Right, that’s everything for tonight – we’re off to put on our own sparkly tops and have a dance. Join us tomorrow from noon for another marathon liveblog as we review performances from Coldplay, Little Simz, the Streets, the Last Dinner Party and much more.
Dua Lipa reviewed
Here’s Alexis Petridis’s four-star take on Dua Lipa’s headline performance.
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Idles reviewed
Other stage, 10.15pm
For the first few minutes of Idles’ headline set on the Other stage, frontman Joe Talbot paces up and down the stage. The crowd – still relatively roomy, for the second biggest stage on site – wait eagerly as tension swells. But by the time the Bristol band are midway through their second song – the slowly climaxing Colossus – Talbot is limbered up, revving the crowd with his mic.
“Split the crowd into two, left and right,” he spits, somewhat predictably. After a little convincing, the crowd part; “Viva Palestina” becomes a call to arms, igniting the first of several moshpits with amp-blasting noise.
For the next hour and a half, they storm through their biggest hits: Mr Motivator, Mother, the slightly corny but beloved Danny Nedelko, all of which gag to be chanted along to. (The crowd comply.) Tracks from their new album, only a few months old, are received like the classics, and the sweeter sentiments of the record are accompanied by camp shimmying, winding hips and strutting from Talbot: showmanship that is just as compelling as his more familiar, menacing style. It’s a high-energy, headline-worthy set featuring a special guest (Danny Brown), plenty of crowdsurfing, and a sweet onstage interaction with someone’s kid. The crowd, which by now has substantially swelled, is absolutely up for their rowdy, no-nonsense schtick.
The set feels a little on the nose at times. While it’s no secret that Idles are anti-establishment – their biggest hits are about the Tories and the immigrant crisis – it all veers towards feeling boyish, even heavy-handed: the waggling middle finger as Talbot calls out the king (Gift Horse); the shout out to the “immigrants that built our country” before a raft full of life-jacketed bodies (later revealed as a Banksy stunt) is pushed out to surf alongside the guitarists in the crowd. That said, it also feels like a big moment to see a chart-topping band call for a ceasefire to thousands of people in a highly televised performance. In many ways, Idles aren’t as radical as they think they are – and yet that’s still more radical than most.
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Some images for Idles’ performance, which our Tim Jonze was in raptures about. We’ll have a review from Safi soon.
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Jamie xx reviewed
Woodsies, 10.30pm
Two questions. First: is it unfair to judge an act by their crowd? Second: was there anyone left in east London between 10:30 and 11:45 on Friday night? I’m picturing an abandoned, dystopian landscape, the pub gardens empty, the organic wine bars vacated – because surely all the twenty-and-thirtysomethings touting disposable vapes and ironic headwear were all packed into Woodsies stage for Jamie xx.
Hanging on to my spot on the outer fringe of the tent, dodging elbows held aloft for another bump, continually making room to accomplish another chain of new arrivals or departures, I felt like I was living in a real-life Real Housewives of Clapton meme. Jamie xx seemed almost incidental to the gathering of “bros” and “brothers” who continued chatting on all sides of me. He delivered a reliably slick, crowdpleasing set, even if the outer edges of the tent seemed largely impervious. The onstage reunion of the xx did penetrate the collective consciousness, particularly with their emotional (and let’s be honest, iconic) rendition of You’ve Got the Love – but Jamie xx’s own highly palatable brand of impeccably mixed soul throwbacks was struggling against the gravitational pull of a) entire groups peaking too soon and b) the hotly-tipped Charli xcx set at Levels stage. Halfway through the tent seemed to have emptied, making it an altogether more pleasant experience for those of us who stuck it out to the end – and we were duly rewarded by a special guest, Robyn, who joined Jamie on stage for the triumphant closer Life.
Anyway, the man I’m seated next to, on this bench writing this review, has told me to put that it was “fucking sick”.
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Haven’t checked into the Fontaines DC set until now, and they’re doing Boys in the Better Land. I’m assuming this was absolutely terrific and not getting to see their new single Favourite – a big-hearted but still political anthem animated by the kind of riff that you can’t believe no one has written before – is a personal bummer. This was an expert bit of Dua counter-programming by Glasto.
I think my favourite moment of Glasto 2022 was The Couple Across the Way in their Other stage set performed with frontman Grian Chatten and a string quartet – a demonstration of this band’s incredible emotional and tonal range.
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Everyone’s suitably amped up after Dua for a Big Night Out. Our Nikhita is up at Genosys: “Honey Dijon absolutely killing it; music you can feel in your bones.” Laura is down at Charli xcx at Levels, which will be ridiculously oversubscribed. I’m thinking my night will be Bicep later on – the Iicon stage will be excellent as they deploy their Chroma AV/DJ/sort-of-live setup – followed there by the king of the arty reggaeton roller, DJ Python.
Jungle are still playing on West Holts but we haven’t, and won’t, dwell on them.
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Houdini, very much the standout on Radical Optimism, closes the show with tightly wound funk and escapology metaphors. “This has been unbelievable, this has been a massive dream come true,” Lipa tells the crowd. “Glastonbury, I love you”.
She didn’t 100% beat the charisma-vacuum allegations here: she is poised at times almost to a fault, and her onstage chat was just the usual “blessed” pop star bromides. I wish more of her lyrics had the specificity of New Rules, which is so animated by her gal-pal intimacy. But this was more “Girl, give us everything” than nothing. Her vocals were impassioned; her choreo engaging and impressivley athletic considering the singing; the Tame Impala duet was a real highlight – and the sense of a sweaty, boozy, flirtatious club night was successfully expanded to Pyramid proportions.
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Another change for Dua, now in that cornerstone of the English night out, a sparkly top. Physical up first, sounding as it always does like a particularly aggressive 80s fitness video.
Then Don’t Start Now, the high point in the whole Lipa catalogue, with its comically bulbous Alan Braxe-ish bassline, shimmy-inducing shuffle, and Lipa swaggering around in the lightest, most elegant manner possible. Having seen the Eras tour last week, whose choreo is characterised by a great deal of walking in a straight line, I can say Lipa really is in another league in this regard.
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According to Safi, “Idles have put a raft full of fake people in life jackets into the crowd to crowd surf.” Comment on the small-boats migrant crisis with the visual language of a vibey mosh pit? Feels very on-brand with their none-so-lumpen brand of politicking.
Edit on 29 Jun: it was revealed on Saturday morning that this was a stunt by Banksy that the band weren’t aware of until after the set.
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The Guardian’s David Levene has been documenting Dua Lipa’s performance. Apparently he saw a dressing room with the words Duran Duran on it backstage. Well well!
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There was a little frostiness to the way Elton John performed his Lipa-featuring latterday No 1 single Cold Heart on this stage last year, briskly intimating that he’d asked her to perform it and she’d demurred. You can now understand why she didn’t turn up, as she kept her powder dry for this performance. Lipa gladhandles her fans as she makes her way back up to the main stage and the lighting modulates into soft Pride month-appropriate rainbows.
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We’re enjoying this re-edited production for New Rules, turned into a prowling tech-house roller – complete with a Bicep-imitating synth rhythm line. Dua’s doing one of the biggest cliches in the pop playbook: getting everyone to crouch down then jump up. Did Slipknot do it first?
Then it’s into Electricity, her collab with Silk City, AKA Mark Ronson and Diplo. This could have been a deathly combo made for the most dead-eyed of LA parties, but it’s genuinely euphoric, even rather kindly in tone – thanks in part to Lipa’s easygoing sense of romance.
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Laura has staked out ground at Levels in anticipation of Charli xcx’s Partygirl set of DJ’d bangers and crowd-goading. She says: “Kelly Lee Owens has just come on at Levels to noticeably more enthusiasm than ANOTR, whoever they were, arriving to Björk’s Big Time Sensuality and walking to the front of the stage for a triumphal pose. Lots of “avin’ it!” from the decks. It also instantly just got a lot busier; we lost about a foot of the space we had. Also, huge shoutout to the guy sitting on the floor at Charli playing Uno on his phone.”
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Dua is meanwhile down on a catwalk B-stage for another sinewy club track, Hallucinate, wearing a Harley Quinn-ish ensemble like a 1970s New York street gang member who struts everywhere rather than getting the subway.
Over on the Other stage, our Safi says Idles have just brought out Danny Brown as a special guest. Good combo!
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Another Future Nostalgia cut here, Pretty Please. Even though it’s not anthemically melodic, I love this song’s elegant, relatively spartan arrangement, done with so much space that you can hear the happily chattering crowd burst through the moments of silence.
Dua’s presumably having a change, so her dancers do some formidable choreo to the kind of heavy dubstep womp that some of the Guardian staff were enjoying at some length at the Glade Dome last night. Me, I was doing a house workout to Ivan Smagghe.
