Glastonbury 2024 in a Nutshell: The Last Dinner Party Lives Up to the Hype, Dua Lipa Succeeds, Coldplay Goes Big | Glastonbury 2024

Friday morning at Glastonbury underlines that the old cliché that the festival offers something for everyone is just that, because it’s true. Your options range from the beatific (Sofia Kourtesis’s sluggish techno) to the deeply thought-provoking (Bishi Bhattacharya performing Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano, which sounds every bit as angsty as you’d expect). From the reliable – a well-suited Squeeze on the Pyramid stage, delivering one of the most beloved hits of the late ’70s – to the largely unknown. Now 80, Asha Puthli His last appearance in Britain was in 1974: his work encompasses everything from collaborations with Ornette Coleman to Bollywood soundtracks to new wave. A small silhouette wrapped in muslin, it appears as spatial and idiosyncratic as the album on which its cult status is based, The Devil Is Loose (1976), very popular with disco collectors and hip-hop producers in search of samples . Between songs, she recalls her friendship with legendary drag queen and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, complains about the weather (“It’s freezing here – I just came from Miami”) and shows how she obtained that curious bubbling sound that appears on his 1973 cover of George Harrison’s I Dig Love: not, as was generally thought, by smoking a bong, but by gargling. His voice is still capable of summoning the eerie falsetto that punctuated his underground disco classic Flying Fish, while The Devil Is Loose’s acknowledged classic Space Talk still sounds incredible: a seductive, trippy dance floor shimmer.

After the British rapper Face-to-face uses his 18-song set on the Other Stage to unveil his new album – not one for euphemism, he urges fans to download it by telling them it’s a “masterpiece” – the Pyramid Stage hosts the first-ever Glastonbury appearance by an almost unreasonably pretty K-pop group Seventeenwhose name refers to the number of members in the group and whose latest EP, FML, was the best-selling EP worldwide last year. The crowd they attract is not huge but at least some of it is very noisy: the stage-side screens unfortunately spot a middle-aged spectator wearing an expression for which the adjective “perplexed” could have been invented, but he There are also teenage girls in the foreground who express their appreciation by making a noise reminiscent of Yoko Ono in Voice Piece for Soprano. And Seventeen, whose music ranges from mouth-watering pop accompanied by cartoon unicorn flicks to what sounds like a particularly fresh take on nu-metal, are working very hard to win over the merely curious. The chorus of their latest track Very Nice is hard to dislodge from your brain for the rest of the day, simply because they repeat it so many times: every time you think they’re about to leave the stage, they start singing it again.

You can understand why the performance artist Marina Abramovic She told the Guardian she was “terrified” to lead the audience from the Pyramid stage in what she described as a “collaboration” called Seven Minutes of Collective Silence. ). There is absolutely no guarantee that people will remain silent during this long symbolic protest against the horrors of war and violence or not), but it proves effective: the descending silence feels powerful and moving, and makes strangely the artist difficult to follow.

His successor, PJ Harveyseems to glide across the stage almost unnoticed, and his opening songs match the mood, by turns hushed and austere: a trio of tracks from last year’s I Inside The Old Year Dying, three more from his masterpiece eerie and haunted 2011 work Let England Shake. Not everything she plays is so understated – there’s a choppy version of 50ft Queenie and a version of Dress strafed by a cacophonous violin – but there’s a captivating sense of cool control in her performance. This is amplified by the fact that Harvey is both a compelling and mysterious presence. At one point, she sits at a music stand, writing in a notebook and sniffing herbs while her band plays around her. She boldly ends her set with a slow and meditative To Bring You My Love.

At the other extreme, LCD audio system features a blast of kinetic, party hits – All My Friends, Dance Yrself Clean, an extended version of Losing My Edge that interpolates snippets of songs from artists the lyrics reference, including Daft Punk and Yazoo. Their blend of analog synth, distorted guitar, and dancefloor-oriented beats sounds fantastic.

According to the most intriguing part of his conversation between songs, Dua LipaThe Glastonbury headliner is the result of a childhood act manifesting itself. Whether you believe it or not, she has clearly spent a lot of time carefully studying and absorbing the workings of a successful Glastonbury headliner, and putting what she has gleaned to good use. She pulls out all the stops to create a sense of special occasion. There are fireworks, special guest appearances – Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, performing his biggest hit, The Less I Know the Better – and a setlist that cleverly integrates a few less impressive songs from her last album, the coolly received Radical Optimism, among a torrent of crowd-pleasing hits: Levitating, Physical, Illusion. It works. The crowds she draws are huge, and what’s more, they stay. There’s no waste that signals a Glastonbury headliner is wrong and pushing his audience towards the festival’s other myriad delights.

As Ball joint The band realise that 11:30 on a Saturday morning is a strange time to be faced with a Northern Irish political rap duo whose song is called All Your Sniffer Dogs Are Shite. “What the fuck are you all doing here?” MC Mo Chara asks as he watches the crowd pour out of the Woodsies tent. It’s also clear why people have made the effort: Kneecap’s depiction of life in west Belfast is by turns funny and aggressively confrontational, coupled with a hugely engaging take on golden-age hip-hop, and the end result is unique and exciting.

Less surprising is the size of the audience present on the Other Stage for The last dinner: they seem to have sidestepped accusations of hype to become the breakthrough British alt-rock band of 2024. It’s pretty obvious why things have worked out for them. There’s certainly a hint of artifice in the whole enterprise, but Abigail Morris is a genuinely charismatic frontwoman; their wild-eyed image through the clothes box leaves them looking fantastic, a riot of bustiers, empire dresses and leg-of-mutton sleeves, a striking alternative to a world of “relatable” pop stars and sadly prosaic alt-rock bands with uniformly great songs. Preceded unexpectedly by an impassioned speech from Morris urging the audience to get politically active, their closer, Nothing Matters, provokes a euphoric mass sing-along.

The afternoon passes in a sunny blur. Cyndi Lauper‘s She Bop is clearly not the only song in pop history about masturbation, but it is probably the only song in pop history about masturbation that features its singer performing a solo on that essential of music lessons at school, the recorder. Whatever you do KeaneIn ‘s music, there’s something gently charming in their joy at the unexpected second wind given to their career by the popularity of Somewhere Only We Know on TikTok. Michael Kiwanuka is downright brilliant. His music occupies a space all its own, informed by the past but never crassly retro, bordered on different sides by soul, funk, confessional songwriting and flamboyant psychedelic rock.

There is something impressively confident in Little Simsapproaching his place on the Pyramid stage. She performs the opening trio of songs alone, boldly relying solely on her charisma and MC skills and a sound that pumps up the bass to such a degree you can see the screens on the side of the scene shake. It’s a risk, but it pays off: she cuts a truly convincing figure, the music moves from the downtempo introspection of Introvert to a fierce version of Venom to the poppier Selfish, and the audience naturally seems completely captivated.

This creates an intriguing contrast with Cold playwho have now headlined Glastonbury five times and, since their last appearance in 2016, have completed a 180-degree turn from earnest stadium balladers to purveyors of relentless visual overload. It’s not so much a performance as a constant bombardment of triple-tested hits – Yellow, Clocks, Adventure of a Lifetime, The Scientist, Paradise, Viva La Vida, Higher Power – and a spectacle. There are fireworks, confetti cannons, a drone flying overhead that reflects the vastness of the masses gathered back at them, the illuminated wristbands that turn even the fringes of the crowd into part of the performance. And then there’s the sumptuousness with which Chris Martin panders to both his audience and the festival itself, a succession of guests who manage to…