Ashcroft pulls it off, the no-frills delivery equalising his career and allowing his enduring songwriting chops to shine, be it a “Sonnet”, a “History” or post-Verve tunes like “Song for the Lovers” and the upbeat “C’mon People (We’re Making It Now)”. As arguably the best song of the Nineties though, “The Drugs Don’t Work” rises above as a superb conflation of addiction and hospital drama that jerks tears with either reading.

At its climax the full band kicks in and Ashcroft’s second half grasps, semi-successfully, for the moon. If 2016’s “They Don’t Own Me” and its blueprint “Lucky Man” plod pleasantly along, the riot imagery of “Hold On” sweeps by on a surge of breezy electro-rock. A final, impassioned “Bitter Sweet Symphony” is sweeter than ever, since it’s the first time Ashcroft has played it in the UK without lining Mick’n’Keef’s pockets.

When “Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies” appears early in Biffy Clyro’s headline set – the sound of being stabbed repeatedly in the face by symphonic metal – you might think they’ve rowed the wrong way en route to Download, so much harder do they rock than anything else on the weekend’s bill. Two songs in and singer Simon Neil already has blood on his face, putting his neon yellow blazer at risk of ruination. But as the Weezer-like surf pop of “Howl” and Fifties milkshake anthem “The Captain” hammer by, it’s quickly made clear why they have a place at IoW.

From hardcore roots, they’ve become niche masters of mating mainstream pop dynamics with rock that roars like onrushing battalions of male voice choirs: witness “Mountains”, “Black Chandelier”, “Biblical” and “Stingin’ Belle”, the wail-along standouts of their 100 mighty minutes. The punk metal clatter of “57”, from their 2002 debut album Blackened Sky, shows how far they’ve shifted to the centre – for the better – but there are moments when they stray too far popward. When “Re-Arrange” indulges in the sort of click-pop we last heard during Anne-Marie’s set yesterday, or when “Born on a Horse” appears to make a concerted effort to be Hall & Oates.

A ferocious rock freak-out is never far away though, and “Sunrise”, from last month’s soundtrack album to upcoming film drama Balance, Not Symmetry, suggests they’re heading more Zep than Lizzo. Plus they revel in the grand tradition of the great rock bang; “Many Of Horror” blares out like their very own “Fix You”, and “That Golden Rule” is met with such gigantic flumes of flame from the top of the stage that the entire island’s heating bill for 2019 will have been reduced by 20 per cent.

It seems almost sacrilegious to watch Keane after this, but fitting. “Everybody’s Changing” and “Somewhere Only We Know” are the Isle of Wight festival reverting to factory settings after another solid year of memory making. A weekend only Jess Glynne will want to forget.