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A strange wormhole opens in pop, allowing White Town’s peerlessly odd No 1 single Your Woman, from 1997, to emanate from the Pyramid stage. My cassette version is still much cherished. It’s sampled on Love Again, from Lipa’s blockbuster Future Nostalgia LP.
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Falling Forever now, one of the better songs from the recent Radical Optimism album, even if there’s still something a little perfunctory about the songwriting. Again, Lipa lifts the material with her force of feeling, and she’s commanding the stage even without her phalanx of dancers.
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Tame Impala's Kevin Parker is Lipa's special guest
Australia’s Kevin Parker has had a charmingly unlikely career path, from psychedelic oddball to a driving force in pop, called upon by the likes of Lipa to add a certain mind-expansion to their work. Here they duet on Tame Impala’s own The Less I Know the Better, and Parker shows no nerves at the scale of the stage – even bigger than the ones that he’s gradually scaled up to. Some of his work is decidedly un-cosmic, like a high that stubbornly refuses to spike, but this song really is strong and works wonderfully in this duet form. There’s a strong rapport on stage too, as they almost descend into giggles at one point.
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Sampha reviewed
Woodsies, 9pm
For so long, Sampha loomed in the background; a secret weapon of A-list talents such as Kanye West, Drake, Solange, Beyoncé and Frank Ocean, often going unnamed and uncredited in features. Your favourite artist’s favourite artist, if you will. That changed with the release of his 2017 album Process, which went on to win the Mercury prize, before he made another retreat from the public. Then, six years later, came Lahai and a tour which ended in London this April. As he performs at Glastonbury in the aftermath of this tour, you can only hope, beg, plead that this is not just another fleeting public moment.
The stage at Woodsies is set, with the band’s instruments arrayed against a bright, luminous sunset gradient background. When the show begins, a voice says “It’s in the name of creation that I have something to say.” The British-Sierra Leonean singer emerges when he has made something truly beautiful, and the set is a testament to this. While his debut album was defined by a kind of emotional brokenness and sorrow, Sampha introduces his set singing Suspended, crooning in that smooth, angelic voice: “I’ve been lifted by love.” The imprecise, chaotic discord of love and its infectiousness is narrated in dreamy love songs Can’t Go Back and Stereo Colour Cloud. At times his live rearrangements have the genius of poetic scholarship: hypnotic repetitions abound and the staccato rhythm of “time, missile, back, forward. I miss you, time, misuse” is enchanting.
“As you can see, I got in this stage for myself,” Sampha tells the crowd. It’s an indication that he only moves when he is ready and willing. Changes in his life, including the birth of a daughter in 2020, have reshaped his sound with the imagery and cadence of hope, love, imagination. He dances. For Dancing Circles, it’s a funky, groovy vibe as he captures the hopes, desires and missed opportunities of London life. He leaves the platform of the band and grooves to the audience, shuffling, bending and swaying to sublime trippy, spacey synths and basses, as if in a rave. He is possessed by it. On Spirit 2.0 he sings: “Love will catch you, faith will catch you, spirit will catch you.” The spirit is certainly caught by the crowd, and at moments I’m even moved to tears. But it is not only the emotional resonances, or the miraculous elegance of his voice, which move you. It is also the precision of every element of production, from the luminous background beaming from red to blinding white, to the little triangle played by his bassist Rosetta.
Sampha and his band dismount from the stage to crowd around a drum kit for a classic Glastonbury drum circle. Alone it is rapturous and spiritual, but when it leads into early single Without, from his 2013 EP Dual, it is transcendent. “God… God!” an audience member next to me screams out in praise. As he closes out with tracks (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano and Blood On Me, you feel that the warmth of his voice and intimacy of his performance stem from just how personal this journey with music is for him, just how much it comes down to that core function of art: to communicate emotion and to reflect our own. We are so indebted to him for sharing his gift with us.
Up next is Be the One, and a costume change from leathers to satin – perhaps even from the same dressing up box as the Last Dinner Party. This song was her breakthrough and a memorably amazing moment at her last Glastonbury set, in 2017. She played an oversubscribed John Peel (now Woodsies) tent to a young crowd in absolute wonderment to this newly minted, athleisure’d star – and Be the One was then the most potent showcase of the strength of vocal feeling I was talking about earlier. The climactic moment, “will you be mi-i-ine?” is charged up with so much desperation.
These Walls now, and a noticeable dip in quality and energy: this was put in a prominent position on her latest album, but it didn’t really deserve to be there. The strummed guitar is blah, the melody unremarkable, and a bit of tepid tambourine is hardly bringing the necessary sparkle. But Lipa is still in fine voice here – her actual vocal quality is rather underrated, with a lovely keenness to it. She’s thought of as this otherworldly model type, but she gives her performances a lot of humanity by letting her effort be known – and that is not veiled criticism. She strains for notes but meets them, and that strength of feeling is affecting.
“It’s a lot isn’t it? A lot to take in,” she tells the crowd. “I have written this moment down, I have wished it, I’ve dreamt it … and I can’t believe I’m here, and it feels so good.” She acknowledges the hard work she’s done to get here, but also – in true hot-astrology-girl style – “manifesting” and “magic”.
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This is a very high ratio of hits: I didn’t think she’d have Levitating so early on her set, it being one of her best and biggest. She’s absolutely on top of the beat as she dispenses her spools of rapped chatter, including some a cappella moments that have to be totally word-perfect – and they are. That mid-Atlantic accent gets comprehensively dropped for “dance my arse off”, paired with the words supersized behind her. This is peak Dua: glamorous but not stiff or queenly, just relaxed in the beat and strutting through it to whatever impossibly fabulous party you wish you were at.
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Dua was lambasted online for some admittedly lacklustre dance moves in the past: one diss, “Girl, give us nothing!” became instant pop cultural canon. But there’s strong choreo here, including from her backing dancers – graduates of London’s Dance School for the Unfeasibly Hot.
Next we have Illusion, which the public have rather shrugged at but I love for its filter-house groove. Something that’s perhaps underestimated about Dua Lipa amid the discourse around her is that she is a proper club singer: more of a house vocalist at times than a straightforward pop star. Her songs are genuinely danceable. And generously so: for all her glamazon pop star poise, there’s something quite ego-free about a lot of her songs, which just want you to dance to them in a sticky-floored establishment.
After a potty-mouthed first acknowledgement of the crowd, she tells them “I dreamed about this my whole life”, in the kind of mid-Atlantic drawl beloved of the perpetual-holiday set..
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Staging-wise, there’s a pair of catwalks that Dua will no doubt strut along numerous times this evening, mega-HD visuals behind her and a heavy-sounding live band. Training Season is a bit tepid on record, but it really connects here and she’s bringing an earnestness and voice-cracking feeling to her vocals that’s lacking on the studio version.
Next up it’s One Kiss, her addictively replayable collab with Calvin Harris. Few songs are as good to flirtily dance to.
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Dua Lipa begins!
And we’re off with the first Pyramid headliner this year: Dua Lipa. The narrative among chronically online people is that she’s yesterday’s news, a charisma-deficient drone being overtaken by edgier new-school stars. Other more well adjusted people think she’s a bit of fun with a formidable bank of songs to spill espresso martinis to. Let’s see who’s right!
She uses the same vocal sample that Primal Scream use on Loaded: “We wanna get loaded … we’re going to have a party”, perhaps a coy reference to the way she said her latest album was inspired by Primal Scream while being audibly nothing of the sort. And it’s into opening track Training Season.
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Not sure whether the brown acid has kicked in or something, but I’ve checked back in with King Krule and there’s a five-year-old in a pink dress on stage with him. This is Seaforth, one of his drowsiest, loveliest numbers.
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Sampha is indulging in that great Glastonbury tradition: a drum circle. Get him up to the Stone Circle with some fire poi and questionable opinions about the Covid-19 vaccine for the canonical version though.
Ohhhhhhhh! That’s the maximum eight Hs allowed for his next track, which interpolates a cover of Roy Davis Jr’s Gabriel, the illuminated manuscript that every student of the London club scene pores over in their infancy.
