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Keza MacDonald
That’s it for us tonight folks! Thank you again for joining us for another day at the world’s greatest festival. I will eventually stop singing “shanananananananan KNEES, KNEES” at random moments before the night is out. Come back tomorrow from 12pm for the final day of liveblog coverage.
Lana Del Rey reviewed
Ammar Kalia
Other Stage, 10.30pm
There were few sets at this year’s Glastonbury festival more anticipated than Lana Del Rey’s Saturday night Other stage headline slot. It’s been nearly 10 years since the cult American singer-songwriter last played on Worthy Farm; in that time, she’s released six albums and established herself as one of pop music’s greatest living songwriters, period – a bold and experimental musician whose renown only seems to grow as her music becomes more introspective and self-referential. Her latest record, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, is already one of the year’s most acclaimed, and one of the strangest pop records to be released in recent memory: across the sprawling, conceptually dense album, Del Rey samples herself three times, collaborates with “fetish rapper” Tommy Genesis, and, for the first time in her career, writes openly about her family and personal history.
At the time of writing, Lana is the 27th most streamed musician in the world on Spotify – an impossibly huge feat, given how idiosyncratic, and downright anti-pop, her vision of pop music is. While Del Rey will probably never be played on pop radio, her fans are devoutly loyal – more so, perhaps, than the fans of many other pop stars. They prove their devotion at the end of Del Rey’s set: after walking onstage 30 minutes late, her sound is cut at midnight, after a raucous, exhilaratingly dense-sounding rendition of the 2017 song White Mustang. Del Rey pleads with various stage managers as the gargantuan Other stage crowd watch on, aghast; she is eventually escorted offstage, and the crew packing up her gear are met with emphatic, resounding boos.
And you can understand why: the hour of Del Rey’s set that she is able to perform is an absolutely ripper tour through her discography, including intense and psychedelic takes on tracks from 2014 fan-favourite Ultraviolence, a wistful rendition of the title track from 2019’s generation-defining Norman Fucking Rockwell, and rapturously received performances of songs from her 2012 debut Born to Die. Del Rey is not a high-energy performer, but she doesn’t need to be one: surrounded by a band and about 10 dancers, she puts on an artfully choreographed show that walks a perilous line between discomfiting intimacy and stadium-show grandeur.
In the style of her records, Del Rey’s live show is ramshackle and intensely thought-out at the same time; sometimes, she looks as if she’s forgotten the words to her own song, even as the dancers around her are pulling off an intricate, frenetic routine. It’s hard to pinpoint a specific highlight, because each song brings a new, surprising standout moment: Del Rey leads the crowd in a speak-along to the spoken word bridge of Ultraviolence; fans scream along to 2012’s Ride; White Mustang, perhaps my favourite song of all time but still, nonetheless, an underappreciated track in Del Rey’s catalog, is turned into a depressing-slash-euphoric festival anthem.
When her sound gets cut, after White Mustang, there’s a ripple of discontent among the crowd; if I had to guess, I would think that at least a few hundred people traveled here just to see Del Rey’s first UK show in four years. No matter – the hour that she did perform was compelling and brilliant, a showcase of one of the world’s greatest living pop stars.
The Pretenders’ set was a highlight of today – if you missed it, Chrissy Hynde was joined by Dave Grohl, Johnny Marr and (briefly) Paul McCartney, setting a high standard for on-stage cameos. Here’s Zoe Williams’ review:
I’m now quite disappointed that I missed Chris of Christine and the Queens’ marble-hewn torso, but hey, it’s nonetheless been fun to be here on the liveblog with all of you. Elton’s tomorrow, obviously; I will personally be headbanging at Queens of the Stone Age instead. Alt-J will be headlining the Park, Rudimental will be revving up West Holts, and Phoenix will be at Woodsies for the headline slot.
Christine and the Queens reviewed
Ammar Kalia
Woodsies, 10.30pm
Referencing Tony Kushner’s Aids epic Angels in America; Pachelbel’s metaphor-laden spoken word on pain, longing and the power of ritual, Canon; even Michael Jackson’s single-gloved choreography, Christine and the Queens’ latest, fourth record, Paranoia, Angels, True Love, is a deeply referential work. At 20 tracks long and containing multiple suites, it might seem like the antithesis of what’s needed to produce a crowd-pleasing headline set at Glastonbury.
And yet, here lies the unique talent of Chris: an enduring capacity to translate concepts, no matter how ephemeral, into feeling and movement, into the body. Stepping out into a busy Woodsies tent 30 minutes late, thanks to a delayed but nonetheless raucous performance from Rina Sawayama, Chris captivates.
