Key events
From the field, Elle Hunt says: “I am in fact now fixed.” Get Coldplay on prescription, stat.
Chris Martin and Michael J Fox are doing Fix You together, Fox sitting in a wheelchair and playing a peach-coloured guitar, while the audience’s wristbands flash golden. What a gorgeous, heartstring-tugging moment.
Orbital reviewed!
Gwilym Mumford
Park stage, 9.15pm
Orbital’s seventh appearance at Glastonbury was always going to be a biggie, marking the 30th anniversary of their first appearance at the festival, when they bashed the walls down between dance and guitar music by playing on an otherwise rock-focused Pyramid stage. A straight DJ set was never going to quite cut the mustard on such a grand occasion. Luckily though they had some starry help.
First up was Tilda Swinton, following up last year’s Park appearance in Max Richter’s devastating live reimagining Blue Notebooks suite. As with that performance, this was spoken word, with Swinton cooing mantras over early track Deeper. That though was merely a throat-clearer for the main event, as Mel C joined Orbital to perform vocals for Wannabe remix Spicy. Sporty, sporting the same torch spectacles as the dance duo as well as an oversized tracksuit, engaged in her own solo exercise class, practically somersaulting across the stage.
Orbital were always going to close with Chime, their breakthrough single and a landmark moment for UK dance when it was released in 1990. All that was left was for Swinton to end the show by telling the audience that she was going to “count down from 5 to 1, and you will awaken”. The spell was broken, but the dream was nice while it lasted.
Over at Disclosure on the Other stage, Sam Smith has come out to perform their 2013 collaboration Latch, says Safi Bugel (and I feel incredibly old, realising that was 11 years ago); meanwhile on the Park, Peggy Gou has brought Sophie Ellis-Bextor out for a remix of Murder on the Dancefloor.
Here’s the big thanks to their crew “and all the crews that have made all this possible”, Chris Martin says, as well as a crowd who have given him faith that “different humans can gather together”. He offers “five seconds of Glastonbury love” that the crowd can send to “Israel, you can send it to Palestine, you can send it to Ukraine, you can send it to peaceful Russia”, and the fireworks explode.
Then he hymns the band and the crowd in an ad-libbed song, riffing off the images of audience members that the camera alights on, such as a “bearded young fellow” – and then Michael Eavis, sitting under a blanket at the side of the stage, a “total 100% legend”, says Martin, before embarking on his brand new song: “Sir Michael, we just want to thank you, as humans go you’re the best of all sorts, you’re a musical charmer, you’re the world’s greatest farmer, and you do it all wearing shorts”.
Next up is another “legendary Michael” and it’s Michael J Fox, playing the guitar to a huge cheer (Fox recently released a documentary about living with Parkinson’s disease since he was 29 years old.) What started out as a little crowdpleasing and cheesy becomes unarguably profound.
Oh, take me back to the start: here’s the “where it all started” moment, as the band gathers around tight to play Sparks from their 2000 debut Parachutes. “Some of us are from around here,” says Chris Martin – West Country incest joke clearly forgotten!!! – and Glastonbury, which they’ve now headlined a record-breaking five times, has always represented “how we want to go out into the world”.
I think this is what they call “a bit”. During A Sky Full of Stars, Chris Martin stops the song to “have a quick meeting”, then addresses the audience: “My brothers, my sisters – actually, ‘cos we’re in the West Country, I should say my cousins” – as a west country native, I take exception to this incest joke – and then talks about getting us on each other’s shoulders so we can get as jacked as Peter Andre (???) and then encourages the audience to put their phones away as they restart the song. I would be enjoying this very pure moment were it not for the profound slight against my countrymen.
OH NO THE FIREWORKS ARE GOING OFF AGAIN! ARGH!
Here’s their 2021 collaboration with K-pop superstars BTS, in absentia: as Chris says, “they’re in the army right now [albeit still managing an impressive amount of solo careers] so we’re gonna sing all the way to Korea” – meanwhile images of the band are projected on the exterior of the Pyramid. “You are my universe” is a pretty straightforward – some might say bland – sentiment, but I can fully imagine that caught up in the euphoria of the field, combined with a few refreshments, stood next to the one you love, it suddenly sounds like the most profound revelation on earth.
“Everyone is an alien somewhere”, reads Chris Martin’s T-shirt, seemingly in a show of display for refugees; meanwhile the band’s very literal, very goofy goofy alien-come-robot masks and the jellyfish hanging from the rafters for their Chainsmokers collaboration Something Just Like This are quite Daft Punk meets seapunk. It’s easy to lampoon Coldplay for selling out to the EDM cheap seats with this chuntering 2017 track, but … I can’t claim I wouldn’t have wept, impromptu, were I in the audience (massive pop moments have an inexplicable propensity to make me burst into tears).
Here’s a gorgeous review of Little Simz’s majestic-sounding Pyramid stage set from Safi Bugel.
Stuart Godwin from our sport desk is in the crowd and has become acutely aware of the generational differences in the crowd for Coldplay: “I’ve now overheard two different people in separate bits of the Pyramid crowd say Paradise” – released in 2011 – “was the first song they ever downloaded. Just embalm me now, FFS.”
