There were few sets at this year’s Glastonbury festival more anticipated than Lana Del Rey’s Saturday night Other stage headline slot. It’s been nearly 10 years since the cult American singer-songwriter last played on Worthy Farm; in that time, she’s released six albums and established herself as one of pop music’s greatest living songwriters, period – a bold and experimental musician whose renown only seems to grow as her music becomes more introspective and self-referential. Her latest record, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, is already one of the year’s most acclaimed, and one of the strangest pop records to be released in recent memory: across the sprawling, conceptually dense album, Del Rey samples herself three times, collaborates with “fetish rapper” Tommy Genesis, and, for the first time in her career, writes openly about her family and personal history.
At the time of writing, Lana is the 27th most streamed musician in the world on Spotify – an impossibly huge feat, given how idiosyncratic, and downright anti-pop, her vision of pop music is. While Del Rey will probably never be played on pop radio, her fans are devoutly loyal – more so, perhaps, than the fans of many other pop stars. They prove their devotion at the end of Del Rey’s set: after walking on stage 30 minutes late, her sound is cut at midnight, after a raucous, exhilaratingly dense-sounding rendition of the 2017 song White Mustang. Del Rey pleads with various stage managers as the gargantuan Other stage crowd watch on, aghast; she is eventually escorted offstage, and the crew packing up her gear are met with emphatic, resounding boos.
