Friday morning at Glastonbury underlines that the old cliche about the festival having something for everybody is only a cliche because it’s true. Your options range from the beatific (Sofia Kourtesis’s lambent brand of techno) to the profoundly challenging (artist Bishi Bhattacharya performing Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano, which sounds every bit as nerve-shredding as you might expect). From the dependable – a sharp-suited Squeeze on the Pyramid stage, offering up one of the late 70s most beloved run of hits – to a largely unknown quantity. Now 80, Asha Puthli last performed in Britain in 1974: her oeuvre takes in everything from collaborations with Ornette Coleman to Bollywood soundtracks to new wave. A tiny figure swathed in chiffon, she turns out to be as spacey and idiosyncratic as the album on which her cult status is based, 1976’s The Devil Is Loose, highly prized by disco collectors and hip-hop producers in search of samples. Between songs, she reminisces about her friendship with legendary drag queen and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, complains about the weather (“it’s bloody fucking cold here – I just flew in from Miami”), and demonstrates how she achieved a curious bubbling sound that appeared on her 1973 cover of George Harrison’s I Dig Love: not, as was commonly supposed, by smoking a bong, but by gargling. Her voice is still capable of summoning up the eerie falsetto that punctuated her underground disco classic Flying Fish, while The Devil Is Loose’s acknowledged classic, Space Talk, still sounds incredible: a seductive, trippy dancefloor shimmer.
After UK drill rapper Headie One uses his 18-song set on the Other stage to unveil his new album – no fan of understatement, he incentivises fans to download it by informing them it is “a masterpiece” – the Pyramid stage plays host to the first-ever Glastonbury appearance by a K-pop band, the almost unreasonably pretty Seventeen, whose name is linked to the number of members and subgroups in the band and whose last EP, FML, was the biggest-selling in the world last year. The crowd they draw isn’t vast but at least some of it is very vociferous indeed: the stage-side screens unfortunately pick out a middle-aged onlooker wearing an expression for which the adjective “nonplussed” might have been invented, but equally, there are teenage girls down at the front expressing their appreciation by making a noise not dissimilar to Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano. And Seventeen, whose music varies from toothsome pop that comes accompanied by film of cartoon unicorns to what sounds like a peculiarly fresh-faced take on nu-metal, work very hard indeed to win over the merely curious. The hook of their closing track Very Nice is difficult to dislodge from your brain for the remainder of the day, simply because they repeat it so many times: every time you think they’re about to leave the stage, they start singing it again.
You can understand why performance artist Marina Abramović told the Guardian she was “terrified” by the prospect of leading the Pyramid stage audience in what she described as a “collaboration” called Seven Minutes of Collective Silence – there’s absolutely no guarantee that people will keep quiet for that long, symbolic protest against the horrors of war and violence or not – but it turns out to work: the hush that descends feels powerful and moving, and weirdly makes the artist a hard act to follow.
Her successor, PJ Harvey, seems to slip onstage almost unnoticed, and her opening songs fit the mood, 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. Not everything she plays is so subdued – there is a churning take on 50ft Queenie and a version of Dress strafed with cacophonous violin – but there is a captivating sense of cool control to her performance. That’s amplified by the fact that Harvey is a simultaneously compelling and mysterious presence. At one juncture she sits at a lectern, writing in a notebook and sniffing some herbs while her band play on around her. She boldly ends her set with a slow, brooding To Bring You My Love.
At the other extreme, LCD Soundsystem offer a kinetic, party-starting burst of hits – All My Friends, Dance Yrself Clean, an extended version of Losing My Edge that interpolates snatches of tracks by artists the lyrics reference, among them Daft Punk and Yazoo. Their mesh of analogue synth, distorted guitar and dancefloor-facing rhythms sounds fantastic.
According to the most intriguing bit of her between-song chat, Dua Lipa’s headlining Glastonbury slot came about as a result of an act of childhood manifesting. Whether you buy that or not, she has clearly spent a lot of time carefully studying and absorbing how a successful Glastonbury headline set works, and putting what she has gleaned to good use. She throws everything she has at it to create a sense of special occasion. There are pyrotechnics, special guest appearances – Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, performing his biggest hit, The Less I Know the Better – and a setlist that smartly tucks a couple of less impressive songs from her coolly received latest album, Radical Optimism, in among a torrent of crowd-pleasing hits: Levitating, Physical, Illusion. It works. The crowd she draws is huge and, moreover, they stay put. There’s none of the wastage that signals a Glastonbury headliner getting it wrong, and driving their audience towards the festival’s other manifold delights.
