Key events
It’s very, very hot and it’s all any of us can talk about (music journalists not necessarily being the most outdoorsy people). During the 2019 Glasto heatwave, I saw one person taking shelter under the A sign for a food stall. I think we’re getting to that point today…
Raye is now up on the Pyramid stage and has brought out a big live band, says Jenessa Williams, who are all dressed “punishingly smart” for this brutal weather. “She’s also doling out some solid life advice: ‘Don’t date rappers.’”
Rick Astley reviewed!
Elle Hunt
Pyramid, 12pm
Rick Astley cuts a sprightly figure on Saturday afternoon, bounding out on to the Pyramid stage in a salmon-pink lounge suit, intensely cheerful. From the melodramatic and slightly bizarre Star Wars intro music to the nudge-nudge, wink-wink interpolations of his best-known hit (you know the one), there’s something of an element of the daytime television special to Astley’s performance: upbeat, affable, fun for all the family. “I miss my dog too!” he tells a member of the audience (presumably in response to a flag). Later: “Make sure you’ve got factor 50 on!”
It works for the Pyramid stage at this time of day, as an undemanding crowd-pleaser with which to ease us into another day of music. Well-coiffed and bubbly, Astley is a professional entertainer of a bygone era, but the sizeable crowd and instant recognition of opener Together Forever show that there’s still a huge appetite for fun, feelgood music. Astley himself is hugely good humoured about his reputation as a few-hit wonder, managing the crowd’s anticipation of Never Gonna Give You Up from the outset (“We do that one at the end”) and showing his range with covers of Harry Styles, AC/DC and a bit of Queen. When the song finally comes, it’s festive with hula-hoopers and leotarded dancers onstage – all the feelgood payoff of completing a Zumba class.
Jeez, poor Billy Nomates (AKA Tor Maries) got such extreme trolling for her performance on the Park stage yesterday (via a post on BBC 6 Music’s social media) that she has asked the BBC to remove the footage of her set and is seemingly contemplating quitting live music.
I know it’s not for everyone what I do. I know lots of people don’t rate me. But the level of personal abuse on that public page is too much. There will be no more shows after this summer. You wouldn’t stay in a workplace that did this to you. Why should I.
Her post drew support from Billy Bragg, who tweeted: “Solidarity from everyone at Left Field with Billy No Mates who was so badly abused online after her @Glastonbury set was posted on @BBC6Music that she asked them to take [the] clip down. She played a set for us last year and was brilliant. You’ll always have [a] place here Tor.”
Geoff Barrow of Portishead and Beak> also posted in solidarity with her.
This is what some female artists
Have to put up with from #6music Dads onlineFuck’em #billyNoMates
Is one of the most talented song writers and performers I’ve ever worked with and had the pleasure to know. https://t.co/P7JqF2oCHV
— 🏴☠️ Geoff Barrow 🏴☠️ (@jetfury) June 23, 2023
What a sad state of affairs. Billy Nomates is great – read our interview with her here – as is her second album, Cacti.
While we await Elle’s review, here’s Rick Astley having a very nice time indeed on the Pyramid stage (and rivalling Cate Blanchett for tailoring).
Ben’s out scouting Glasto’s stylish people: “I asked these people why they were all in blue and they looked at me like I was an idiot. ‘Just because!’”
The Last Dinner Party reviewed!
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Woodsies, 11.30am
Since time immemorial, music journos have massively overhyped bands to a degree that isn’t actually fair on them, leaving an inevitable gulf between the hype and reality, disappointing audiences and creating a backlash, which we journos can then write about. It’s the circle of life! Couple this with audience suspicion of anyone who seems to have been anointed by the industry in this way and there have been quite a few dark mutters about “industry plants” of late – none louder than those about the Last Dinner Party, a quintet signed to major label Island Records before releasing any music. Sexism surely amplified the grouching, from men suspicious that a group of young women with a cohesive image could actually have formed themselves.
On the bad-faith internet, the music can feel immaterial – and the stage banter here suggests the band won’t beat the posho allegations. But what are they actually like? They fit into a lineage of proudly theatrical alt-pop alongside Patrick Wolf, HMLTD or Anna Calvi (and while musically they’re nothing like Porridge Radio, they share that band’s massed declamatory vocals). Some of these songs are a bit episodic, shunting from one middling section to another with a bold flourish to paper over the lack of finesse or arc. But the crowd are punching the air to Sinner despite having never heard it before, and while Godzilla isn’t to my personal taste – a sort of big-production blues rock that recalls the most money-soaked end of Britpop – the band really sell it.
Their neo-Victoriana aesthetic stands out, and while some may find lead singer Abigail Morris’s repertoire of Kate Bush-ish twirls and self-conscious prowling a bit irritating, there are plenty more who will find it the very essence of pop panache. She can really sing, too, beautifully topping off Mirror with a pristine chirrup around her high notes. The tent is pretty much full and everyone seems to know insistent debut single Nothing Matters – there’s clearly enough here, in songcraft and rapport, to drown out the keyboard warriors.
Max Richter reviewed!
Gwilym Mumford
Park, 11.15am
The Park is clearly the place to be for celeb spotters this year. After Cate Blanchett’s star turn at Sparks last night, here’s Tilda Swinton, dressed fittingly in a powder blue suit, providing the narration for Max Richter’s 2004 suite The Blue Notebooks.
Richter, supported here by an accomplished string quartet, introduces the performance by noting that it was originally written as “a kind of protest against the Iraq War” but – with the exception of the roiling The Trees, these sombre, stately compositions give off a mood of resignation rather than fury. It opens with On the Nature of Daylight, best known for soundtracking a tonne of films including the Denis Villeneuve sci-fi Arrival. It’s a gorgeous slow-build of a composition that elicits a quiet sob from several presumably worse for wear festival-goers near me.
The rest of the set continues in the same mesmeric fashion, with Swinton’s fragmentary, diaristic spoken-word segments bookending the ambient swirls of strings while Richter feverishly flits between grand piano, keyboard and laptop. It’s an incongruous experience, watching and listening to something so rarefied while in the distance a man in a Crocodile Dundee hat gamely tries to transport four pints of cider at once. But there’s a sense of ceremony and grandeur here that leaves a varied all-ages audience – parents, pensioners, caners – utterly rapt. A sensational start to Saturday.
This is nice: yesterday a new David Hockney video artwork was unveiled on the Pyramid stage, I Lived in Bohemia Bohemia Is a Tolerant Place promotes ideals of togetherness, incorporates AI, and is based on Hockney’s 2014 painting The Dancers V.
It’s already been an eventful morning up at the Park stage – not only did Max Richter bring out Tilda Swinton (not to be outdone by Sparks having Cate Blanchett) but their performance was interrupted a streaker who had to be led away. Retro!
In case you missed it, here’s Alexis Petridis’s three-star review of Arctic Monkeys’ Pyramid stage headline slot last night.
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.
And we’re back!
Good afternoon from a painfully hot Glastonbury (I am not sad to be spending the first three hours of the day inside the cabin, let’s put it that way). Our reviewers are out in the field seeing the likes of Rick Astley, Raye and Max Richter so the piping hot liveblog action is soon to commence…