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For all Laura’s indifference towards their set, Heilung certainly give good woad. Here’s some more pics from their set. First of all, put all goth Pinterest users on notice for some major wedding inspo here:
That first wee of the day after you wake up in your tent:
Me trying to get the barman’s attention for a lime and soda:
When you’ve got a blood sacrifice at 2pm but you don’t have time to change before the England game at 5:
How everyone feels driving home on Monday morning:
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Heilung reviewed
West Holts, 8.15pm
I always wonder why Glastonbury – known for its ley lines and hippie credentials – doesn’t take place a weekend earlier, on the actual summer solstice. Nordic folk metal band Heilung would be the perfect band for the occasion. More goat head-wearing commune than band, they start their set with an inward-facing circle as they chant some kind of incantation. The stage is laden with spindly trees and hanging drums presumably made from a beast they killed earlier. One male singer looks like Iggy Pop if he’d been left to forage in the wild for some months and really taken to it. There are shields and spears being pounded into the stage, lots of elemental drones and what sounds like growled frog ribbits, and a very impressive if very severe sense of theatrics. It couldn’t be more opposite to LCD Soundsystem over on the main stage – more BCE Paganism.
Plenty of people here are rapt, and one group’s pole for locating one anotherin the crowd has a decapitated, wigged head on top, which really adds to the witch trials vibe. But much as I like gnarled, weird folk, this is my kryptonite. I hate medieval fantasy as a genre and – standing here drinking a synthetic alcoholic water drink and clutching a synthetic fruit-flavoured vape – I couldn’t feel more remote from the apparently ancient ritual they’re so invested in. As the sun goes down, may the darkness bind everyone who’s into it, but I’m beating on towards the orgiastic lurid green Brat light.
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Talking of unteachably unique vocal timbres, King Krule is up on the Park stage – unequivocally the best place to be at sunset, looking down on the tens of thousands of people across the site like a benevolent druid. He and his band are whipping up a glorious noise, with added skronk factor from the sax. His voice – hoarse, impetuous, conversational one minute and hectoring the next – is always gripping. And his ambient-post-punk, while it has its tendrils in a lot of other music, sits very much in its own postcode.
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Sampha has started up on the Woodsies stage and he’s in typically gorgeous voice performing Spirit 2.0: he’s got one of those totally distinctive vocal timbres that is a miracle of genetics and can’t be taught: vulnerable and hurt, but hopeful and benign, all at the same time. Expert triangle playing here, too, from his percussionist.
Meanwhile Heilung are doing a high-tempo throat-singing-driven hoe-down as a load of shirtless people daubed in paint prance about, which is to say it’s the kind of thing you’d see on an average Tuesday afternoon in the Stonehenge-Glastonbury-Frome region.
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BBC doing some instantly regrettable “cut to cute kids in the front row” editing there, as D-Block Europe eulogise: “New pussy good, new pussy good!”
I hate to denigrate the UK rap scene, because I hate the discourse around it from the US, where UK rappers get cast by online meme-lords as rapping about beans on toast or whatever. But D-Block Europe, it has to be said, are not our finest ambassadors.
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LCD Soundsystem reviewed
Pyramid stage, 7.45pm
James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem make no fanfare of their arrival on to Glastonbury’s most prestigious stage, at the pivotal dusk hour. “Hello,” he says briskly before launching into Oh Baby, the opener from 2017’s American Dream. There’s a notably bigger turnout than for PJ Harvey, whom you might think would have a more committed reception on home turf – but LCD are nailing a few different demographics at the festival, taking in middle millennials such as myself (born 1991) and the generation that came before, Murphy’s peers. (Notably, my Gen-Z pals are not thronging to see LCD.)
The band’s trademark blend of melodic rock and electronic influences is an apt choice for the sundowner set. But, at least at the start of the set, Murphy’s deadpan stance (“You outnumber us again, but we’ve got stuff ...”) doesn’t necessarily meet the crowd – eager to pick up the energy for the second shift – where they’re at.
The tempo starts to increase with second song I Can Change, introduced by Murphy with a fun nod to Kraftwerk’s Computer Love (also sampled by headliner Coldplay’s Talk – though this is surely not the parallel Murphy is seeking to invoke). And of course the band – featuring legends of the game Nancy Whang on keys and Pat Mahoney on drums – sound incredible, with a rhythm section so tight and impenetrable you can picture bouncing a ball off it. But whether it reflects Murphy’s time-honoured world-weary act (he claimed to be losing his edge in 2005, don’t forget) or a genuine jadedness with performing (LCD have been touring consistently since 2015, having made much fanfare of their breakup with the black-and-white ball in 2011), it takes a while to get the crowd moving.
But then maybe that’s what everyone expects, even hopes for. LCD have always been masters of the slow build: the seven-minute song that may present, initially, as unassuming before steadily climbing to a point of undeniable intensity. The audience is the frog in their pan of boiling water, but it’s still up to them to turn up the heat.
The energy notably picks up from track three, Tribulations, which concludes with a reverb-heavy breakdown that leads straight into Tonite, from American Dream. Again there’s that gradual climb in the temperature, before it’s brought down for Losing My Edge. “You’re very kind, says Murphy, before singing: “Your kindness knows no bounds ...”
That song’s clever sidelong take on the cynicism LCD were being met with, back in their heyday of 2005, plays differently now – having joked about having been “there, in 1968”, and being “the first guy to play Daft Punk”, Murphy (born 1970) now more obviously presents as the boorish, know-it-all scene figure he was originally skewering. Beyond the undeniable beat, what is a crowd to make of this? Perhaps it’s the difference between playing a scene-y, inner-city and in-the-know venue versus an inherently diffuse outdoor stage, but Murphy’s arch references to the formulaic nature of popular music (calling out, wearily, the inevitable sequence of verse, chorus, verse) and the band’s playful interpolation of hits by Yazoo seem lost on the audience.
All of that is not to say “shut up and play the hits”, to quote the title of their 2012 film – they’ve earned the right to play whatever they want, how they want to, and as I say the performance is technically faultless. But it’s hard to shake a sense of perfunctoriness, on the parts of the band and the audience. By Home, I see some hands thrown in the air around me (“You’re afraaaaaid of what you need”). But I’m not feeling rapture, or joy, or transcendence, either from the stage or around me in the crowd, until Someone Great: the third-to-last song, and the start of a stellar closing leg taking in Dance Yrself Clean and (the obvious closer, as one of very few perfect songs in existence) All My Friends.
Dance Yrself Clean makes the most of that suddenly-tapped emotion, with its winking slow build – and the drop is, as you’d imagine, euphoric, finally tapping a fount of rapture that you can’t help but think was there for the taking the whole time. But then again, maybe it’s more welcome – and certainly more rapturously received – for all the build-up.
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Hello everyone, Ben Beaumont-Thomas here, fresh from an afternoon seeing Squid, Noname and Lulu. Classic trio.
It’s an absolutely vintage Glasto evening out there, with a picturesque sunset warming up nicely. Currently on the Other stage, it’s D-Block Europe talking about vaginal lubrication among other assorted topics. Aitch has just come on as a guest. To be honest it doesn’t really carry with it the usual romance of the Glastonbury sunset slot, but the kids are happy enough.
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I’m off to hunt for some Sri Lankan curry. Steering the good ship liveblog for the rest of the evening will be Ben Beaumont-Thomas. Join him for coverage of Sampha, Idles and of course tonight’s Pyramid headliner, Dua Lipa. Ta-ra.
Here’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas’s report on the Marina Abramović seven minute silence business. Come for that, stay for this absolutely gorgeous picture of two audience members very much getting into the spirit of Abramović’s exercise:
Noel Gallagher is watching LCD from the side stage. He’s not exactly bouncing around, to put it mildly. Everyone else is though: it looks a great set from here – on-the-whistle review from Elle Hunt coming in a bit.
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The BBC’s Glastonbury channel just had a performance from Zawosie Queens, who play a thrilling modern update of Tanzanian Gogo music. They have a fascinating backstory too. Read our interview with them here:
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Scandi folk-metallers Heilung are playing West Holts at the moment, and if you’re within reach of the iPlayer I strongly urge you to stick them on. They look like escaped extras from Midsommar, they began their set with a deeply sinister chanting circle, and are now making guttural noises over a thudding monotonous drumbeat. Oh and one of them uses a human forearm bone as an instrument. Madder than a moonwalking lizard – hard recommend. Full review from Laura Snapes in a little while.
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Danny Brown reviewed!
West Holts, 7.30pm
Playing after Sugababes shut down West Holts (quite literally: overcrowding meant staff had to close off access) is no easy feat. But while numbers have significantly reduced by the time Danny Brown swaggers on stage in double denim and Kurt Cobain sunglasses, there’s a new, cultish crowd gathering around the barrier – one which grows in both size and intensity as the beloved Detroit rapper rips through his extensive back catalogue.
The first stop is “back where it all started”: his breakthrough 2011 record XXX. When he raps through the skulking Monopoly in his signature nasal yelp, his fans play ball and chant along, finishing his retorts about “sucking dick” with boisterous tenacity. Other early favourites, including Lie4 and Smokin’ & Drinkin’, conjure a similar fervour, before he fast-forwards to last year’s collab album with JPEGMafia, Scaring the Hoes. It’s already iconic, and many fans join in with the opening fast handclaps while the screeching sax line snakes beneath.
