the same way as it is Nickelback, but (in my opinion, as an unabashed fan) to do so is an own goal, only revealing your own narrow-mindedness and willingness to fall in line with popular opinion. They have bangers! Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends is nearly a perfect album! Many, highly critically-acclaimed artists have never written half as good a song as The Scientist or Amsterdam!!!
Anyway, this unkind urinal graffiti has really irked me and I can only hope that sweet Chris Martin seeks to relieve himself elsewhere. I am so looking forward to seeing Coldplay tomorrow that I have bribed my colleague Tim Jonze into taking on my assigned Gossip review so that I may see their entire set. Five stars, for sure!!! (Don’t worry, Alexis Petridis is reviewing, not me.)
Guardian contributor) Isabel Brooks for scene reports.
It’s her first time at Glastonbury, and her predominant impression is – conveyed in a one-word message – “queues”. Having skipped the “ridiculous” line for Shygirl last night, she found it “SO QUIET”. “Daisy Edgar-Jones was next to us, though, which was exciting.”
Certain sets are already shaping up as the place to be – specifically, Charli XCX’s DJ set Party Girl at Levels tonight, capacity only 7,000, meaning the crowd will start forming a good 90 minutes beforehand.
Even today’s life-drawing session was over-subscribed. Izzy was turned away at the door, but says that anyone who’d been holding out to see a naked lady may have been disappointed: “She was wearing a sports bra.”
This old group of pals from Surrey watching Midland at Levels have come dressed as grannies. “There’s nothing better than a good old granny,” says Jen (centre).
Other Stage, 2.15pm
Dropping a new album the day of your Glastonbury performance is a high-risk strategy for an artist who wants the kind of “energy” from the crowd that relies on song recognition. But the Tottenham MC and drill king Headie One perfectly balances the classics with tracks from sophomore album The Last One, his signature, consistent mid-tempo rapping flow carrying him seamlessly between songs. Entering the stage wearing a glorious Louis Vuitton two-piece, Headie comes in all guns blazing with a rapturous performance of 18Hunna. It’s a confident performance with careful delivery, and he reaches for more bangers – Know Better, Princess Cuts, Don’t Rush. Charades, with its line “All I know is money and beef/don’t think I left it all in the past”, speaks to the narrative the four-times-incarcerated Headie threads through his music – of prison, rivalries, dealing, fast money, straps.
The audience are in his palm, arms swaying, finger-guns pointing, chanting “HEADIE WE WANNA PARTY!!!” along with his hypeman (though an attempt by some young fans to engineer a mosh pit doesn’t quite take off). Then comes the new music. Glastonbury revellers won’t have had a moment to take in a 20-track album in fewer than 24 hours, but that same emotional deftness, and granular documentation of criminal life quickly wins them over. The lyricism stands out. Album opener I Could Rap contains “change the outfit like Amy Winehouse and change it back to black”. Memories, with Sampha, is melodic but funny: “I was sitting on a rock like Fred Flintstone.” Once he closes with Cry No More, you get the impression of an artist at the top of his game.
Park, 2pm
There’s a real appetite for shimmery, feelgood electronic music right now – the type more suited to big stadiums than any underground club. Just look at leader of the pack Fred Again, consistently selling out mega-venues like Sydney Opera House and Madison Square Gardens with his brand of neutral, sunshine-ready beats, sprinkled with ear-wormy vocal samples. The formula is also a winning one for rising Edinburgh producer Barry Can’t Swim (real name Joshua Mannie) as he takes on a completely packed-out Park Stage with a set of foolproof, family-friendly festival bangers.
Accompanied by a live band and a string of guest vocalists, Mannie saunters through a good chunk of his still-small discography, which spans from deep house and ethereal electronics to percussive afrobeat. From the tinkling opening keys of How It Feels, he has his crowd locked in, cheering and singing along to the mellifluous garage-y vocals. It’s these vocal-led tracks that are clear highlights; others become pleasant but slightly unmemorable fillers. Though there’s slight dips in energy – he risks losing his crowd a bit with one track, seeming to surpass the five-minute mark – everyone around me seems thrilled to be there. There’s plenty of gun fingers pointing, and when he asks people to get on their friends’ shoulders, many oblige. The music itself is nothing groundbreaking but it does what it sets out to do: soundtrack a sunny Friday afternoon.
West Holt, 2pm
“This is a new one – it’s about cannibalism.” Ah, the words every Glasto-goer longs to hear. If Squeeze pepped people up and Olivia Dean soothed them again, over on West Holts Squid are suddenly poking them in the ribs and ruffling their hair while wearing giant Mickey Mouse hands, sonically speaking. A few people may have been left wondering if last night’s mushroom chocolate is still hanging around their limbic system, particularly when you notice that one but two shoulder-riding audience members are dressed as actual squids.
Squid’s hyper-intellectual prog-jazz-techno-rock is surrealist, dense, trippy – and, yelping drummer and all, the six of them do build an impressively singular, odd, nervy sound. If your threshold for wackiness is up somewhere around “Danny Elfman juggling guavas” then there’s probably much to love. But I suspect that outside their faithful cephalopod squad, many will find the quality of the grooves isn’t remotely high enough to forgive the complete lack of tunes. At least my hands are exfoliated from the chin stroking.
Afternoon all – I’m relieving Laura of blog duties, having spent the morning reviewing Lynks and Olivia Dean: two very different shows, and together a testament to the range of experiences you can stumble upon (or be assigned to review) at Glastonbury.