As Kneecap themselves note, 11.30 on a Saturday morning is a peculiar time to be confronted by a political Northern Irish rap duo who have a song called All Your Sniffer Dogs Are Shite. “Fucking hell, what are you all doing here?” ponders MC Mo Chara as he surveys the audience spilling out of the side of the Woodsies tent. Equally, you get why people have made the effort: Kneecap’s depiction of life in west Belfast is alternately funny and aggressively confrontational, it is married to a hugely appealing take on golden age hip-hop and the end result is thrillingly unique.
Less surprising is the scale of the audience at the Other stage for the Last Dinner Party: they seem to have sidestepped accusations of hype to become the breakthrough British alt-rock band of 2024. It is fairly obvious why things have worked out for them. There is definitely a hint of contrivance about the whole enterprise, but Abigail Morris is a genuinely charismatic frontwoman; their rampage-through-the-dressing-up-box image leaves them looking fantastic, a riot of bustiers, empire-line frocks and leg-of-mutton sleeves, a striking alternative to a world of “relatable” pop stars and drearily prosaic alt-rock bands with songs that are uniformly great. Unexpectedly preceded by an impassioned speech from Morris urging the audience to become politically active, their closer, Nothing Matters, provokes a euphoric mass singalong.
The afternoon passes in a sunny blur. Cyndi Lauper’s She Bop is clearly not the only song in pop history about masturbation, but it is probably the only song in pop history about masturbation that features its singer performing a solo on that school music lesson staple, the recorder. Whatever you make of Keane’s music, there is something sweetly charming about their delight at the unexpected second wind given their career by the TikTok popularity of Somewhere Only We Know. Michael Kiwanuka is flatly brilliant. His music occupies a space that feels uniquely his, informed by the past but never cravenly retro, bordered on various sides by soul, funk, confessional singer-songwriting and blazing psychedelic rock.
There is something impressively confident about Little Simz’s approach to her slot on the Pyramid stage. She performs the opening trio of songs alone, boldly relying only on her charisma and skill as an MC and a sound that cranks the bass up to such a degree you can see the screens at the side of the stage shaking. It’s a risk, but it pays off: she cuts a genuinely compelling figure, the music shifts from the downtempo introspection of Introvert to a ferocious version of Venom to the more pop-facing Selfish, and the audience understandably appear completely captivated.
It makes for an intriguing contrast with Coldplay, who have now headlined Glastonbury five times, and, since their last appearance in 2016, have completed a 180-degree turn from earnest stadium balladeers to purveyors of relentless more-is-more visual overload. It’s not so much a performance as a constant bombardment of triple-tested hits – Yellow, Clocks, Adventure of a Lifetime, The Scientist, Paradise, Viva La Vida, Higher Power – and spectacle. There are fireworks, confetti cannon, a drone flying overhead broadcasting the vastness of the assembled masses back to them, the illuminated wristbands that turn even the fringes of the crowd into part of the performance. Then there’s the lavishness with which Chris Martin flatters both his audience and the festival itself, a succession of guests that manages to encompass both Afrobeat legend Femi Kuti and Michael J Fox. It is so wilfully over the top that it leaves Dua Lipa’s show looking like an understatement, but, in the middle of the crowd, it would take a quite extraordinary level of churlishness not to be swept along in its wake. Whatever objections you might reasonably lodge against Coldplay melt away in the face of such cartoonish good fun. During an orchestrated mass singalong to Fix You, the cameras briefly focus on drummer Will Champion, who appears to be in tears. But even if it doesn’t leave you moist-eyed, Coldplay’s performance seems like the kind of headlining set that no one present is likely to forget in a hurry, which was clearly the intention. Job done.
