Harriet Gibsone 

Paolo Nutini at Glastonbury 2014 review – emotion overload, even for loved-up couples

The voice belongs to a man who's studied the Motown greats, but Paolo Nutini's soul-survivor act rings rather hollow
  
  

Paolo Nutini
Spreading it thick … Paolo Nutini. Photograph: Jonathan Short/Invision/AP Photograph: Jonathan Short/Jonathan Short/Invision/AP

Where and when: Other stage, 9pm, Friday.

Dress code: Frayed straw hats and a long-term significant other.

What happened: The storm has passed, and the Other stage is backed up with delays. So by the time Paolo Nutini comes on stage, the audience – consisting largely of doting, highly sexed couples – are just tilting over the edge of sobriety and normality. With a full brass band and gospel vocals behind Nutini, even the slightly-too-groovy Scream (Funk My Life Up) sounds more muscular and triumphant. But despite his voice, raw and ragged with emotion, it's hard to understand a man in leather jacket, plaid shirt, with puckered lips and a floppy fringe, singing about "redemption" with the sincerity of a blighted survivor. A man who has studied the intonation of the soul greats, Nutini's Motown-indebted set, largely drawn from new album Caustic Love, reveals an awfully earnest pop star. As his set draws to a close, one half of a particularly sappy couple breaks her boyfriend's swaying embrace momentarily to observe, quite poignantly: "It's a little self-indulgent, isn't it?"

High point: The grandiose Iron Sky.

Low point: The occasional exaggerated post-high-note grimace.

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