Receive free Music updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Music news every morning.
Some aspects of Glastonbury are constant. The festival’s main Pyramid Stage is a fixture, beaming light from its apex high into the night sky. So are the exhibitionist performers roaming the circus field playing wind instruments with each nostril or performing tricks with fishing rods. Moon meditations in the Green Futures Field, singing circles in the Tipi Field: here are unchanging elements in the cycle of life at Glastonbury.
But every year there are newcomers too. With the festival’s evolution into a British national treasure, these come from all walks, and indeed lunges, of life. That’s why I found myself doing star jumps and stretching exercises with cheery celebrity fitness instructor Joe Wicks on Friday morning (“Look at us Glastonbury, we’re doing a workout, we’re nutters!”). It’s also why 1980s pop pin-up Rick Astley was able to fulfil his teenage dream by jumping behind the drum kit on the Pyramid Stage on Saturday to play AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”. A decent rock’n’soul version, too.
“We played Glastonbury for the first time!” That was the cry from another 1980s pop star, Toyah Willcox, at the end of her set in the Acoustic Tent on Sunday, the festival’s final day. She was accompanied by a non-acoustic band whose electric guitarists included her husband Robert Fripp, the King Crimson leader and virtuoso instrumentalist. He sat wearing a tie, white shirt, waistcoat and sober expression as though for a technically rigorous afternoon of jazz fusion. But no: the songs were hard rock and heavy metal classics, performed with irresistible vim by Willcox in a look-at-me shiny red minidress.
The gig was a live spin-off from the YouTube covers that the pair made during lockdown. Some Crimson fans look on the project as a terrible waste of the 77-year-old Fripp’s time. But the smile that broke across his face as he watched his show-woman wife told a different story. The audience is as much an instrument for a rock singer as the microphone, and Willcox worked hers like a maestro. Meanwhile, Fripp played sharply animated solos and, a lump-in-throat moment, reprised his celebrated guitar part in David Bowie’s “Heroes”.
Blondie, who used Fripp’s guitar-playing on their hit album Parallel Lines in 1978, were a big draw at the Pyramid Stage in late afternoon. Debbie Harry and her fellow New York veterans were an unofficial adjunct to the so-called legends slot, which had been filled earlier on the same stage by Yusuf/Cat Stevens.
Bass guru Thundercat provided a panacea for the genial, slightly dozy nostalgia that can settle over Glastonbury on Sundays. The Californian wore a red and white jacket and shorts ensemble that gave him the look of a summering Father Christmas for his set at the Park Stage. Joined by a fast, supple drummer and an electronic musician, he played his bass as though it were lead guitar. Notes poured from him in profusion, like gifts spilling from the sleigh. His songs blended psychedelic funk, jazz, soul and rock, in a fashion at once mazy and mellow. It was all the more impressive for coming from someone who was, in his words, “pretty zonked” from the previous night’s festival revelry.
The sense of an ending always overhangs the festival’s final day. Belgian singer Charlotte Adigéry articulated the strangely exhilarating feeling of things drawing to a close during her vibrant set with musical partner Bolis Pupul at the Park Stage. “Say goodbye, let it go,” she sang in their song “Mantra”, at which point a glittering electropop beat erupted like confetti.
Goodbyes at Glastonbury carried a special charge this year. Sunday’s headliner was Elton John, playing his final ever date in the UK. Or, as he said from his piano-stool perch on the Pyramid Stage, what “may be my last show ever in England”. Cynics will note the considerable wriggle room for potential future gigs in Wales etc.
Rumours of who he’d bring out as guests had circulated the site all day. Dua Lipa? Britney Spears? Kiki Dee? Or even — Eminem? As is usually the case, reality didn’t live up to fantasy. Elton proceeded to introduce at various points, with great ceremony and effusiveness, a series of duet partners who inspired bemusement or indifference. History may not recall them, but let us do so here: The Gabriels’ singer Jacob Lusk, US up-and-comer Stephen Sanchez, UK singer Rina Sawayama and Brandon Flowers of The Killers.
Resplendent in a gold lamé suit visible from all parts of the packed expanse, Elton opened with a guitar-driven number, “Pinball Wizard”, as a sop to the rock festival setting. The Pyramid Stage with its beam of light illuminated the Pink Floydian aspects of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”. However, it was one of his quieter songs, a touching version of the pianoman’s calling card, “Your Song”, which came closest to providing the fabled Glastonbury moment that defines the rest of the festival.
Having been touring his farewell show since 2018, elongated by the pandemic and a hip replacement, he seemed eager to dispatch this particular engagement rather than linger over it. It was a workmanlike performance — with the proviso that the workman was Elton John, so the quality of the work was considerable.
Fireworks lit up the night sky when “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time)” came to an end. It’s Paris next for Elton, as his protracted goodbyes move towards their finale later this summer. Meanwhile, it’s back to dairy-farming for Glastonbury. And so the cycle of life spins on.