Given the amount of pop-country currently occupying the singles chart, it feels oddly timely that Shania Twain – whose steroidal brand of pop-country broke big, as she reminds us, 27 years ago – is in the legends slot. The crowd is enormous: if there’s a crippling global shortage of pink cowboy hats, it’s pretty obvious where the finger should be pointed. It’s an experience the 58-year-old singer seems to find both delightfully overwhelming – she launches into a peculiar story about travelling around the festival, peering into portaloos which is either a little fanciful or evidence that Shania Twain has terrible judgment – and faintly disturbing. “What is that?” she shrieks, peering into the crowd: in fairness, a reasonable reaction to being confronted by a large group of people wearing masks featuring your own face. You could, if you wish, bemoan the passing of the era when the legends slot at Glastonbury meant James Brown or Al Green rather than Man! I Feel Like a Woman!, but your argument would find few takers while that song is actually playing. And, as always, there is an alternative: it’s a short walk to the Park stage, where Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar is on explosive form, unleashing a series of jagged but dextrous solos, despairingly comparing England’s idea of warm weather to what he’s used to back home in Niger, and – as on his recent album Funeral for Justice – giving the distinct impression that he and his backing musicians are currently one of the greatest rock bands in the world.
If Shania Twain’s appearance at Glastonbury seems timely, then so too does Avril Lavigne’s. Punk-pop is currently big business again, and no one did more to turn punk into pop than Lavigne in the early 00s. Moreover, the genre’s current practitioners are happy to pay tribute to her as a forebear: two years ago, on the same stage, Oliva Rodrigo was to be seen performing a cover of Lavigne’s Complicated. And the impact she had on a tweenage audience 20 years ago is obvious: the Other Stage is so over-subscribed that stewards shut down one entrance, the place is packed with early thirtysomething women aloft on people’s shoulders, not merely singing along, but cathartically emoting like mad to Losing Grip and I’m With You: the moment when Lavigne organises a crowd singalong to the latter seems a little surplus to requirements, given that everyone in the field already seems to bellowing along to every word she sings anyway. Critically mocked as cosplay punk and rounded-edge grunge her music may have been, but a song like Don’t Tell Me, which advised her fans not to feel pressurised into having sex, clearly spoke very directly to a generation of women only a few years younger than Lavigne herself when her debut album was released. The songs sound remarkably robust; the field remains packed and devoted to the end.
Towards the end of her set, SZA informs the audience that she was “so nervous to be here”. You can understand why. Judging by the fans who assembled at her O2 Arena gig last year, her core audience are teenage girls, not Glastonbury’s main demographic: if you believed what you read on social media following the announcement of her headlining slot, a significant proportion of Glastonbury goers had simply never heard of her. The audience is noticeably thinner than those that gathered for Dua Lipa and Coldplay, but they’re touchingly committed, and their ardour is entirely understandable. As R&B divas go, she’s impressively eclectic and strikingly eccentric. Her sound hops divertingly around: heavy guitars underpin F2F, Love Galore carries a distinct trace of G-funk in its DNA, Nobody Gets Me is an acoustic ballad with a chorus that keeps threatening to break into Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, the live version of her collaboration with Doja Cat, Kiss Me More, comes interpolated with snatches of Prince’s Kiss.
She variously performs astride a giant beetle, accompanied by a hybrid robot/chair – she parts its legs to give it a brief lapdance – waving swords around, and ascending a giant felled tree trunk while clad in a pair of fairy wings (on the way back down, she pauses momentarily to twerk). The connection between the swords and the title of her biggest hit, Kill Bill, aside, what any of this is supposed to signify remains fairly enigmatic, but it would be extremely hard to feel bored while watching someone twerking in fairy wings halfway up a tree.
It concludes with her performing 20something, during which she causes a degree of screamy bedlam by descending to the barrier at the front of the stage. This being Glastonbury, a degree of weirdness is added by the fact that one of the fans she’s singing her heartfelt ballad of lost love and post-teenage ennui to is holding an effigy of Milhouse from The Simpsons on a stick: a suitably peculiar ending to a risky, but ultimately hugely rewarding performance – and indeed Glastonbury festival as a whole.
• This article was amended on 1 and 2 July 2024. An earlier version said Kneecap were from east Belfast rather than west Belfast. It was an effigy of Milhouse from The Simpsons that a fan was holding, not Smithers. And the name of the K-pop band Seventeen comes not from “the number of members in the band”, but from adding these members (13) to the number of subgroups they form (3) and to the band as a whole (1).
