An Englishman in Newport – Sting wows Isle of Wight Festival
Half way through his one-and-a-half-hour slot, Sting said to the Newport audience: 'We are delighted to be back at the Isle of Wight festival, it's a historic festival.
'Thank you for inviting us.'
Example entertaining the crowds on Thursday night at the Isle of Wight Festival (David Rutherford/Isle of Wight Festival/PA)
After bounding through An Englishman in New York, Walking On The Moon and Every Breath You Take, the band went off before returning for an encore of Roxanne which the crowds enthusiastically sang along to.
Sting then finished with Fragile, the only acoustic song in the set.
Other bands taking to the Main Stage on Friday included Lottery Winners, Amy Macdonald, The Corrs and Faithless ending the night while Clean Bandit headlined the Big Top.
Some 55,000 partygoers have crossed the Solent to reach Seaclose Park in Newport for the four-day event also being headlined by Stereophonics and Justin Timberlake.
John Giddings, who has run the festival since re-launching it in 2002 following the legendary events which ran from 1968 to 1970, has said he goes with 'gut feeling' when choosing the acts.
The 72-year-old told the PA news agency: 'You want to book acts that have a catalogue that's going to entertain an audience for an hour, hour and a half, and, secondly, someone who's capable of performing to an audience of 50,000 people in a field, because they need to be able to project to entertain.'
Other acts performing during the weekend include The Script, Jess Glynne, Supergrass, Example, Busted and Texas.
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The son of a woman who abandoned him and the rest of the family for a Masai warrior she met on holiday has spoken for the first time about how she 'ruined his childhood'. Stevie Liddington, 43, felt compelled to break his 30-year silence after reading MailOnline's sensational account of how his mother, Cheryl Thomasgood, regrets marrying Masai tribesman Daniel Lekimencho and swapping her home on the Isle of Wight for a mud hut. Cheryl, now 65, claimed in the article that she had maintained a 'good relationship' with all her four children, despite admitting the damage she had done to them through her actions. But web design company owner Stevie hit back and says he is 'ashamed to call her my mother'. And in stark contrast to Cheryl's recollections of her children being 'taken' with Daniel, Stevie said he viewed him as 'a stranger in our house' and recalled physical fights between Daniel and Cheryl. While the world viewed the relationship as a 'quirky story', Stevie's legacy from his mother's actions was years of therapy as he struggled against depression. Cheryl was aged 34 and on a holiday in the East African country in March 1994 when Daniel came to her hotel as part of a group that performed traditional Masai dancing for tourists. Within weeks of becoming besotted by him, she dumped her husband Mike Mason and her three children, to pursue a new life with the dashing 6ft 2in warrior who was ten years her junior. The couple later moved to Britain and married in February 1995 on the Isle of Wight and had a daughter Misti, Cheryl's fourth child, in January 1998. But the relationship with Daniel fizzled out a couple of years later after Cheryl complained that her 'spiritual warrior turned into a miserable sod, more like Victor Meldrew.' These days, Daniel works in a supermarket on the Isle of Wight. 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