Key events
These Walls now, and a noticeable dip in quality and energy: this was put in a prominent position on her latest album, but it didn’t really deserve to be there. The strummed guitar is blah, the melody unremarkable, and a bit of tepid tambourine is hardly bringing the necessary sparkle. But Lipa is still in fine voice here – her actual vocal quality is rather underrated, with a lovely keenness to it. She’s thought of as this otherworldly model type, but she gives her performances a lot of humanity by letting her effort be known – and that is not veiled criticism. She strains for notes but meets them, and that strength of feeling is affecting.
“It’s a lot isn’t it? A lot to take in,” she tells the crowd. “I have written this moment down, I have wished it, I’ve dreamt it … and I can’t believe I’m here, and it feels so good.” She puts her acknowledges the hard work she’s done to get here, but also – in true hot-astrology-girl style, “manifesting” and “magic”.
This is a very high ratio of hits: I didn’t think she’d have Levitating so early on her set, it being one of her best and biggest. She’s absolutely on top of the beat as she dispenses her spools of rapped chatter, including some a cappella moments that have to be totally word-perfect – and they are. That mid-Atlantic accent gets comprehensively dropped for “dance my arse off”, paired with the words supersized behind her. This is peak Dua: glamorous but not stiff or queenly, just relaxed in the beat and strutting through it to whatever impossibly fabulous party you wish you were at.
Dua was lambasted online for some admittedly lacklustre dance moves in the past: one diss, “Girl, give us nothing!” became instant pop cultural canon. But there’s strong choreo here, including from her backing dancers – graduates of London’s Dance School for the Unfeasibly Hot.
Next we have Illusion, which the public have rather shrugged at but I love for its filter-house groove. Something that’s perhaps underestimated about Dua Lipa amid the discourse around her is that she is a proper club singer: more of a house vocalist at times than a straightforward pop star. Her songs are genuinely danceable. And generously so: for all her glamazon pop star poise, there’s something quite ego-free about a lot of her songs, which just want you to dance to them in a sticky-floored establishment.
After a potty-mouthed first acknowledgement of the crowd, she tells them “I dreamed about this my whole life”, in the kind of mid-Atlantic drawl beloved of the perpetual-holiday set..
Staging-wise, there’s a pair of catwalks that Dua will no doubt strut along numerous times this evening, mega-HD visuals behind her and a heavy-sounding live band. Training Season is a bit tepid on record, but it really connects here and she’s bringing an earnestness and voice-cracking feeling to her vocals that’s lacking on the studio version.
Next up it’s One Kiss, her addictively replayable collab with Calvin Harris. Few songs are as good to flirtily dance to.
Dua Lipa begins!
And we’re off with the first Pyramid headliner this year: Dua Lipa. The narrative among chronically online people is that she’s yesterday’s news, a charisma-deficient drone being overtaken by edgier new-school stars. Other more well adjusted people think she’s a bit of fun with a formidable bank of songs to spill espresso martinis to. Let’s see who’s right!
She uses the same vocal sample that Primal Scream use on Loaded: “We wanna get loaded … we’re going to have a party”, perhaps a coy reference to the way she said her latest album was inspired by Primal Scream while being audibly nothing of the sort. And it’s into opening track Training Season.
Not sure whether the brown acid has kicked in or something, but I’ve checked back in with King Krule and there’s a five-year-old in a pink dress on stage with him. This is Seaforth, one of his drowsiest, loveliest numbers.
Sampha is indulging in that great Glastonbury tradition: a drum circle. Get him up to the Stone Circle with some fire poi and questionable opinions about the Covid-19 vaccine for the canonical version though.
Ohhhhhhhh! That’s the maximum eight Hs allowed for his next track, which interpolates a cover of Roy Davis Jr’s Gabriel, the illuminated manuscript that every student of the London club scene pores over in their infancy.
