On Saturday afternoon, a Land Rover with Glastonbury’s founder, Michael Eavis, within the passenger seat pulls out of the backstage space, on to a highway filled with people who runs between Glastonbury’s Pyramid and Different phases. The group don’t simply half to let it via: after they realise who’s inside it, they line the perimeters of the highway, not cheering or shouting, however respectfully applauding because it passes.
It’s a candy and oddly transferring scene, and it appears to say one thing in regards to the first Glastonbury since 2019. Eavis is known for cropping up within the media in direction of the top of each competition, loudly proclaiming the previous days the very best Glastonbury ever, an evaluation it may be onerous to agree with when you have simply spent three days watching folks’s belongings being washed away, wading via ankle-deep mud or, on one notable event, trying on aghast because the operator of an effluent truck presses the mistaken button and inadvertently sprays the inside of one of many dance tents with human excrement. You typically get the sensation that if an enormous sinkhole unexpectedly opened up, swallowing enormous sections of the Worthy Farm website, Eavis would stick his head out of it on Sunday afternoon and begin waxing lyrical to a reporter in regards to the magical environment and indomitable excessive spirits within the crowd.
However this 12 months the environment at Glastonbury does really feel a bit totally different. If arriving onsite is a barely discombobulating expertise at first – even for a seasoned Glastonbury-goer, the sheer quantity of individuals feels weirdly overwhelming after spending a big proportion of the previous two years locked in your house – you shortly discover a recent, benign happiness that's presumably rooted in gratitude that the occasion is occurring in any respect.
Accordingly, the audiences appear extra attentive than traditional. The Friday night time headliner, Billie Eilish, performs a succession of gradual, fragile ballads, however quite than depart in the hunt for one thing extra punchy or simpler to bellow alongside to, the group stays and listens. One thing related occurs on Saturday morning, when the US trio Gabriels play the Park stage. They sound incredible – their gospel-trained frontman, Jacob Lusk, has an astonishing falsetto voice, tender and eerie; their sound variously touches on 60s soul, disco and jazz-inflected pre-rock’n’roll pop – however whereas their songs are lovely, they're additionally usually measured and opaque. They require shut consideration, which they get: the group appears rapt.
Eilish’s presence on the prime of Friday night time’s invoice additionally appears to point a shift in Glastonbury’s musical boundaries. It’s not simply that she is the youngest headlining act within the competition’s historical past; it’s that she is the primary mainstream pop star – as within the sort of pop star that 14-year-olds scream at – to headline the competition. A couple of years again, it’s onerous to not assume her presence would have brought about controversy – some berk would have gotten up a keep-Glasto-rock petition about it – however in 2022 it appears to cross with out remark.
In reality, the invoice is studded with mainstream pop stars, together with Eilish’s primary competitor for tweenage affections, the previous Disney starlet Olivia Rodrigo, George Ezra and the Sugababes, who, in a masterly instance of what you would possibly name Glastonbury’s idiosyncratic strategy to billing, had been supposed to look on the Avalon stage between Nick Mulvey – previously the grasp of the metal pan within the left-field jazz act Portico Quartet – and the hoary punk pioneers the Damned.
Even the standard preposterous Glastonbury hearsay a few potential secret look by an enormous star appears to have been given a 2022 pop makeover. You shortly lose depend of how many individuals let you know that they've heard it on good authority that Harry Kinds is being helicoptered in to make an look with Billie Eilish, or Paul McCartney, or probably with the punishing doom-punk quintet Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs throughout their set on the Earache Data stage in Shangri-La.
Conventional various guitar rock additionally appears to be having a resurgence at this 12 months’s competition. Moist Leg trigger the competition’s first roadblock, early on Friday afternoon on the Park stage. They entice so many individuals that it’s unimaginable to see them – the phrase is that they're on stage, sporting matching white clothes that make them seem like extras from Little Home on the Prairie, though it’s tough to confirm if that's true, or simply one other hearsay from the Harry-Kinds-is-helicoptering-in-to-sing-Radio-Gnome-Invisible-with-Gong faculty. It's, nonetheless, ceaselessly onerous to listen to Moist Leg over the sound of the viewers singing, or within the case of the fabulously deadpan Ur Mum, screaming alongside.