Though Brown’s music is characterised by brooding, glitching beats and often quite crass lyrics, there is a real playfulness to his performance. He cackles loudly when he tells us he’s excited to see our “beautiful faces” and smiles as he slinks around the stage at half-time, in sync with the pink-mulleted, camo-wearing DJ Skywlkr on the decks behind him. There’s poise too: he delivers each quick line effortlessly and immaculately. The ripples of his strong 2023 comeback – not only two albums, but sobriety too – are still being felt, and deservedly so.
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Over on Woodsies right now is Declan McKenna, who is enjoying a bit of a victory lap at this year’s festival. McKenna won Glastonbury’s emerging talent competition back in 2015 and now finds himself sandwiched between Arlo Parks and Sampha on the lineup: quite the rise. He has celebrated by appearing shirtless with a gaudy tie wrapped around his neck. The crowd looks a monster, stretching right out of the back of the sizeable Woodsies tent.
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Lulu reviewed!
Avalon stage, 6.35pm
Glasto is a great champion of the older performer, be it Burt Bacharach, Kris Kristofferson or many others besides. But few of them have given as much energy as Lulu, who, at 75 and marking her 60th anniversary as a pop star, is doing a farewell tour with the panache of a twentysomething band – but with considerably better stories and considerably courser banter. As our recent interview with her showed, she has possibly the starriest cache of anecdotes of any British star – acting with Sidney Poitier aged 16 and going to US No 1! Shagging Bowie and singing one of his best songs! – and they all get an airing here as she moves chronologically through her career.
Rather like Elton John, whom she reminisces about prior to performing I’m Still Standing, her voice has arguably gained more than it has lost thanks to age. She can still belt but there’s extra grain in there, while there’s also a careworn Candi Staton-ish hoarseness and melancholy even to Eurovision banger Boom Bang-a-Bang. She’s gloriously hammy in her inter-song stories, pronouncing Madrid “Madleeeeed” and going full Scouse for a John Lennon anecdote; and gloriously sweary, complaining of duet partner Ronan Keating “The fucker’s not here”, and introducing Grammy-nommed Who’s Foolin Who with “At 75 fucking years old I’m going to give it a chance” (a terrific performance ensues, as the blues rock allows her rasp to get as rough-graded as possible).
She remembers that Bowie told her “I’m going to make a fucking hit record with you”, and then for her version of Man Who Sold the World she duets with footage of him performing it on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage.
With a strong band, including a drummer who looks like he’s taken the night off from the murderous security detail in a Texan biker bar, she brings the house down with Relight My Fire – closer to Dan Hartman’s muscular original than the pert Take That version Lulu guested on. “It’s very emotional, but I’m going to try and keep it together – and sing my ASS OFF,” she promised at the outset, and ass is duly sung entirely off the stage.
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PJ Harvey reviewed!
Pyramid stage, 6pm
Following Marina Abramović’s seven minutes of silence on the Pyramid Stage is a surprisingly tough gig – you have to break the sense of stillness that her performance created. PJ Harvey seems to slip on stage almost unnoticed, amid what looks like the furniture from a turn-of-the-century church (her keyboard player/violinist James Johnson is wearing something that looks a little like a surplice and entirely out of the 19th Century) and launches into a selection of songs that are alternately hushed and austere: a trio of tracks from last year’s I Inside The Old Year Dying, three more from her eerie, haunted 2011 masterpiece Let England Shake (you could, if you wished, infer something from her playing so many songs with an anti-war tone).
Not everything she plays is so subdued. There’s a churning version of 50ft Queenie, and a take on 1991’s Dress with a protracted finale lent such a cacophonous edge by Johnson’s violin that Harvey briefly breaks into giggles. But it feels cool and controlled, very much a performance. At one juncture Harvey sits at a lectern, writing in a notebook and sniffing some herbs while her band play on. It’s all appealingly mysterious and strange, and Harvey is a lithe, captivating presence. It ends on a downbeat note, with a brooding To Bring You My Love: the sense that you’re in the presence of an artist interested only in playing according to her own rulebook is hard to miss.
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LCD Soundsystem, who were responsible for one of my favourite ever Glasto sets (a sodden Sunday nighter after Brexit that proved surprisingly euphoric), are making their Pyramid bow right now. They’ve just powered through certified banger I Can Change.
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Secret sets are as much a part of Glasto as sunburn and spending an hour and a half trying to find your friends by the bins, and this year is no different. Attendees at the tiny Strummerville stage were just treated to a surprise performance from planet-conquering producer Fred Again. Fred absolutely packed out the Other Stage last year, and could easily do the same on the Pyramid, so this was quite the intimate set. It certainly won’t be the last secret set of the weekend – there’s a conspicuous TBA on the listings for the Woodsies stage tomorrow evening …
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This year’s festival is a particularly starry one – and it’s all thanks to the usually unheralded Pilton Palais cinema, which has coaxed a host of Hollywood A-listers including Florence Pugh, Paul Mescal, Tilda Swinton and Simon Pegg to do pre-film Q&As. Lanre Bakare caught up with Pilton Palais’s co-curator Riyad Mustapha to find out how they pulled it off:
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Here’s an on the ground report by Jessica Murray on Seventeen’s groundbreaking Pyramid set earlier today:
Dexys reviewed!
Park stage, 6pm
Given how many decades Kevin Rowland has been flaying his tortured soul for us, it’s surprisingly moving to see him looking so naturally, easily delighted as the reformed Dexys perform on the Park stage, the lowering sun casting a diagonal light across the crowd.
Parts of the set serve as tributes to past Runners: Geno is for Kevin Archer, a member of the band at the outset “and obviously a huge influence on the second album”, and Until I Believe in My Soul is for trombonist Big Jim Patterson, who has been unable to join them on recent tours. And precisely nothing from their astonishingly great 2023 album The Feminine Divine is played (seriously, it’s amazing: from classic Dexys to Gainsbourgian synth-louche, as Rowland disentangles and disavows his historic attitudes to women), in keeping with Rowland’s trademark contrarianism regarding nostalgia. But he is so utterly vital: he’s seemingly keeping someone’s portrait locked in his attic, he looks so tanned and splendid in his pink and green suit. And that voice is still the sound of soul reaching out from the depths of isolation in a desperate attempt to connect; he can still rip out high notes in a way that sounds like he’s striking a match.
Down on the Pyramid stage at the same time as Dexys start, Marina Abramović is asking the crowd to stay silent for seven minutes as they give one another their unconditional love. The atmosphere up here is far brassier but the mood is very much the same: that of a heavily carpeted, musty brown pub full of emotional men with their arms around one another, singing some of the greatest pop songs of the past 40-plus years.
It’s a real party up here, strutting to the brass of Geno, sparking off the fantastic thespianism of Until I Believe…, as Rowland pretends to bawl, hoo-hoo-hoo-style, in a classic tale of romantic rejection. In one of the revue-style bits with foil (and sometimes saxophonist) Sean Read, he admits to being 70 – “I’m already old, man!” – but Come On Eileen – man, it’s utterly timeless. I firmly believe there are songs every British person deserves to hear done live at least once – Robbie Wiliams’s Angels, for one – and this is much the same; a bawdy, reveller’s folk song (and the sped-up bit in the middle eight leaves me giggling). “You definitely liked that one!” says Rowland, seemingly still surprised at it striking such a chord 42 years later. Too rye aye!!!!
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News from the Pyramid stage, where PJ Harvey is “sniffing some sage like a queen”, according to our roving reporter Jenny Stevens.
Ted Lasso actor Kola Bokinni is looking fresh in a lilac-pleated Issey Miyake two-piece. He’s just seen Sugababes and he’s especially excited for Burna Boy and Shania Twain!
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Here’s a pic of Marina Abramović performing her Seven Minutes of Collective Silence while dressed as a giant peace sign. Whatever you think of her brand of performance art, you can’t deny that she is a genius at grabbing people’s attention.
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D:Ream brought Brian Cox on for Things Can Only Get Better. He’s introduced with “ladies and gentlemen, and everything in between, welcome back a man who’s become a lot more famous than any of us”.
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Sugababes reviewed!
West Holts, 4.55pm
“What a turn out, ladies!” Keisha Buchanan says. Perhaps the understatement of the century. Sugababes is heaving. So heaving that this review nearly doesn’t happen – access to the West Holts staged is blocked off from various entrances, and I’m forced to go on a mad dash around the perimeter of the area before it’s completely shut down. Two years ago, when Sugababes performed at Glastonbury’s Avalon stage, they were so overwhelmed by interest that the attendant audience could have filled the tent five times over. You have to wonder then how Glastonbury has managed to again underestimate the popularity of one its heritage acts – who could have easily filled the greater capacity Pyramid stage.