I can tell you that it’s heating up outside, though the cloud cover remains persistent, and a big crowd gathering at the Other stage for Confidence Man – our team will be bringing it to you live.
West Holts, 12.30pm
Asha Puthli represents a genuinely unknown quantity. It is, apparently, 50 years since she last played in the UK, two years before she released the album on which her latter-day cultdom is largely based: 1976’s The Devil Is Loose, an intriguing, off-beam confection of breathy, high vocals and woozy, jazzy dancefloor grooves, much-prized by disco collectors and home to the oft-sampled Space Talk. That aside, Puthli’s oeuvre took in everything from collaborations with Ornette Coleman to Bollywood soundtracks to new wave: who knows which of her musical incarnations is going to turn up on the West Holts stage after all this time?
Nearly 80, swathed in chiffon, Puthli cuts an authentically eccentric figure, alternately reminiscing about her friendship with Holly Woodlawn, Warhol-affiliated drag queen and star of Lou Reed’s Walk on The Wild Side, demonstrating how she came up with the peculiar bubbling sound that appears on her 1973 cover of George Harrison’s I Dig Love (not, as was commonly supposed the noise made by Puthli smoking a bong, but gargling with champagne), and protesting about the weather. “It’s bloody fucking cold here,” she complains. “I just flew in from Miami”.
Singing, as she proudly announces, in the same key she performed in during the 70s, she’s still capable of summoning a genuinely eerie falsetto on the chorus of Flying Fish, while her band, augmented by a tabla player, do an impressive job of conjuring up The Devil Is Loose’s unique sound: her occasionally improvised vocals (“I’d better sing the song to you,” she announces, after one long extempore burst during Hello Everyone) are punctuated by long, spacey instrumental passages. The set has a tendency to lurch about – jumping from a bluesy saunter through JJ Cale’s Right Down Here to the self-explanatory Disco Mystic – but the sun comes out as she plays Space Talk, which sounds fantastic, a beguilingly strange shimmer. “Do you love me? Do you really love me?” she asks. “Say yes!” The audience seem understandably happy to oblige.
Pyramid, 1.15pm
“This is the biggest crowd I have ever played,” says Olivia Dean, having just concluded Echo, early into her early-afternoon Pyramid stage slot. Her Mercury-nominated debut album Messy was released a year ago (to the week, as she points out) so this set – on Glastonbury’s biggest stage, setting the tone for the days to come – represents an anointing of sorts for the neo-soul singer. And the crowd has come out for her, with groups seated but densely packed all the way up the hill.
She’s been dreaming of playing this stage since she was eight years old, she says, “so this is a really big moment for me”. You wouldn’t know she turned 25 only in March – Dean holds herself like a superstar, switching between instruments (guitar, keys, tambourine, a maraca shaped like a banana that I now desperately wish for myself) and engaging graciously with the crowd. Last year, she points out, she played the smaller Lonely Hearts stage, “so this is a big ol’ jump for me”.
For the first few songs, she doesn’t take off her cat-eye sunnies – a cool move that enhances the confessional nature of her set, creating the sense of layers unfurling by increments when she finally takes them off. On the breastplate of her mini-dress, there’s a photo of her grandmother, further indicating what this performance means to her.
That she sees herself as engaging with the singer-songwriter tradition is clear from her introduction to each song, telling the story of their inspiration – and emphasising her relatability. My Own Warfare is about the concept of “the other half”: “I don’t really believe in that … you don’t need someone else to complete you”, she says, to cheers from the crowd (presumably the single ladies). UFO is about her feelings of alienation, she explains; I Could Be a Florist is about her daydream of an alternate path and another life. (“Any florists in the crowd?” A smattering, apparently.) Time, her new song which was released only this week (“I don’t expect you to know the words”), is about the question of how to spend it.
It’s all very introspective for a Pyramid stage set, and generally on the slower side tempo-wise, but Dean has a beautiful voice and knows how to use it, precisely expressing her themes of sadness, relief, heartbreak (“‘tis the season, yeah?”), yearning or self-doubt. She’s accompanied by a brass section, generating a sense of occasion and elevating what is, after all, early in the day on Glastonbury time. When the band get a chance to let loose during her more upbeat songs, the set really starts cooking, but before long the temperature is brought back down to Dean’s mid-tempo comfort zone.
The Hardest Part, the song she says changed her life, draws the most recognition from the crowd, but it’s her cover of Kelis’s Millionaire that I enjoy most – I’d love to hear her write her own songs with similar swagger. Her unwavering smile through Messy speaks to its genesis as anthem of self-acceptance; the next step might be embracing that mess in her music.
But Dean’s home key, it’s clear, is more ballads than ballsy, more schmaltzy than spiky. (An audience member’s sign, requesting that she play at their wedding, is met with a maybe: “I love weddings!”) That reflective instinct is at its best with Carmen, her second-to-last song and a touching tribute to the sacrifices that got her here. Holding back tears, she dedicates the song to her grandmother – watching on the telly, Dean says – and the rest of her Windrush generation: “She came to this country when she was 18, she’d never been before, and decided to change her whole life … I’m a product of her bravery.”
It’s a lovely note on which to end the set – or, in Glastonbury time, start the day.
Top Boy actress Saffron Hocking with friend, actress Lois Chimimba ready for Headie One. “We love Headie, he’s so sweet, our baby!” says Hocking.
We can hear the soulful oomph of Olivia Dean wafting over the Portakabin. Here she is having a lovely time on the Pyramid stage!
Source: theguardian.com
