Both the Strokes and Jay-Z have recently been announced as headline acts for the Isle of Wight Festival, June 11-13th 2010. It’ll be the Strokes’ first gig since 1996 and signals the bands second coming. Tickets went on sale on Friday 4th December 2009, and will undoubtably fly. The rest of the confirmed line up includes the Blondie, Orbital and unfortunately Pink.
I’ve seen both Jay-Z and the Strokes play festivals before and they are both big crowd entertainers. Jay-Z closed Glastonbury in 2008 after coming under fire from Liam Gallagher, but silenced his critics by opening his set with a version of Wonderwall that saw him stroll out strumming the rhythm on an acoustic – however, that said, once he’d done Wonderwall and 99 Problems I kind of lost interest a bit. Not so with the Strokes. They were the highlight of a stunning V Festival 2005, just edging out the sublime Pixies, and are to date the coolest band I have ever seen live. Julian Casabalancas, despite being fully cut, nailed every one of my favourite Strokes songs to perfection.
The first Isle of Wight Festival was in 1968, where Marc Bolan stole the show. This was followed up by the 1969 festival, which was the scene of Dylan’s come back gig; watched by somewhere in the region of 150,000 and 250,000 festival goers (clearly the ticketing system wasn’t that sophisticated back in the day). Then came the 1970 festival in which Jimi Hendrix gave his last major performance alongside the likes of The Who, The Doors and Joni Mitchell. Within three weeks of the festival he was dead. Someone set the stage on fire after his performance, lighting the way for Hendrix’s swan song to be the end of the festival also. In the aftermath of 600,000 music lovers flocking to the isle for the ’70 festival, the Isle of Wight Act was passed by parliament and it was closed down for 32 years.
Then in 2002 it reappeared with Robert Plant and The Coral and now eight years on it has established itself as a unique festival surrounded by waves.
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