Opening in the red light haze of longing single Tears Can Be So Soft and draped in an open waistcoat and trousers, by the second number Marvin Descending, Chris is shirtless, writhing his muscular torso, mirroring the marble statues scattered across the stage. The staging is spectacular, featuring smoke-filled lasers, neoclassical sculpture and multiple costume changes. The set plays more like a mix of theatre and performance art than a simple gig.
It’s a brave choice to barely break character and to eschew earlier hits in favour of a set entirely from the latest record, but it also marks out Chris’s set as truly individual. “This is a ritual”, he tells us several times, and it certainly is unlike anything else you are likely to see at the festival. From the thundering drums of Track 10 to the lithe sensuousness of Angels Crying in My Bed, and his poetic interludes, the show is a dense text open to interpretation. Many of the messages might fly over our heads, especially being four days into the festival, but the mighty spectacle remains.
Divided opinions on Guns N’ Roses and Lana Del Rey here in the Guardian cabin: some found the headliners to be embarrassingly past it, others are willing to forgive them. Meanwhile, Lana got cut off a full eight songs before the end of her set, prompting something of a crowd revolt.
Late-night crowd! We’ve got reviews of Guns N’ Roses, Lana and Christine and the Queens from tonight still to come – and we despatched Gwilym to Fatboy Slim a while back too. In the meantime, here’s a throwback to the glorious positivity of Lizzo earlier today.
Lana Del Rey has actually been kicked off the Other Stage, they’ve killed the mic. But she’s still on stage, trying to talk to the crowd. Real Sunday night energy going on, even though we’re only just past midnight.
The photos are in from Slash and co’s performance:
Loyle Carner reviewed
Jenessa Williams
West Holts stage, 10.15pm
Twenty minutes before Loyle Carner’s set is due to begin, there is a gentle cloak of melancholia hanging around the West Holts stage. It’s the end of another hot day, and rather than rushing straight to the front, groups are huddled round one another on the grass of the warm evening, drinking quietly or having heart-to-hearts about the lives that await them outside of this festival. it’s a much calmer atmosphere that you might expect at Guns N’ Roses or Lana Del Rey, but it’s part of what makes this a great booking: a space to kick back and enjoy a rapper who isn’t afraid to say the quiet part out loud.
It starts well. A white car, half sprayed black, sits mysteriously on stage as if the rapper might burst out of it, but he storms right past it for it a furious opener of Hate. Plastic chills things out a little with a looser funky swing, but the delivery is still so urgent, a man desperate to get his feelings out. He clutches his cap, clutches his knees, visibly overwhelmed by the amount of people who have showed up. For a rapper who sings about aimlessness, it’s phenomenally direct, impossible to look away from.
Finding his feet, it’s clear he has lots to say. He decides Georgetown to his hero Madlib, the artist whose blueprint can clearly be found right across latest album, Hugo. His lyrical meditations on mixed-race identity can sometimes be a little heavy-handed on the metaphors of piano keys and being stuck between two worlds, but they go over perfectly on Still, which he declares to be his favourite ever song. It’s an element of blackness so rarely spoken about that it clearly means everything to the brown-skinned kids who dominate the first few rows, resonating with every conflicted word.
In this vein, the whole set is driven by unapologetic openness – from a duet with Olivia Dean in tribute to his son right through to a spoken word piece by youth campaigner Athian Akec about knife crime, he leaves very few subjects untouched by emotional anecdote; The process of breaking generational trauma to bond with his son, of dismantling toxic masculinity through his wise friends in Ezra Collective, of reconnecting with his birth father and learning to drive during the lockdown under his care, gesturing to the very car – the exact car – that sits on stage. A story suddenly clicking into place, It weaves the whole set together, an evening of intimacy made bigger to fill a deserved stage. As he leaves with his enduring mantra “Take these words and go forwards”, he’s not the only one left in proud tears.
Mel C reviewed
Laura Snapes
Avalon stage, 9.35pm
The revival of Melanie C is one of pop’s most heartwarming stories – it’s so hard for a member of a major pop band to continue their former glories, but with her latterday turn towards disco-tinged pop, the 49-year-old is experiencing a well deserved career rejuvenation. Not that she needs rejuvenating in the least – with her washboard abs, expressive dancing (a far cry from the Spice Girls’ strict choreography) and infectious ebullience, she has the energy of a performer half her age, and she maintains the kind of openness and curiosity that keeps a musician young. Her set is a brilliant straddling of eras, a self-aware sample from her brilliant debut and more recent re-emergence. Early solo singles like Never Be the Same Again and the rocky, fantastically growled Going Down sound like classics, while recent bops such as Here I Am fit with the current trend towards empowerment anthems, and they hit harder because we’ve watched Melanie C grow up in public and reckon with self-acceptance in real time. She’s clearly having a brilliant time. “Don’t make me cry!” she tells us, though the famously high-achieving artist keeps one eye on her performance. “I sing shit when I cry!”
English (US)