For all Laura’s indifference towards their set, Heilung certainly give good woad. Here’s some more pics from their set. First of all, put all goth Pinterest users on notice for some major wedding inspo here:
That first wee of the day after you wake up in your tent:
Me trying to get the barman’s attention for a lime and soda:
When you’ve got a blood sacrifice at 2pm but you don’t have time to change before the England game at 5:
How everyone feels driving home on Monday morning:
Heilung reviewed
Laura Snapes
West Holts, 8.15pm
I always wonder why Glastonbury – known for its ley lines and hippie credentials – doesn’t take place a weekend earlier, on the actual summer solstice. Nordic folk metal band Heilung would be the perfect band for the occasion. More goat head-wearing commune than band, they start their set with an inward-facing circle as they chant some kind of incantation. The stage is laden with spindly trees and hanging drums presumably made from a beast they killed earlier. One male singer looks like Iggy Pop if he’d been left to forage in the wild for some months and really taken to it. There are shields and spears being pounded into the stage, lots of elemental drones and what sounds like growled frog ribbits, and a very impressive if very severe sense of theatrics. It couldn’t be more opposite to LCD Soundsystem over on the main stage – more BCE Paganism.
Plenty of people here are rapt, and one group’s pole for locating one anotherin the crowd has a decapitated, wigged head on top, which really adds to the witch trials vibe. But much as I like gnarled, weird folk, this is my kryptonite. I hate medieval fantasy as a genre and – standing here drinking a synthetic alcoholic water drink and clutching a synthetic fruit-flavoured vape – I couldn’t feel more remote from the apparently ancient ritual they’re so invested in. As the sun goes down, may the darkness bind everyone who’s into it, but I’m beating on towards the orgiastic lurid green Brat light.
Talking of unteachably unique vocal timbres, King Krule is up on the Park stage – unequivocally the best place to be at sunset, looking down on the tens of thousands of people across the site like a benevolent druid. He and his band are whipping up a glorious noise, with added skronk factor from the sax. His voice – hoarse, impetuous, conversational one minute and hectoring the next – is always gripping. And his ambient-post-punk, while it has its tendrils in a lot of other music, sits very much in its own postcode.
Sampha has started up on the Woodsies stage and he’s in typically gorgeous voice performing Spirit 2.0: he’s got one of those totally distinctive vocal timbres that is a miracle of genetics and can’t be taught: vulnerable and hurt, but hopeful and benign, all at the same time. Expert triangle playing here, too, from his percussionist.
Meanwhile Heilung are doing a high-tempo throat-singing-driven hoe-down as a load of shirtless people daubed in paint prance about, which is to say it’s the kind of thing you’d see on an average Tuesday afternoon in the Stonehenge-Glastonbury-Frome region.
BBC doing some instantly regrettable “cut to cute kids in the front row” editing there, as D-Block Europe eulogise: “New pussy good, new pussy good!”
I hate to denigrate the UK rap scene, because I hate the discourse around it from the US, where UK rappers get cast by online meme-lords as rapping about beans on toast or whatever. But D-Block Europe, it has to be said, are not our finest ambassadors.
LCD Soundsystem reviewed
Elle Hunt
Pyramid stage, 7.45pm
James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem make no fanfare of their arrival on to Glastonbury’s most prestigious stage, at the pivotal dusk hour. “Hello,” he says briskly before launching into Oh Baby, the opener from 2017’s American Dream. There’s a notably bigger turnout than for PJ Harvey, whom you might think would have a more committed reception on home turf – but LCD are nailing a few different demographics at the festival, taking in middle millennials such as myself (born 1991) and the generation that came before, Murphy’s peers. (Notably, my Gen-Z pals are not thronging to see LCD.)
The band’s trademark blend of melodic rock and electronic influences is an apt choice for the sundowner set. But, at least at the start of the set, Murphy’s deadpan stance (“You outnumber us again, but we’ve got stuff …”) doesn’t necessarily meet the crowd – eager to pick up the energy for the second shift – where they’re at.
