If you’d switched on BBC iPlayer midway through Glastonbury’s sleepy early Sunday afternoon session in June, you’d have been forgiven for double checking the listings. Pacing the Pyramid Stage with vigilante black eye make-up smeared across her face, dressed in a feathered leather ensemble like Black Swan gone punk, and singing an incantational sort of Doors-esque psych rock, the woman at the centre stuck out like a barbed sore thumb amid a day of family-friendly fun; Nile Rodgers’s disco hits and Rod Stewart’s tight trousers. “For those of you who are wondering what’s happened, the crazy part is over,” laughed Celeste at the section’s climax, “and now it’s time for me to do a nice song.”
Suffice to say, this off-piste interlude — recent Death In Vegas-sampling single Everyday; the frustrated howl of new album track Could Be a Machine, plus a couple of hugely exciting new cuts from a forthcoming project — was far from what the world had been taught to expect from the 31-year-old singer.
