The Isle of Wight Festival 2024 is on Sky Arts and Now from 7pm on Friday 21 June to Sunday 23 June.
At the Isle of Wight Festival, which clashes with Taylor Swift’s Wembley tenure, but Bowman has no regrets about missing out: “I’m not a Swiftie; all she does is diss her exes.” Instead, she’s looking forward to the Friday-night headliners the Prodigy and their first live performance since their lead singer Keith Flint died in 2019.
“Weirdly, my 11-year-old’s beyond excited by the idea of seeing Simple Minds and Green Day. The way we consume music is so different these days, kids discover it through lots of mediums – film, television, gaming – it’s no longer about ‘What’s new, what’s new?’ Music’s become a common ground across the generation gap.”
Certainly, in recent years the BBC has lost plenty of other older talent: the late Steve Wright and Paul O’Grady were two Radio 2 stars replaced by younger presenters, while Ken Bruce and Vanessa Feltz defected to other stations – with the latter citing ageism as a factor in her decision. Bowman has some experience of hard-nosed BBC cuts, having been moved to a “quieter” slot on Radio 1 in 2009, before being “edged out” in 2014. In a 2022 interview, she said the decisions had “absolutely floored her” and left her “speechless… I just felt incredibly let down”.
Bowman and her husband, Tom Smith, the frontman of the rock band Editors, live in rural Gloucestershire. They’ve combined peripatetic careers with bringing up their sons, Rudy, 15, and Spike, 11, with a lot of help from parents and a succession of nannies. “I get annoyed when people try to hide the fact they use childcare; you’re not making it easy for other women by making out you do it all yourself.”
