Glastonbury is a weekend of highs and high emotions and the Sunday afternoon Legend slot is the biggest nostalgia rush of them all: a great icon transports you through time and forces you into your feelings. Last year at Cat Stevens, I wept watching a family clutch each other close during “Father and Son”; the year before that Diana Ross’s set spanned hit after hit of Motown and disco; the festival before that Kylie Minogue threw the biggest party of the weekend.
When Shania Twain skipped onto to the stage to “That Don’t Impress Me Much” – not on a horse, despite her now infamous request, but with just as much flamboyance in a rhinestone cowboy hat and a pink ruffled sleeveless coat – it was 1997 again, when that stratospheric country-pop single made superstars of her and her leopard print suit, paved the way for crossover artists like Taylor Swift, and Come On Over became the bestselling album from a female artist of all time. “The one that changed my life… when I was hoping for the best.” Judging by the size of the cowboy-hatted crowd singing their hearts out at the Pyramid Stage, everyone here had a copy.
Twain’s music has been ubiquitous for nearly 30 years. Who has not done karaoke to “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” or sobbed to “Still the One”? At 58, Twain embraces her oldest and best work (released between 1995 and 2002) and often styles her live shows as a camp cabaret. I had expected her to assume the role of grand diva at Glastonbury, instead she gave us something a little more intimate, her stage set up as the “Twain Town Saloon”, with her nearly all-female band – divine fiddlers, searing guitars and lush harmonies.
Rather than Nashville novelty act it felt like a nod to her roots, playing in open mic nights as a teenager in rural Ontario, earning money to support her younger brother and sister after her parents were killed in a car crash. Twain has known so many tragedies, though they are seldom mentioned in her songs.
Instead her music endures for its universality and simplicity, for how it speaks to women, especially. Insecurities, exposing desires for love, and sometimes sheer naffness (“Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” is surely the jolliest, silliest honky tonk song about jealous paranoia ever recorded).
She has a command and stage presence that makes it impossible not to envy her confidence. “I’m Gonna Getcha Good” had a menace that felt genuinely thrilling, “Any Man of Mine” asserted her dominance with just the right level of tongue-in-cheek, and then came the emotional wallops of torch songs like “You’re Still the One” – here a big crowd singalong – and “From This Moment On” (lyrics tweaked: right beside you in my tent), its final long note glorious and impassioned.
Twain’s voice does not have the same power it had in her earlier career: after she contracted Lyme disease in 2003, her vocal cords were damaged so severely she feared she would never sing again, and didn’t release new music for 15 years. But its timbre is still beautiful, it is deep and throaty, and adds a new rawness to her music that compensates for the moments it can’t project. And though she kept her stage patter light and polished – magnanimously claiming to understand the crowd’s concerns about toilets and showers, which nobody was buying – you just about believed her the many times she seemed stunned by her audience.
For so long, she thought this would never happen again, and the albums she has released in the last decade have been themed around positivity and self-belief, rather than love – “Giddy Up”, which can seem a little unsophisticated on record, was the only newer one she performed and had people dancing whether they’d heard it before or not.
Twain herself is a legend: an icon of strength and resilience and of pure fun. No, she doesn’t have decades of music that have soundtrack the lives of every generation here but her best songs are so deeply treasured that to watch her so love performing them again is a joy, as is seeing thousands shouting along to the lyrics of album tracks like “‘Don’t Be Stupid (You Know I Love You)” that they surely remembered from having that Come On Over CD in their homes and cars in the 90s.
“You are country music fanatics,” she screamed into the crowd. If anyone could convert you, it’s Shania – she converted the world three decades ago.