on Saturday night. Photograph: David Levene/The Observer
“This is our favourite thing to do on earth, so thank you for letting us do it here,” says Chris Martin as Coldplay headline Glastonbury for a record-breaking fifth time. No other band has such a direct line to the festival’s inclusive, idealistic heart. Their speciality is the universal.
Each year’s line-up throws its arms a little wider around the world of music. On Friday afternoon, for example, you could see in quick succession Indonesian heavy metal, Indian disco, Sofia Kourtesis’ dreamy, therapeutic dance music and Headie One’s furious drill.
The Pyramid stage alone could give you whiplash. Sharp-dressed pop grandees Squeeze celebrate 50 years together with a winning set of droll, moving character studies spiced with surprisingly fiery guitar solos. K-Pop stars Seventeen, whose name refers to their profligate manpower, address the crowd with the stiffness of diplomatic envoys and make music so derivative that it resembles an AI digest of boy bands from the Backstreet Boys to Busted. It’s a trip to the uncanny valley.
Not many artists would agree to follow Marina Abramovic’s seven minutes of silence in the name of peace but PJ Harvey is something of a performance artist herself. Whether she’s singing the haunted protest songs from Let England Shake or the rampaging swamp-rock of 50ft Queenie, she has an actorly precision that can seem arch to the casual viewer but mesmerises the faithful.
The most electrifying rock performance of Friday is Fontaines DC at the Park, so commanding and obsession-worthy that the new songs they end on already feel like old favourites. Mostly, though, people want to dance. Greeting the tardy sunshine on the Other Stage, brother-and-sister rave-pop duo Confidence Man are a non-stop glee machine, filleting the history of dance music for all the fun bits. The unbreakable deadpan with which they execute even the silliest dance moves makes them perhaps the only people in the field who aren’t grinning. At West Holts, the thirst for reunited 2000s hitmakers Sugababes is so great that the field has to be closed for safety reasons. Never doubt the potency of nostalgia for the soundtrack of youth.
The passing of time is a core theme for New York dance-rock juggernauts LCD Soundsystem. Having not released an album in seven years, they might have seemed like a risky choice to precede Dua Lipa but their mountingly intense set proves irresistible to all ages and All My Friends, their galloping anthem of regret and reunion, makes for a transcendent sunset soundtrack.
Dua Lipa’s headlining status was also not a surefire bet. More a sleek delivery system for expert dance-pop than a bona fide star, she is light on mythology and mystique. But it’s soon clear that she has studied the unofficial Glastonbury playbook. It’s not just about fireworks, confetti and a surprise guest – in this case Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. It’s about forging an emotional connection. Lipa’s sincerely overwhelmed dream-come-true monologue turns an extended version of Be the One into an emotional ode to the festival itself. She’s realised her task is to weave the hits into a story of celebration and ascent that sends the crowd dancing merrily into the night.
Saturday starts with a bang. It’s not yet noon but Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap’s wildly enjoyable compound of hedonism and dissent is enough to trigger a moshpit in the packed Woodsies tent. The Last Dinner Party played the same slot last year but even their elevation to mid-afternoon on the Other Stage undersells the popularity of 2024’s new sensations. Their dress-up flamboyance and art-pop melodrama reveal a desire for bands who go all in without apology. Imagine if Saltburn was a band. Cyndi Lauper has similar sartorial chutzpah but misses the mark with a semi-detached performance to a large but muted crowd patiently waiting for her backloaded 80s hits.
Thanks to TikTok and streaming, older artists from Keane to the Streets are relishing an influx of new fans. Three decades after touring with Nirvana, the Breeders have been opening for Olivia Rodrigo to acknowledge her debt to their cherry bombs of melody and noise and impeccable Gen X cool. Kim and Kelley Deal’s near-permanent grins during their charming Park set suggest they are enjoying their Indian summer enormously. Michael Kiwanuka is much younger but already sounds classic. It’s hard to think of a better companion for a sunny evening than his wise and radiant psychedelic soul, with a knockout cameo by Lianne La Havas.
Unlike most of their peers, Coldplay require no comeback. They have been wowing stadiums for 20 years and the bigger the crowd, the more sense they make. Within the first hour they’ve pelted the vast crowd with fireworks, balloons, lasers, pyro, a Femi Kuti collaboration and half a dozen of the most-streamed songs in the world, while LED wristbands make the field sparkle like a city. The link between this maximalist crowd-pleasing spectacle and their indie-rock origins is their wonderstruck emotional largesse. Like the festival with which their career has been entwined, they want to give you everything.
