“The Monkeys are back on the farm!” bellows Alex Turner. “Wow!” Indeed, a day ago, it seemed fairly dicey as to whether Friday night at Glastonbury would have a headliner at all thanks to Turner being struck down with laryngitis – presumably, the worst-kept secret set by the Foo Fighters would have been shunted up the bill had the Arctic Monkeys frontman been unable to perform. But he sounds in remarkably good voice. He looks good too: shirt open to reveal a silver chain, foot on the monitors at the front of the stage, emphasising lyrics by raging his right hand in the air, index finger aloft in the manner of John Travolta on the cover of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.
But Arctic Monkeys are a conundrum. On the one hand, they are probably the biggest alt-rock band in Britain: in an era when alternative rock doesn’t really sell, their albums consistently remain in the charts. On the other, only some of their albums are consistently in the charts. Their 2006 debut Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not and 2013’s AM seem to have achieved the kind of sales ubiquity usually reserved for best-ofs by Fleetwood Mac, Elton John or Oasis. But there have clearly been substantially fewer takers for the band’s more recent excursions into more expansive and serpentine realms, Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino and last year’s The Car. You suspect that may be the point – they’ve successfully rid themselves of the beer-chucking lads in their audience, who were frequently the subject of much mortified eye-rolling on Turner’s part – but it makes for a curiously uneven headlining set. The response to the opening Sculptures of Anything Goes – a single from The Car – is decidedly muted. And the crowd only respond in the way the crowd are supposed to respond to a Glastonbury headlining set – ie rapturously – when they play AM’s Snap Out of It.
Occasionally, their set displays the impressive distance the Arctic Monkeys have covered over the last decade. In theory the kind of NME-hyped band who appeared fully-formed, as exciting as they were ever going to be on arrival, they turned out to be more interesting and talented than that, a point proven not just by the muscular, vaguely heavy-rock-influenced riffs of AM’s How Come You Only Call Me When You’re High?, but the beautifully-turned songcraft of Cornerstone and Fluorescent Adolescent. Equally, there are moments that feel like lulls, when the audience lose interest and start drifting elsewhere: there’s always something else to do at Glastonbury. It’s a state of affairs not much helped by the persona Alex Turner inhabits onstage. A kind of deliberately mannered oleaginous lounge crooner, he somehow sounds like he’s being sarcastic every time he says “thank you”.
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It’s a strangely paced set: the euphoria induced by Mardy Bum is deliquesced by There’d Better Be a Mirrorball and the lengthy closer Body Paint. Their version of John Cooper Clarke’s I Wanna Be Yours – a huge song on TikTok, but one that proceeds at a painfully slow pace – makes for an unlikely encore. But the mood in the crowd is rectified by I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor and AM’s R U Mine? The sense of a band marching to their own tune – uninterested in providing the fabled Glastonbury moment, when music and surroundings coalesce into something magical – is hard to miss, and it’s simultaneously admirable and underwhelming: an odd way to feel about a headlining set at the world’s most famous festival. “You’ll be alright,” Turner tells the audience, as proceedings draw to a close.
