The build up to this year’s Glastonbury has felt as politicised as any other in recent memory – from the government’s calls to deplatform Kneecap amid the hysteria surrounding their pro-Palestine messaging, to a barrage of discourse, some of it terrifying in tone, about the potential damage of overcrowding, to Neil Young’s headline set being announced via its initial cancellation – Young claiming he wouldn’t play owing to the ‘corporate control’ of the BBC, then swiftly backtracking citing an “error in the information we received” (he is still, reportedly, demanding that the channel don’t broadcast any of his performance).
Mooching around the dance stages after arriving on Thursday afternoon, however, there’s no feeling of charge in the air. Rather, Worthy Farm feels not unpleasantly mellow, that is until our meander takes us to the South East Corner, more specifically to IICON, a 20-metre high stage built to resemble the severed head of some retrofuturist colossus. As Thursday night blurs into Friday morning, the enormous box television where the statue’s eyes should be frames Pearson Sound. A smattering of rain is illuminated in piercing beams of light that spear out into the night. It’s a dazzling effect, but more dazzling still is the set itself, moving from Hades-deep dub plunges to Olympian melodic soars.
The following morning, meanwhile, comes a show precision-calculated to kick off the weekend proper: Lorde, celebrating today’s launch of her new album Virgin by performing it in full in the mid-sized Woodsies tent. The secrecy of this ‘secret set’ has, like all in the social media era, been badly kept – not only is Woodsies rammed, but the field around it too – but if this is the first test of Glastonbury’s efforts to cope better with the overcrowding that has begun to mar recent editions, it’s passed with aplomb. From our vantage point at the back, however, it’s hard to see or hear a thing, so our opening salvos must come in the more humble form of Supergrass on The Pyramid. They, too are performing an album in full – in their case I Should Coco – approaching the task in admirably no nonsense, crowd pleasing fashion.
Glastonbury 2025’s real ignition comes courtesy of CMAT. Sprinting onstage, pretending to faint, she sings her first verse from the floor. Opener ‘Have Fun’, a wonderful sweep of lopsided slide-guitar-funk, does not just invite, but demands that you do just that; donning enormous euro-symbol earrings, ‘The Dunboyne Diana’ written across the hem of her bright blue dress (her backing band, “the best Irish country rock n roll band in the world” all dressed to match), the whole thing is brimming with perfect flourishes, but at its heart is the sheer charisma of CMAT herself. She’s at once self-effacing, goofy, sharply witty, political (she leads the crowd in a chant of ‘Free Palestine’ at the set’s close) and empowering (dismissing a barrage of online hate against her appearance with merely a simple declaration that they’re “crazy, because as you can see, I am in fact very sexy” – shifting between wonky bedroom dance moves, high camp theatrics, and powerhouse vocal acrobatics in an instant, dismissing the rapture of her audience with little more than an ‘aw, shucks’ wave of the hand. You could argue the vastness of her crowd is partly down simply to recent single ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’ and going viral on TikTok (“thank you for doing the silly little dance,” she beams), but what the show really proves is that CMAT is no flash in the pan. There are points, in fact, where it feels like we’re witnessing the rise of a generational pop star.
Like members of CMAT’s band, Fat Dog frontman Joe Love, too, is dressed in a cowboy hat. Where the energy on The Pyramid was effervescent and uplifting, however, the South Londoners’ set at Woodsies is its feral funhouse mirror reflection, a muddy swirl of techno thumps, buzzsaw guitars, saxophones, manic grooves, a brief intervention by a breakdancer; it’s so preposterous as to be strangely brilliant. Indie survivors Franz Ferdinand, meanwhile, prove themselves to be still sharp, still in possession of that edgy art school charm that set them apart from the early-2000s landfill, over on the Other Stage. The highlight here comes when Alex Kapranos – in what at first appears to be a spiel about Lewis Capaldi’s comeback set earlier on on The Pyramid, another of today’s secret sets, but turns out to be a double bluff – invites Peter Capaldi, he of Doctor Who and The Thick Of It fame, to trade lead vocals on ‘Take Me Out’. It is faintly surreal, although Capaldi – punk frontman in his youth – proves that he, too, has still got the goods.
Next up is Busta Rhymes, who delivers a fever dream of a set. There is a strange slapstick sequence where hypeman Spliff Star pretends he’s turned Busta’s mic down, a sequence where – after everyone onstage declares themselves to be a champ, they play Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’ in tribute to “a festival full of winners”, another where ‘Don’t Cha’ is blended into ‘Seven Nation Army’. Visuals appear to be AI-generated, taking us from scenes of an AI dragon maurauding through an AI city, to an AI Busta chatting up an AI British woman named ‘Lady london’, to vocal parts by AI Mariah Carey and AI Janet Jackson (both of whom we are invited to applaud louder than our first attempt, as if they had really just appeared). It feels a little ironic, then, when Busta and Spliff declare themselves as representatives of “real hip hop, with no special effects.” And yet, amidst this sensory overload, there are plenty of moments where you’re reminded that that pedigree is no joke – his legendary verse from A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Scenario’, the irresistible bounce of ‘Woo Hah!!’, those multiple moments where his rapping accelerates into a manic hyperspeed barrage of bars, the sheer charisma he emanates throughout.
With ANOHNI And The Johnsons, however, tQ’s choice for Friday headliner up at The Park, there are no such dramatic swings. The visuals here are very much real – nothing but sea life swimming slowly around once vibrant coral reefs now rendered brown and dead by the effects of climate change, one of the thematic focuses of her latest album ‘My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross’. She begins with ‘Why Am I Alive Now’, which rides a mellow wave of guitar that is slowly but irresistibly spellbinding, then on ‘4 Degrees’ gradually ramps up the energy until we are rapt in an overwhelming crescendo of emotion. When ANOHNI sings ‘Scapegoat’, the image behind her of a lone cuttlefish, floating aimlessly through an otherwise lifeless ocean, is charged with such intense ennui as to be almost completely overwhelming. Interspersing the performances are video testimonies from climate scientists. Each of them talks soberingly about their overwhelming feelings of despair – there is no hope, they tell us, only the veneer of it that one occasionally assumes in order get through the day. The best they can offer, says one of the scientists, before breaking down into a sob, is the fact that grief can be turned into energy. This set, made clear by the projection of stark all-caps at the close: MOURNING THE GREAT BARRIER REEF is proof of that fact. It is a sobering, and yet somehow sublime, conclusion to day one.