The tempo starts to increase with second song I Can Change, introduced by Murphy with a fun nod to Kraftwerk’s Computer Love (also sampled by headliner Coldplay’s Talk – though this is surely not the parallel Murphy is seeking to invoke). And of course the band – featuring legends of the game Nancy Whang on keys and Pat Mahoney on drums – sound incredible, with a rhythm section so tight and impenetrable you can picture bouncing a ball off it. But whether it reflects Murphy’s time-honoured world-weary act (he claimed to be losing his edge in 2005, don’t forget) or a genuine jadedness with performing (LCD have been touring consistently since 2015, having made much fanfare of their breakup with the black-and-white ball in 2011), it takes a while to get the crowd moving.
But then maybe that’s what everyone expects, even hopes for. LCD have always been masters of the slow build: the seven-minute song that may present, initially, as unassuming before steadily climbing to a point of undeniable intensity. The audience is the frog in their pan of boiling water, but it’s still up to them to turn up the heat.
The energy notably picks up from track three, Tribulations, which concludes with a reverb-heavy breakdown that leads straight into Tonite, from American Dream. Again there’s that gradual climb in the temperature, before it’s brought down for Losing My Edge. “You’re very kind, says Murphy, before singing: “Your kindness knows no bounds …”
That song’s clever sidelong take on the cynicism LCD were being met with, back in their heyday of 2005, plays differently now – having joked about having been “there, in 1968”, and being “the first guy to play Daft Punk”, Murphy (born 1970) now more obviously presents as the boorish, know-it-all scene figure he was originally skewering. Beyond the undeniable beat, what is a crowd to make of this? Perhaps it’s the difference between playing a scene-y, inner-city and in-the-know venue versus an inherently diffuse outdoor stage, but Murphy’s arch references to the formulaic nature of popular music (calling out, wearily, the inevitable sequence of verse, chorus, verse) and the band’s playful interpolation of hits by Yazoo seem lost on the audience.
All of that is not to say “shut up and play the hits”, to quote the title of their 2012 film – they’ve earned the right to play whatever they want, how they want to, and as I say the performance is technically faultless. But it’s hard to shake a sense of perfunctoriness, on the parts of the band and the audience. By Home, I see some hands thrown in the air around me (“You’re afraaaaaid of what you need”). But I’m not feeling rapture, or joy, or transcendence, either from the stage or around me in the crowd, until Someone Great: the third-to-last song, and the start of a stellar closing leg taking in Dance Yrself Clean and (the obvious closer, as one of very few perfect songs in existence) All My Friends.
Dance Yrself Clean makes the most of that suddenly-tapped emotion, with its winking slow build – and the drop is, as you’d imagine, euphoric, finally tapping a fount of rapture that you can’t help but think was there for the taking the whole time. But then again, maybe it’s more welcome – and certainly more rapturously received – for all the build-up.
Hello everyone, Ben Beaumont-Thomas here, fresh from an afternoon seeing Squid, Noname and Lulu. Classic trio.
It’s an absolutely vintage Glasto evening out there, with a picturesque sunset warming up nicely. Currently on the Other stage, it’s D-Block Europe talking about vaginal lubrication among other assorted topics. Aitch has just come on as a guest. To be honest it doesn’t really carry with it the usual romance of the Glastonbury sunset slot, but the kids are happy enough.
I’m off to hunt for some Sri Lankan curry. Steering the good ship liveblog for the rest of the evening will be Ben Beaumont-Thomas. Join him for coverage of Sampha, Idles and of course tonight’s Pyramid headliner, Dua Lipa. Ta-ra.
Here’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas’s report on the Marina Abramović seven minute silence business. Come for that, stay for this absolutely gorgeous picture of two audience members very much getting into the spirit of Abramović’s exercise:
Noel Gallagher is watching LCD from the side stage. He’s not exactly bouncing around, to put it mildly. Everyone else is though: it looks a great set from here – on-the-whistle review from Elle Hunt coming in a bit.