Opening up with Freak, the revived three-piece noughties phenomenon delivered a string of their greatest hits. Their harmonies are luxurious and transcendent but often it is the singular, enduring vitality of Mutya Buena’s vocals that stands out. Sugababes have always been more defined by cool swagger and slick electric movement than by highly choreographed theatrics, and as such, naturally their throwback performance of breakout single Overload, with a chair routine reminiscent of Top of the Pops, is the show’s centrepiece. The performance is elevated through the dynamism of UK garage, and though the crowd is at full capacity, there is still plenty of arm swinging, jumping and singing. There is a little too much time spent on an “olly olly olly” call and response, but their cover of Sweet Female Attitude’s Flowers is triumphal.
The crowd are only stilled for the duration of two of the revived Sugababes’s newer tracks – When the Rain Comes and Today – though the catchiness of the latter’s chorus soon takes off. You might have hoped that they would reach for more deep-cut album tracks but they’re comfortable with their bangers: Push the Button, Round Round, and Too Lost in You. However, closer About You Now makes me wonder if the set has been too safe: its beamy pop commerciality feels incongruous with the too-cool-for-school grit that defines the trio. Their ownership of the entire Sugababes back catalogue is a triumphant development considering their legal struggles, but they’ve already long proved that the name is theirs and theirs alone.
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This is Lucinda and Lizzy from Bristol who live on the same street and bumped into each other in the crowd for Marina Abramović. Lucinda: “I thought it was wonderful. I found out about it 30 seconds before she started. I adored her. That has made my Glastonbury. I thought it was really powerful. Seven minutes went really quickly.”
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Over on West Holts, Damon Albarn has made an appearance in the middle of Bombay Bicycle Club’s set. Albarn made an appeal for Glasto-goers to vote: “I don’t blame you for feeling ambivalent about that but it’s still important.” He added that “maybe it’s time we stop putting octogenarians in charge of the world”, a reference to last night’s US presidential debate.
Gwilym here, taking you through Glasto’s pre-headline shift. Right now on the Pyramid Marina Abramović is trying to get tens of thousands of festival punters to shut their eyes and be quiet for seven whole minutes. It’s a big ask given the, ahem, well-lubricated nature of some Glastonbury punters, but by the sounds of it she’s been successful. The Guardian’s Sarah Phillips, who is in the field, says that, bar a rogue screamer, the crowd all kept quiet and that the effect is “incredibly powerful and moving”.
“It is completely still and silent and I weirdly want to cry,” adds the Guardian’s Jenny Stevens.
There’s a thing I call “Glastonbury maths”, explaining why it’s not always the most hyped or critically acclaimed bands that draw the biggest crowds. Basically, if you’re trying to corral a group of 15 people in your campsite, and half of them kind of like/have heard of Avril Lavigne or TLC, you’re going to be fighting for your life in the stands.
All of which is to say – there’s such a groundswell of enthusiasm to see Sugababes at the West Holts stage that access is being restricted. Don’t fret, though – our own Jason Okundaye has managed to squeeze in so as to do his review, though phone signal is struggling …
I am now handing over the reins of the blog to my esteemed colleague Gwilym Mumford, who will be your jockey through this next stage of the day’s events – Heilung, LCD Soundsystem, Danny Brown, Dexys and, next up on the Pyramid stage, PJ Harvey. I’ll be back from 3pm to 6pm tomorrow.
Paul Heaton reviewed!
Pyramid stage, 4.15pm
Paul Heaton’s set backdrop reads Welcome to Heatongrad, a nod to his track with Jacqui Abbott that opens with: “Fuck the king and fuck the queen, with an AK47”. It’s a pointed reminder that there has always been a waspish quality to Heaton’s soft rock with the Housemartins, the Beautiful South and most recently with Abbott. Four decades into his career Heaton may be approaching national treasure status, but he’s a prickly, sardonic sort of national treasure. In front of a Pyramid stage audience whose average age has surely tripled since the previous act, the K-poppers Seventeen, Heaton delivers a greatest hits set with tongue lodged in cheek.
Smash hits are introduced with side eye. “There’s swear words in this one and because of my good relationship with television I can’t swear – but you can,” he says to the audience before Don’t Marry Her (naturally, everyone obliges). Thirty-eight years after the Housemartins first played this stage, Norman Cook is brought on to rekindle his bass-playing days in that band for a lively Happy Hour, a touching moment undercut by Heaton warning that Cook will probably be a little rusty. And later Heaton chides: “For all the people who only came down the hill when they heard Norman Cook was here, fuck on back. We don’t need them do we.”
Between the zingers and the bangers – I’ll Sail this Ship Alone, Fun Fun Fun, an extended Song For Whoever – the whole thing is a riot. All that’s missing is Abbott, absent from Heaton’s tours due to health issues since 2022. Singer Rianne Downey has a spirited go at filling her shoes but Heaton acknowledges how big Abbott’s absence is before Rotterdam, a song synonymous with her, and that definitely isn’t the same without her.
Still for Heaton this is a triumphant homecoming. He closes with Caravan of Love, prompting one of the weekend’s first mass singalongs. A perfect mid-afternoon pick me up.
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The reported crowd crush for Sugababes is worsening, by all accounts, sounding much the same case as with TLC two years ago. Bands are being given time slots and stages that clearly underestimate their pulling power.
Noname reviewed!
West Holts, 3.30pm
Playing to an ever-swelling crowd gearing up for Sugababes after her, Noname will have converted thousands of people to her hyper-literate, hyper-skilled wordplay, which really is the ideal for conscious hip-hop: politically biting but not drearily worthy. She is backed by an on-point band who deliver shuffling, frequently polyrhythmic beds for her raps.
This is MCing on the hardest difficulty setting: she’s not just quick, but vying with a beat that could easily dart away from her. It’s not mere mic cleverness: her castigation of the “war machine” chimes with a festival that champions nuclear disarmament, and her announcement “I’m a socialist; I don’t fuck with billionaires” gets a big cheer. The hooks are a delight – a “yippee kai yay” chorus has the audience chirruping along – and there is such joy in language: “Ticky ticky boom boom in a lagoon-goon...” runs the rapturously sexual Boomboom.
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Confidence Man, reviewed!
Other Stage, 3.45pm
In the same way that I imagine Glastonbury has an emergency button that says “deploy Coldplay”, I also suspect they also have one that says “activate Confidence Man”.
The Australian duo have absolutely perfected the art of festival-pleasing, with songs that perfectly clash the Minogue (both of them – and frankly more Dannii) Eurotrash-disco nexus with the more accessible parts of PC Music trash and self-awareness. (My friend very accurately refers to them as “goth Aqua” even before they play Cool Party, with its delightful lyric “I’m a cool party girl in a cool party world”, which also suits this most Brat summer.)
They also have the iconography to back it up: in frontman Reggie Goodchild, they have a classic “what does he actually do?” synthpop foil, their choreo is like stylised versions of your silliest bedroom moves (I particularly like one I’d describe as “scampering pony crab”). As I reported earlier, several members of the audience are wearing homespun versions of Janet Planet’s pointy boobs and the drummer/DJ’s veiled, brimmed, beekeeper-style hat (one guy has veiled his baseball cap, and gets a lot of mileage out of his spell on the big screens).
It’s hard to tell why they haven’t become actual, bona fide breakout pop stars: although parts of their set sound much like a YouTube house megamix, Luvin’ U Is Easy is a seductive, chugging would-be classic that makes you imagine how great a Balearic Kylie era would have been. And it’s hard to pull off genuinely funny without tipping over into being a comedy band, from the fake blood on Goodchild’s chest to Planet’s pouring water on her hair and windmilling it dry. But who cares about the big leagues when there are moments like the sun breaking through the crowds as Planet sings “I only want a good time, sunshine”: pure Glastonbury kismet.
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The Mary Wallopers reviewed!
Park Stage, 3.15pm
The Mary Wallopers are keen to take folk music back to its roots – where the genre is subversive, rowdy and unapologetically political, rather than twee. Here, to a full Park stage, they do exactly that, conjuring absolutely raucous crowds with their jaunty Irish ballads, and punctuating songs with messages about wealth inequality and Palestine.
Despite playing to thousands of people, the set captures the energy of a small local pub: there’s silly storytelling about fleas, fishing and drinking as pints are swilled and feet are stamped. Towards the back, a few mini ceilidhs break out to the storm of quick, jangly strings and punchy drums. Much of the Mary Wallopers’ material is short and snappy, and some songs date back hundreds of years, but even with the traditional Scottish and Irish vernacular, tracks like the chirpy Cod Liver Oil & The Orange Juice inspire boozy but verbatim singalongs from the crowd. It’s definitely the most engaged – and joyous! – crowd I’ve seen across the festival so far.