Over on the Pyramid stage, Wolf Alice – visibly frazzled by a journey to Glastonbury so chaotic it checked out one stage as in the event that they wouldn’t make it – get a equally ecstatic, and deserved, reception. There's something actually spectacular about their potential to all of the sudden shift tempo, from the epic, string-bedecked, stadium-ready balladry of Scrumptious Issues to the snarling noise of Play the Best Hits (“a track about getting shitfaced,” suggests the frontwoman, Ellie Rowsell, the sort of assertion that's assured to get a cheer at Glastonbury). It's touching how overwhelmed Rowsell – often an imperious presence on stage – appears by the viewers’s response.
One thing related occurs when Sam Fender performs, bumped up the invoice from a day slot because of the rapper Doja Cat’s emergency tonsil surgical procedure. His Springsteen-inflected sound and socially conscious lyrics – incisive and courageous whether or not discussing poisonous masculinity, white working-class disillusionment or father-son relations – have clearly touched a nerve. The title monitor of his second album, Seventeen Going Underneath, causes one thing approaching bedlam within the crowd, which refuses to cease singing its wordless chorus when the track ends. Fender returns to the microphone and joins in; for a second, it seems as if he's going to cry, earlier than he collects himself and launches into The Dying Mild. It’s a kind of emotionally charged, career-defining Glastonbury moments that individuals like to speak about.
Against this, Billie Eilish doesn’t appear overawed in any respect. Not, one suspects, a daily festivalgoer – “you guys are troupers, together with your tents and shit,” she opines at one level – she however exudes a massively interesting confidence, performing a set that's basically a truncated model of the present she has been touring round arenas the previous few months.
Sometimes, a few of the between-song chat – heavy on stuff about loving your self and empowerment – feels extra suited to a teen-pop viewers than a Glastonbury crowd, however the viewers go together with it: if she asks them to crouch down then leap, they fortunately oblige. Her large hits – Bury a Pal, You Ought to See Me in a Crown, Unhealthy Man – pack an immense bass-heavy punch and the title monitor of her most up-to-date album, Happier Than Ever, offers a surprising finale, slowly constructing right into a ferociously offended, pyrotechnic-abetted coda. Curiously, Kinds doesn’t seem: maybe he's over on the Storm stage, MCing over LTJ Bukem’s drum’n’bass set.
On Saturday afternoon, Self Esteem’s look on the John Peel stage has an identical impact to Moist Leg and Sam Fender – inside minutes of her arrival on stage, you possibly can’t get close to the tent, not to mention into it, with out an unfeasible quantity of willpower. It provides to the sense that her album Prioritise Pleasure has actually captured folks’s imaginations, and that its emotional cocktail of fury, brutal self-examination and cathartic pleasure matches the present temper. It additionally helps that she is a incredible performer – in entrance of a backdrop that reads THERE IS NOTHING THAT TERRIFIES A MAN MORE THAN A WOMAN WHO APPEARS COMPLETELY DERANGED, she punctuates high-kicking choreographed routines with self-deprecating wit – and that she has a knack for writing punchy, sensible pop songs.
On the Pyramid stage, within the slot vacated by Fender, AJ Tracey opens a set that skilfully marries UK rap with one thing near onerous rock – clad in a leather-based jacket, he's backed by a band, full with a guitarist who seems as if he's moonlighting from a stoner steel outfit. He opens with a prolonged, offended introduction in regards to the Grenfell Tower hearth and the “murderers” accountable.
It’s not the afternoon’s solely second of heartfelt politicking. The environmental activist Greta Thunberg makes an look on the Pyramid stage simply earlier than Haim. Up towards stiff competitors from the platinum-selling Glass Animals over on the Different stage, she basically does her best hits, together with righteous anger, withering scorn for world leaders and dire presentiments of disaster. The group joins in a chant of “local weather justice” on the finish.
