As the bedraggled masses make their way home from Worthy Farm today, there has been a lot of talk about Glastonbury’s headliners this year. In the run-up to the festival, the feeling was that the three top acts on the Pyramid Stage – Dua Lipa, Coldplay, and SZA – were particularly weak selections.
Though Dua pulled things back with a meticulously rehearsed pop mega-spectacular (her underwhelming third album Radical Optimism making more sense in the breezy context of Worthy Farm) Coldplay trawled out their slightly overdone formula of big hearty singalongs and light-up wristbands (along with an exceedingly weird moment in which they sang Fix You to Back to the Future’s Michael J Fox).
Then, on Sunday night came SZA, who played a stunning show filled with Eighties sci-fi inspired visuals, to one of the Pyramid’s sparsest crowds in recent memory. The numbers took a hit due to the usual late Sunday night exodus of punters leaving the site, a strong line-up of rival headliners on other stages to compete with, Glastonbury’s slightly older-skewing crowd, and the fact that Glastonbury punters buy their tickets before line-ups are announced. Evidently, not many of them this year were SZA fans.
Sure, there were still some issues with SZA’s set, which was not perfect. For the first half an hour, her voice sounded muffled and distorted as the microphone appeared to be playing up, interrupting and dampening all of the emotion that usually courses through her vocal performances. As with other US pop headliners in the past, the singer hadn’t quite received the Glastonbury brief; rather than pulling in the extra-special Worthy Farm bells and whistles, she offered up the spectacle of an arena show with little of the crowd interaction Pyramid Stage attendees have come to expect.
But it was still a perfectly solid show, and certainly a damn sight more interesting than watching Chris Martin wang on about peace and love for two and a half hours.
A few of SZA’s loudest naysayers have argued that she didn’t “deserve” to headline, which is of course nonsense given that she’s one of the biggest artists in the world right now. She may not be universally known in the same sense as Coldplay, and fair enough, the idea of your postman’s cousin’s best mate knowing all of the words to Broken Clocks feels unlikely. But the idea that she is too unknown to top the bill depresses me.
Is this not a music festival we’re talking about here? Do we not want to be challenged, or see something that feels moderately fresh or different from the rest of the pack? Or is an inoffensive revolving door cycle of steadily popular headliners with mass, universal ubiquity really the best we can do?
To me, it feels contradictory to moan on about being fed up of “boring” headliners like Coldplay, while also complaining that you’ve never heard of SZA . Mostly, it reveals its utterer has been living under a rock since her 2017 debut album Ctrl came out. A global star and a four-time Grammy winner, she is also the 17th most streamed artist on Spotify of all time.
If you’ve not heard of her by now, it should be very, very easy to remedy things. And if you’re still not interested, the beauty of Glastonbury is that there’s always something else to see instead.