Quick wit and sheer entertainment value aside, the Mary Wallopers’ musicianship is strong. The percussion is razor-sharp, the penny whistle solos are lovely and, between them, they have some serious pipes. Brilliant all round!
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Seventeen reviewed!
Pyramid stage, 2.45pm
The crowd for the first appearance by a K-pop band in Glastonbury’s isn’t vast, but it’s vociferous. When the almost unreasonably pretty members of the almost comically over-staffed Seventeen take the stage, you’re struck by a sound you seldom hear at the festival: the kind of screaming you get at pop gigs. Its source is pressed against the barrier at the front of the stage: girls waving South Korean flags and sporting Seventeen T-shirts. One of them has a banner claiming the band are “making history” – which, in a way, they are.
Aside from the sheer number of members – during the set the band split into smaller groups that they insist on referring to as “units” – Seventeen’s point of difference in the K-pop firmament appears to be a certain guitar-heavy undertow to their sound. Their songs range about from rap-infused R&B to pop so toothsome it can be soundtracked by film on the stage=side screens of cartoon unicorns, confetti and smiley emoji, but a surprising amount of it seems to be rooted in distorted guitars: the influence of pop-punk hangs over a track called 2 Minus 1, another song sounds like a very clean-cut take on nu-metal (if such a thing can be imagined). All of it is accompanied by the kind of precision-tooled unison choreography standard in the K-pop world: even a nay-sayer be hard-pushed to argue that they’re not working incredibly hard up there.
And there definitely are naysayers present. There is a moment when the screens stop showing the girls at the front of the audience and briefly focus on a middle-aged man wearing an expression for which the adjective “nonplussed’ was made, but more of the audience are won over: happy to join in with synchronised arm waving at the band’s behest, or sing along to the most obvious hooks. The most obvious of all comes in the Uptown Funk-y Very Nice which concludes the set. Moreover, Seventeen hammer said hook into the ground like a recalcitrant tent peg: there are umpteen false endings, a moment when a girl who looks about eight years old and a lady who appears to be in her late 60s are picked out of the crowd and urged to help out with the call-and response chorus. Whether Seventeen’s appearance at Glastonbury proves a blip, or the first of many K-pop appearances remains to be seen: either way, they can chalk it up as a victory.
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Laura Snapes has a fashion report from the field:
“You can tell people love Confidence Man because there are a number of themed costumes in the crowd: people with pointy plastic boobs (possibly repurposed colanders) and beekeeper-style brimmed and veiled hats, as the duo and their dummer/DJ wear on stage.”
A hot trend for 2024 – apiarist chic? You read it here first. Hard to pull off on the Tube, though.
Our roving reporter Laurence Phelan has documented this very fresh critical commentary, posted on a urinal ahead of Coldplay’s headlining set.
It’s obviously fashionable to hate upon the ‘play, the same way as it is Nickelback, but (in my opinion, as an unabashed fan) to do so is an own goal, only revealing your own narrow-mindedness and willingness to fall in line with popular opinion. They have bangers! Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends is nearly a perfect album! Many highly critically acclaimed artists have never written half as good a song as The Scientist or Amsterdam!!!
Anyway, this unkind urinal graffiti has really irked me and I can only hope that sweet Chris Martin seeks to relieve himself elsewhere. I am so looking forward to seeing Coldplay tomorrow that I have bribed my colleague Tim Jonze into taking on my assigned Gossip review so that I may see their entire set. Five stars, for sure!!! (Don’t worry, Alexis Petridis is reviewing, not me.)
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As a 33-year-old, it becomes increasingly hard to retain one’s grasp on the zeitgeist, so I have asked my Gen-Z pal (and Guardian contributor) Isabel Brooks for scene reports.
It’s her first time at Glastonbury, and her predominant impression is – conveyed in a one-word message – “queues”. Having skipped the “ridiculous” line for Shygirl last night, she found it “SO QUIET”. “Daisy Edgar-Jones was next to us, though, which was exciting.”
Certain sets are already shaping up as the place to be – specifically, Charli XCX’s DJ set Party Girl at Levels tonight, capacity only 7,000, meaning the crowd will start forming a good 90 minutes beforehand.
Even today’s life-drawing session was over-subscribed. Izzy was turned away at the door, but says that anyone who’d been holding out to see a naked lady may have been disappointed: “She was wearing a sports bra.”
This old group of pals from Surrey watching Midland at Levels have come dressed as grannies. “There’s nothing better than a good old granny,” says Jen (centre).
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Headie One reviewed!
Other Stage, 2.15pm
Dropping a new album the day of your Glastonbury performance is a high-risk strategy for an artist who wants the kind of “energy” from the crowd that relies on song recognition. But the Tottenham MC and drill king Headie One perfectly balances the classics with tracks from sophomore album The Last One, his signature, consistent mid-tempo rapping flow carrying him seamlessly between songs. Entering the stage wearing a glorious Louis Vuitton two-piece, Headie comes in all guns blazing with a rapturous performance of 18Hunna. It’s a confident performance with careful delivery, and he reaches for more bangers – Know Better, Princess Cuts, Don’t Rush. Charades, with its line “All I know is money and beef/don’t think I left it all in the past”, speaks to the narrative the four-times-incarcerated Headie threads through his music – of prison, rivalries, dealing, fast money, straps.
The audience are in his palm, arms swaying, finger-guns pointing, chanting “HEADIE WE WANNA PARTY!!!” along with his hypeman (though an attempt by some young fans to engineer a mosh pit doesn’t quite take off). Then comes the new music. Glastonbury revellers won’t have had a moment to take in a 20-track album in fewer than 24 hours, but that same emotional deftness, and granular documentation of criminal life quickly wins them over. The lyricism stands out. Album opener I Could Rap contains “change the outfit like Amy Winehouse and change it back to black”. Memories, with Sampha, is melodic but funny: “I was sitting on a rock like Fred Flintstone.” Once he closes with Cry No More, you get the impression of an artist at the top of his game.
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Barry Can't Swim reviewed!
Park, 2pm
There’s a real appetite for shimmery, feelgood electronic music right now – the type more suited to big stadiums than any underground club. Just look at leader of the pack Fred Again, consistently selling out mega-venues like Sydney Opera House and Madison Square Gardens with his brand of neutral, sunshine-ready beats, sprinkled with ear-wormy vocal samples. The formula is also a winning one for rising Edinburgh producer Barry Can’t Swim (real name Joshua Mannie) as he takes on a completely packed-out Park Stage with a set of foolproof, family-friendly festival bangers.
Accompanied by a live band and a string of guest vocalists, Mannie saunters through a good chunk of his still-small discography, which spans from deep house and ethereal electronics to percussive afrobeat. From the tinkling opening keys of How It Feels, he has his crowd locked in, cheering and singing along to the mellifluous garage-y vocals. It’s these vocal-led tracks that are clear highlights; others become pleasant but slightly unmemorable fillers. Though there’s slight dips in energy – he risks losing his crowd a bit with one track, seeming to surpass the five-minute mark – everyone around me seems thrilled to be there. There’s plenty of gun fingers pointing, and when he asks people to get on their friends’ shoulders, many oblige. The music itself is nothing groundbreaking but it does what it sets out to do: soundtrack a sunny Friday afternoon.
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Squid reviewed!
West Holt, 2pm
“This is a new one – it’s about cannibalism.” Ah, the words every Glasto-goer longs to hear. If Squeeze pepped people up and Olivia Dean soothed them again, over on West Holts Squid are suddenly poking them in the ribs and ruffling their hair while wearing giant Mickey Mouse hands, sonically speaking. A few people may have been left wondering if last night’s mushroom chocolate is still hanging around their limbic system, particularly when you notice that one but two shoulder-riding audience members are dressed as actual squids.
Squid’s hyper-intellectual prog-jazz-techno-rock is surrealist, dense, trippy – and, yelping drummer and all, the six of them do build an impressively singular, odd, nervy sound. If your threshold for wackiness is up somewhere around “Danny Elfman juggling guavas” then there’s probably much to love. But I suspect that outside their faithful cephalopod squad, many will find the quality of the grooves isn’t remotely high enough to forgive the complete lack of tunes. At least my hands are exfoliated from the chin stroking.
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New hands on deck
Afternoon all – I’m relieving Laura of blog duties, having spent the morning reviewing Lynks and Olivia Dean: two very different shows, and together a testament to the range of experiences you can stumble upon (or be assigned to review) at Glastonbury.
I can tell you that it’s heating up outside, though the cloud cover remains persistent, and a big crowd gathering at the Other stage for Confidence Man – our team will be bringing it to you live.