Whereas Eilish and Phoebe Bridgers each point out the overturning of Roe v Wade on stage, it’s Rodrigo who unexpectedly goes in studs up. Visibly upset – “I’m devastated and terrified; so many women are going to die” – she lists the supreme court docket justices accountable by identify, then brings on Lily Allen to sing her 2009 single Fuck You, working throughout the stage along with her center fingers raised when she isn't duetting.
It’s a spotlight of an unexpectedly triumphant set. Her band supply a noticeably harder tackle the post-punk stylings of her debut album Bitter (tellingly, she additionally covers Avril Lavigne’s Difficult, a track that, terrifyingly, was launched earlier than Rodrigo was born). The viewers is impressively different: there are preteen women on their mother and father’ shoulders who appear to be word-perfect at any time when they're caught on the stage-side screens, however there are additionally couples sufficiently old to be Rodrigo’s mother and father singing alongside to Drivers License.
Because the solar begins to set, Burna Boy’s look on the Different stage pulls out all of the stops, with fireworks, flamethrowers and a confetti cannon through the nearer Ye. Larded with Afrobeats horns and a choir, he sounds incredible. In the meantime, on the Pyramid stage, successfully warming up for Macca, Noel Gallagher takes an admirably prosaic strategy to an viewers rising visibly stressed at a set toploaded with tracks from his solo albums: “I’m going to play just a few extra tunes that you simply don’t give a shit about,” he informs them. “They’re for me. However should you stick round, after that there’s going to be plenty of very completely satisfied folks in bucket hats.” True to his phrase, he begins rolling out Oasis singalongs – Half the World Away, Wonderwall, Don’t Look Again in Anger – in the end.
Unexpectedly, it’s a theme that's returned to throughout Paul McCartney’s set. “After we do a Beatles track, all of your telephones mild up and it’s like a galaxy of stars,” he shrugs. “After we do a brand new track, it’s like staring right into a black gap.”
There's definitely extra Wings and solo Macca than you would possibly count on, significantly early on. Generally, his decisions really feel completely justified – Wings’ Junior’s Farm and Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-5 are incredible songs, whereas their flop 1975 single Letting Go deserves to be rescued from relative obscurity – and typically they quantity to pushing his luck a bit, not least when he performs Fuh You, a 2018 collaboration with songwriter-for-hire Ryan Tedder that, with the very best will on the earth, doesn’t actually breathe the identical rarefied air as, say, Blackbird; the latter’s opening notes are greeted with a stunning collective sigh from the group.
However maybe he is aware of precisely what he's doing. The occasional lulls within the first half of the set potentiate what occurs within the second half, which offers virtually completely within the failsafe: Let It Be, Reside and Let Die, Hey Jude, two sizeable chunks of the Abbey Highway medley. He brings out Dave Grohl to duet on Band on the Run and I Noticed Her Standing There, then Bruce Springsteen, who offers one other Glastonbury second by default. The massive screens seize the puppyish elation on Springsteen’s face as he and McCartney commerce traces on Glory Days and I Wanna Be Your Man; a seventysomething rock legend momentarily turned again into the obsessive Beatles fan he was in his teenagers, he seems as if he can scarcely imagine his luck.
There’s one thing equally transferring in regards to the sight of McCartney taking part in I’ve Bought a Feeling as a duet with John Lennon’s remoted vocal from the Get Again TV collection. He isn’t the primary artist to make use of know-how to reanimate a long-deceased musical companion, however the distinction of their voices – McCartney’s audibly aged and fraying a bit at 80 years previous, Lennon’s frozen in youth – has an actual impression. The viewers continues to be singing the chorus of Hey Jude as they get lost into the night time, maybe in the hunt for Kinds, who, hearsay has it, has helicoptered in to the Acoustic stage to sing Streets of London with Ralph McTell.
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