Read the room, Rod. To a slow-growing Pyramid Stage crowd – several regretting their choice of leopard-print leggings and mullet wig – Stewart arrives on a lavish Vegas stage in a Liberace jacket, fresh from pleading with the UK to “give Farage a chance”.
A chance to demonise immigrants, dismantle the NHS, ruin us all with die-bankrupt health insurance and let multi-millionaires off with a bargain bin one-off tax payment for life, yes? Looks like Rod the Selfish Sod will have to put on a barnstormer to carry off the most pre-tainted legend slot in Glastonbury history.
Unfortunately, his famously grainy and lived-in voice is now totally shot, and he initially lacks much of the field-wise goodwill that carried Diana Ross through against similar odds in 2022. For a good hour, despite valiant work by a host of glamorous backing singers and beaming fiddle players in razzle-dazzling attention away from Rod’s punctured instrument, it’s often preferable to spend the set mentally reworking the songs’ titles rather than concentrating too hard on their wincing renditions. “Some Guys Have All the Luck,” he wheezes early on. Some sadly now sing like a set of knackered van brakes. The first cut may be the deepest, but the first note isn’t even the flattest. It’s an earache, more like.
There’s also some awkward kowtowing to the Glastonbury mindset, which comes across as disingenuous damage limitation. “Music brings us together!” he cries ahead of a painful take on Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party”. His urging of the world’s nations to “join hands, start a love train” during a cover of The O’Jays’ “Love Train” is his response to “a lot of talk about the Middle East, and rightly so” – presumably landing on the condition that it isn’t routed through the Chunnel. That he does all this wearing trousers with two stars on each buttock seems an unwitting self-review.
Come “Maggie May” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” the crowd begin to carry the songs for him (hear that, Rod? It’s called compassion), particularly when a song like “Young Turks” requires any sort of energy or oomph. He copes much better with the gentler material: the lower end of Etta James’s “I’d Rather Go Blind” or a heartwarming “I Don’t Want to Talk About It”. But the most enjoyable parts of the latter stages come when he gets Michael Eavis on for a birthday hug, or leaves the stage to change into a hot pink or bright green suit while his effervescent backing singers do “Lady Marmalade” or “Proud Mary”.
His “surprise” guests, announced long before they make an appearance, make for a cornucopia of corn. Mick Hucknall wanders out for a duet on “If You Don’t Know Me by Now”, presumably here only for his even more withered voice to make Rod’s sound altogether powerful. Ronnie Wood adds meat to “Stay With Me” and Lulu some much-craved vocal prowess to an otherwise hoary-to-the-max “Hot Legs”.
By the final “Sailing”, a modicum of event status has amassed, but the overall sense of the set is of the wringing out the dregs of a career. Far more than Neil Young last night, Stewart’s show suggests that the old guard’s time has well and truly passed, and that in future all legend slot bookings need to involve a fresh audition tape.