Asha Puthli reviewed!
West Holts, 12.30pm
Asha Puthli represents a genuinely unknown quantity. It is, apparently, 50 years since she last played in the UK, two years before she released the album on which her latter-day cultdom is largely based: 1976’s The Devil Is Loose, an intriguing, off-beam confection of breathy, high vocals and woozy, jazzy dancefloor grooves, much-prized by disco collectors and home to the oft-sampled Space Talk. That aside, Puthli’s oeuvre took in everything from collaborations with Ornette Coleman to Bollywood soundtracks to new wave: who knows which of her musical incarnations is going to turn up on the West Holts stage after all this time?
Nearly 80, swathed in chiffon, Puthli cuts an authentically eccentric figure, alternately reminiscing about her friendship with Holly Woodlawn, Warhol-affiliated drag queen and star of Lou Reed’s Walk on The Wild Side, demonstrating how she came up with the peculiar bubbling sound that appears on her 1973 cover of George Harrison’s I Dig Love (not, as was commonly supposed the noise made by Puthli smoking a bong, but gargling with champagne), and protesting about the weather. “It’s bloody fucking cold here,” she complains. “I just flew in from Miami”.
Singing, as she proudly announces, in the same key she performed in during the 70s, she’s still capable of summoning a genuinely eerie falsetto on the chorus of Flying Fish, while her band, augmented by a tabla player, do an impressive job of conjuring up The Devil Is Loose’s unique sound: her occasionally improvised vocals (“I’d better sing the song to you,” she announces, after one long extempore burst during Hello Everyone) are punctuated by long, spacey instrumental passages. The set has a tendency to lurch about – jumping from a bluesy saunter through JJ Cale’s Right Down Here to the self-explanatory Disco Mystic – but the sun comes out as she plays Space Talk, which sounds fantastic, a beguilingly strange shimmer. “Do you love me? Do you really love me?” she asks. “Say yes!” The audience seem understandably happy to oblige.
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Olivia Dean reviewed!
Pyramid, 1.15pm
“This is the biggest crowd I have ever played,” says Olivia Dean, having just concluded Echo, early into her early-afternoon Pyramid stage slot. Her Mercury-nominated debut album Messy was released a year ago (to the week, as she points out) so this set – on Glastonbury’s biggest stage, setting the tone for the days to come – represents an anointing of sorts for the neo-soul singer. And the crowd has come out for her, with groups seated but densely packed all the way up the hill.
She’s been dreaming of playing this stage since she was eight years old, she says, “so this is a really big moment for me”. You wouldn’t know she turned 25 only in March – Dean holds herself like a superstar, switching between instruments (guitar, keys, tambourine, a maraca shaped like a banana that I now desperately wish for myself) and engaging graciously with the crowd. Last year, she points out, she played the smaller Lonely Hearts stage, “so this is a big ol’ jump for me”.
For the first few songs, she doesn’t take off her cat-eye sunnies – a cool move that enhances the confessional nature of her set, creating the sense of layers unfurling by increments when she finally takes them off. On the breastplate of her mini-dress, there’s a photo of her grandmother, further indicating what this performance means to her.
That she sees herself as engaging with the singer-songwriter tradition is clear from her introduction to each song, telling the story of their inspiration – and emphasising her relatability. My Own Warfare is about the concept of “the other half”: “I don’t really believe in that ... you don’t need someone else to complete you”, she says, to cheers from the crowd (presumably the single ladies). UFO is about her feelings of alienation, she explains; I Could Be a Florist is about her daydream of an alternate path and another life. (“Any florists in the crowd?” A smattering, apparently.) Time, her new song which was released only this week (“I don’t expect you to know the words”), is about the question of how to spend it.
It’s all very introspective for a Pyramid stage set, and generally on the slower side tempo-wise, but Dean has a beautiful voice and knows how to use it, precisely expressing her themes of sadness, relief, heartbreak (“‘tis the season, yeah?”), yearning or self-doubt. She’s accompanied by a brass section, generating a sense of occasion and elevating what is, after all, early in the day on Glastonbury time. When the band get a chance to let loose during her more upbeat songs, the set really starts cooking, but before long the temperature is brought back down to Dean’s mid-tempo comfort zone.
The Hardest Part, the song she says changed her life, draws the most recognition from the crowd, but it’s her cover of Kelis’s Millionaire that I enjoy most – I’d love to hear her write her own songs with similar swagger. Her unwavering smile through Messy speaks to its genesis as anthem of self-acceptance; the next step might be embracing that mess in her music.
But Dean’s home key, it’s clear, is more ballads than ballsy, more schmaltzy than spiky. (An audience member’s sign, requesting that she play at their wedding, is met with a maybe: “I love weddings!”) That reflective instinct is at its best with Carmen, her second-to-last song and a touching tribute to the sacrifices that got her here. Holding back tears, she dedicates the song to her grandmother – watching on the telly, Dean says – and the rest of her Windrush generation: “She came to this country when she was 18, she’d never been before, and decided to change her whole life ... I’m a product of her bravery.”
It’s a lovely note on which to end the set – or, in Glastonbury time, start the day.
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Top Boy actress Saffron Hocking with friend, actress Lois Chimimba ready for Headie One. “We love Headie, he’s so sweet, our baby!” says Hocking.
We can hear the soulful oomph of Olivia Dean wafting over the Portakabin. Here she is having a lovely time on the Pyramid stage!
Waiting around at the Other stage for Headie One to begin when I have what looks like a voodoo stick waved in my face. David (pictured) tells me this is Keith Richards, “from the Rolling Stones, but he’s not with them right now, he’s with me.” Are David and Keith regulars? “Keith’s never missed a year.”
Here’s the Glastonbury founder, Michael Eavis, performing on the Park stage yesterday!
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Hat news: Safi Bugel reports that there’s “about 2m bucket hats in the Barry Can’t Swim crowd”. More on Glasto fashion from Sirin Kale later!
Marina Abramović has set herself a tall order for later today – to get the Pyramid crowd to be silent for seven whole minutes. Read more from Lanre Bakare here.
I’ve never been happier that I went to bed last night instead of trekking up to the Crows’ Nest for the ALLEGED Four Tet DJ set!
Funniest moment of Glastonbury so far was going to a 'secret set' billed as Will b2b Kieran. Rumoured to be Burial and Four Tet, people in the crowd announcing it as fact, confirmed by 4 undisputed sources etc. They come on and it's just two random lads called Will and Kieran
— patrick hinton (@patrickch_) June 28, 2024
Squeeze reviewed!
Pyramid, 12pm
Generally the Pyramid stage opening act gently eases you into the day but Squeeze get you on your feet, shove a largarita in your hand and tell you to get back in the game. Snappily dressed in sharp tailoring, they kick Take Me I’m Yours instantly into a high gear, almost towards a rockabilly tempo, with Glenn Tilbrook’s soul-boy voice heated up into rock’n’roll. Suitably warmed, he swerves expressively around his upper register for Hourglass as the backing band prop him up with five-way vocal harmonies. Later, his songwriting partner Chris Difford gives Cool for Cats quite the opposite vocal treatment. On release in 1979 it was the pub-bar chatter of a twentysomething likely lad; grizzled and even deeper-voiced, he now sounds like the pub’s landlord delivering an old yarn.
New song One Beautiful Summer gets a warm reception, and when I interviewed Difford earlier this week he told me it was inspired by a Guardian article about late-in-life romance at an Eastbourne care home. “Unfortunately the guy passed away and she was left to pick up the pieces of her heart,” he said. “We’ve written this song to reflect what it must be like to be in a care home and have a relationship at very late stage of life. Because it’s just around the corner for us!”
He and Tilbrook celebrate 50 years together this year, and as this set shows, seem energised by the very spunk that fires up the songs they wrote in their youth. Difford told me they’re even planning to revisit some unrecorded mid-70s demos. “It’s been kind of like an archeological dig, we’ve going around with a brush with each song and taking it out of the ground,” he said. “I think: those young lads had incredible ambition and commitment to writing those songs, and here they are all these years later.”
While Tilbrook and Difford remain the heart of the band, the supporting players are terrific: their keyboardist doing an analogue synth solo in Slap and Tickle by karate-chopping the keys, while Pulling Mussels (From the Shell) has hard-pounding piano and punchy congas, and later their pedal steel player gives a magnificently gurning solo. But this Pyramid crowd pull their weight too. Up the Junction provokes one of the loveliest sounds you get on this stage – thousands of people wordlessly singing a riff – and Tilbrook leads a giant call and response for Black Coffee in Bed. “You’ve made an old man cry,” says Difford, and the wave of love surges back towards him.
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Voice of Baceprot reviewed!
