Isle of Wight Festival 2024: Sunday

It was clear that it was a pop rock day at Isle of Wight Festival, with all the Billie Joe Armstrong lookalikes roaming the festival and Nothing But Thieves, Simple Minds and McFly on the lineup. Day tickets for predominantly Green Day fans had sold out and the swarms started gathering in the mighty sunshine for McFly. 

With seven UK number ones and ten million records sold worldwide, McFly are without a doubt a Brit-pop treasure. Their first body of work since 2011, Young Dumb Thrills caused the group to remember why they began to create music and became a band in the first place. The four London lads ran onto the stage and opened with their song Red. It certainly had a more mature sound as opposed to their original teen pop rhymes. Their chemistry and telepathic artistic connection also made itself known as each member had a specialised input. With Dougie on base guitar, Harry’s percussive wizardry and Danny and Tom on lead guitar and vocals, they unquestionably proved themselves as adept performers. 

There wasn’t much time to recover from McFly until Simple Minds graced the stage with tunes from their 18^th studio album, as well some olden goldies. 

Mostly known for popularising punk rock, the sole international headliner, Green Day, brought the Californian sun to Newport with them and finally presented themselves with one of their classics, Basket Case. The five-time Grammy award-winning trio have certainly mastered the art of entertainment. Lead vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong had a particularly heartwarming exchange with a young girl named Molly who he invited on stage to sing. She was clearly a die-hard fan, wearing a T-shirt that had the band’s album artwork sprawled across it and Armstrong’s iconic red tie. Between their breakout album Dookie in 1994, and their most recent musical pursuits, including a 14^th studio album called Saviours, it must have been difficult to condense a list of record-breaking singles and albums from over three decades into a two-hour set. Nonetheless, they didn’t leave out any classics. The heads started to bang for Boulevard of Broken Dreams, American Idiot and Wake Me Up When September Ends and continued right until the end of their gig. And on that high, so ended another fabulous edition of Isle of Wight Festival.