Woodsies, 11.30am
How best to open a festival? Some winsome, gently cooed folk ballads, to ease hungover punters into the day? That’s one option, but the schedulers at Woodsies have instead opted for a bracing blast of thrash metal to blow away the cobwebs. The first Indonesian band to ever play at Glastonbury, Voice of Baceprot are a female power trio whose cheerful onstage disposition masks an impressively beefed up brand of old-school metal. Dressed head to toe in black, including hijabs, it’s immediately clear they mean business from the very first chugging drop D riff they launch into.
Their sound owes much to the big four of 80s thrash, but there’s a hint of System of a Down in their off kilter melodies and a dash of Primus in Widi Rahmawati’s frenetic slap bass riffs. She’s given plenty of room to show off her chops, as is drummer Euis Siti Aisyah, whose extended mid-set solo gets the biggest cheer of the day. But perhaps most impressive of all is vocalist Firda Marsya Kurnia, who is equally at ease delivering a lacerating growl or a clean, soaring pop-metal melody. There’s a lovely moment where, right after concluding one of their many bruising breakdowns, the band pause to wish Rahmawati happy birthday and Kurnia gets a little teary at the sight of hundreds of Glasto punters joining in. “This is the best gig ever” she yelps, and in the moment it’s hard to disagree.
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Lambrini Girls reviewed!
Woodsies, 12.45pm
Pouring Red Stripe down each other’s throats at midday, here come Lambrini Girls, careering around the stage in a blaze of guitars-aloft feedback, blitzkrieg drums and savage lyrics that cut through the bullshit of 2024 culture wars.
“Big dick energy / You’re such a fake / Stay the fuck away from me!” screams singer Phoebe Lunny, before asking for a show of hands for “queer legends and non-binary legends” and launching into Help Me I’m Gay. Then during Terf Wars there’s a call and response routine: “Shut your stupid fucking mouth,” yells Lunny while the crowd yell back “You stupid fucking terf!” One suspects the Radio 2 playlist does not beckon.
But in a year in which Coldplay, Dua Lipa and Shania Twain are taking the plum spots it’s thrilling to hear the exact polar opposite, a truly righteous racket of youthful anger.
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Elle Hunt, in the field, sends an important update:
Long, dusty trudges across the countryside are a hallmark of the Glastonbury experience but people’s fits often provide food for thought. I’ve just passed a man whose slogan t-shirt has given me food for thought to sustain me for the entire walk from Park stage to the Pyramid. It read: “STOP GLORIFYING RATS”. They’ve had it too good for too long!
A couple of lovely snaps from our intrepid photographer David Levene from yesterday.
Yoko Ono's Voice Peace for Soprano – reviewed!
Park, 12.25pm
Just after Lynx at Park, Bishi – wearing a gold kaftan and a white feathery headdress – performs Yoko Ono’s Voice Peace for Soprano before leading the crowd in a primal scream for peace, power and whatever you fancy, really. (If collectivism isn’t your thing, she suggests it could be a warmup for Dua Lipa later on the Pyramid stage.)
The crowd doesn’t quite match her intensity – one guy standing very close to the stage carries on eating throughout – but some certainly seize the opportunity to get something off their chest. (In my case it’s the £2 increase in cost of lageritas at San Remo.) The event was brought to Glastonbury by Tate Modern Lates, inspired by exhibition Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind.
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Lynks reviewed!
Park, 11.30
As they themselves acknowledge, 11.30am isn’t the obvious timeslot for Lynks and their raunchy, verbose electro-clash, but they’re not letting scheduling stop them from imbuing late-night energy to the blustery Park stage. “Welcome to drag brunch,” they joke, two songs in. “Honestly, why are you all awake?”
“To see YOU!” shouts someone behind me.
Lynks certainly commits to putting on a show, starting with the lewks. They’re known for their extensive performing wardrobe of elaborate masks, and shows self-effacingly likened to the low-budget version of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour; today it’s a tartan bodysuit covering their face, which is already obscured by a tremendous wide-brim hat. They’re flanked by dancers (named Lynks Shower Gel), likewise clad in tartan, whose playful energy is eagerly reciprocated by the crowd. Bass-heavy opening song Abomination dwells on sexual shame, cut with cheeky humour: “Since age 11, I’ve been told that I’m a heathen / So you best believe I’m on the guest list for Armageddon.”
After a cheery “good morning!”, Lynks launches into Pedestrian at Best, the Courtney Barnett cover with the lyric warning that they’ll “only disappoint you”. Today it sounds like false modesty, as the crowd in front of the Park stage grows steadily bigger: it’s a delightful show thanks to Lynks’ irrepressible stage presence and deadpan comedy. Having warned that they’re about to get vulnerable (“If I cry, don’t film it”) Lynks launches into How to Make a Béchamel Sauce in 10 Steps (With Pictures) – which is exactly as it sounds, down to the print-outs illustrating each step flaunted by the dancers. “Continue adding milk” has never sounded so sexy (and having recently made my first Béchamel sauce, I can attest to the steps). It’s ridiculous, but wonderful fun; I see a woman laughing with her kids about the unlikeliness of the beat, moving their feet.
It may be a more PG show than their usual, given the hour – “There are children here, I can’t do that!” Lynks checks themselves during Hot Straight Boys – but their show is full of words of wisdom, and not just for the kitchen. Having led the crowd in a call-and-response (“because I’m all about inclusion”) of “you silly little boy”, Lynks gets their biggest cheer for the true statement: “NOBODY CARES THAT YOU’VE WATCHED PULP FICTION!” “Friends don’t give each other head!” from New Boyfriend also gets gleefully shouted back by the crowd. Someone give Lynks an advice column.
Lynks has other ideas for empire-building, concluding a particularly high-energy number, flushed beneath their plaid, with a shout-out to Joe Wicks, who gave a workout class earlier: “I’m open to collaboration.” With the crowd, they’re flirtatious and courteous, introducing Everybody’s Sexy and I’m Not as a song about being a “big uggo in a field full of sexy people. None of you would relate to that, though”. A moody, down-tempo breakdown is truncated in favour of a quick finish: “Everybody’s bored of this bit, right?”
By the time Lynks has donned an extravagant bridal veil and Lynks Shower Gel are spraying water (at least I think it’s water) over the crowd, I’m guessing that they’ve won over a lot of new fans, not to mention a bigger crowd for their DJ set later on at Scissors. It might be Lynks’s “special day”, as they yell from beneath their veil, but they’ve got ours off to a great start.
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From Ben at the Pyramid stage, on flag watch (also shoutout to the Bob Mortimer one I saw at Sofia Kourtesis earlier):
Tyskie (leftist ref as I discovered from Zoe last night!), late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, a red flag with RED FLAG on it (classic Glasto, ahem, humour), and strong showing for Wolves, Brighton, Bath City, Scarborough Athletic FC. Annoying to see four with Radio X branding which is totally against the spirit of anti-commercial Glasto. Surprising lack of Palestine ones too.
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A few more views from the site today and yesterday.
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Last night Jonny Weeks was out capturing the fun around Arcadia and Silver Hayes – which, as ever, were colossally busy on Thursday before the main programming has kicked in.
Rick Williams has also written this nuanced profile of the troubled life of ska pioneer Don Drummond – a founding member of the Skatalites, who celebrate their 60th anniversary at Glastonbury this weekend.
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And here’s another great interview with Ayra Starr, by Jason Okundaye – who’s out reviewing for us right now – about the Nigerian superstar’s Glastonbury debut this weekend.
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Ben is at the Pyramid stage watching openers Squeeze, who we can hear chugging away joyously from the cabin. He says:
First song of the day on Pyramid: Take Me I’m Yours, with Squeeze in terrific tailoring. Funky and driving it really hard, with an almost rockabilly feel – and amazing soloing from Glenn Tilbrook. Superb opening!
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To whet your appetite for the weekend, here’s some we made earlier. The cover of today’s Film & Music is an excellent interview by Elle Hunt with the Last Dinner Party, who everyone thinks are going to steal this year’s “Glastonbury moment” – as Wet Leg did in 2022 – when they play the Other stage tomorrow afternoon. But success, it seems, has been a bit of a mixed experience for them. Read on!
Welcome to Glastonbury 2024!
Hello from Worthy Farm! It’s an overcast day here so far, although Sofia Kourtesis warmed things up on the West Holts stage with her delightful stage presence and softly ecstatic club music (and prompted a cheering “booooo!” from the crowd when she introduced one song about being ghosted by some cad). Our reviewers have been dispatched out into the field – after varying degrees of late Thursday bedtimes – and their takes on the day’s acts from Lynks to Squeeze, LCD Soundsystem to Dua Lipa, will start arriving in due course.
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