People keep asking how Glastonbury festival was this year, and I keep telling them about the night before I left for the festival.
To make sure my friends and I could leave London bright and early, I rented a car the night before. I was bringing it home to park it overnight when another driver, coming toward me on a straightaway, suddenly turned across my lane. I expected that he would speed up to squeeze through before I passed, but suddenly, the driver slowed down his turn, inching to a stop so that he blocked my lane. When I jammed my brakes to stop, with mere feet separating us, he slowly, emphatically, almost triumphantly (??) looked me dead in the eyes and unfurled his middle finger — something he wanted to do so badly he was apparently willing to risk great physical injury. In shock, I laughed, and I shouted, with what I hope conveyed good humour, "I had the right of way!!"
I ended up thinking about that interaction frequently throughout the festival, because reader: that shit would not happen at Glastonbury.
Maybe it was the lineup this year, which felt aimed to invoke nostalgia for festivalgoers exactly my age (shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of the millennial crowd), or the fact that, on my third pilgrimage, I now felt at home at Worthy Farm, but I felt particularly grateful, even wistful, being there this year. Every time a fellow attendee bumped hard into me, tripped on my friends' backpack pile, stumbled across our tents or accidentally spilled my drink, and then looked me in the eye and smiled, apologizing — I thought of my London motorist friend. I thought of him when my girlfriend lost her phone, twice, and when it was returned safely to her, twice.
I said it last year, and I'll say it again: Glastonbury is the happiest music festival in the world. People are their best selves there.
So it was that I wandered around Glastonbury, perpetually on the edge of misty eyes. Everywhere I went, and every set I saw, my thoughts skewed sentimental. At Avril Lavigne's Other Stage performance on Saturday, where record-breaking numbers turned out to watch the Napanee, Ontario native showcase the colossal discography she's built up over her career — not just "Complicated" and "Sk8er Boi" but "My Happy Ending," "He Wasn't," "What the Hell" and "Here's to Never Growing Up" – I realised I knew her songs so well because of my younger sibling, who played Lavigne's first two albums incessantly when I was a teenager.
I pretended not to like the songs back then — a fact that made me appreciate the relationship we have now — but there, buoyed by the voices of a crowd pushing 70,000, I couldn't help but be moved by the poetic loneliness of set highlight "I'm with You," a song whose simplicity underscores its pleading humanity: "Isn't anyone trying to find me?" As for Avril herself, she began the set a little distant, able to muster just a sliver of the excitement her fans were showing her, but she warmed up quickly enough, grinning at the volume of the crowd's singing during "Complicated" and teasing them with impossible call-and-response clapping rhythms before launching into "He Wasn't."
Coronating Charli XCX's BRAT summer was her incredibly exclusive, hugely buzzed-about Friday performance at Levels, where fans queued in their thousands for a spot in the 7,000-capacity DJ stage. There, she blazed through a DJ set that, between BRAT's "365," "Guess," "Talk talk," "Everything is romantic," "Von dutch" and "Club classics," left space for remixes of Robyn's "With Every Heartbeat" and "Dancing on My Own" — not to mention an appearance from the Swedish pop maven herself, who partied alongside Charli and the xx's Romy while the songs blared.
It was the stuff Glastonbury is made of — not just the set itself, but the waiting (my friends staked out a spot four long hours before Charli's set) and the deliberating (we had to choose between Charli and Pyramid Stage headliner Dua Lipa), as well as the crowd participation. Because Charli made her merch extremely limited, fans made their own: beside us, holding onto the barrier, a man named Lindsey, sporting a neon yellow work vest onto which he handprinted Brat, shared stories of fandom with my girlfriend, who clipped a BRAT printout to the front of a neon green ballcap. Experiencing Charli myself would have been a festival highlight anyway, but enjoying it vicariously, too, through the eyes and hearts of people I love, made it feel extra special.
I felt similarly reminiscent during LCD Soundsystem's standout set on Friday just before that, where they perfectly balanced old ("Losing My Edge") with new (perfect opener "Oh Baby," from American Dream) and sounded incredible. I would challenge anyone not to feel perfectly at peace with the world at Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage, surrounded by some of their best pals, screaming "Where are your friends toniiiiight" and dancing together during "All My Friends."
I'm sharing these personal, emotional details, I suppose, because it was these moments that made my Glastonbury special — and that make most fans' Glastonbury's special, I reckon. Even the supposed "best" song in the world could never outshine a silly or mediocre one made special by memories; it's the corny song your mum shared with you as a kid or the sort-of-trite one that reminds you of a lost love that makes you cry, not History's Greatest Song.
And so it is that I must, I'm afraid, crown Coldplay — yes, corny, sky-reaching, they-will-fix-you, critical punching bag Coldplay — as the festival's absolute highlight.
HEAR ME OUT. My friends and I made a pact before the set: we heard Coldplay were fantastic live; we would never pay to see a Coldplay concert; let's just buy in, for one all-consuming Saturday night set, and be Coldplay fans for two hours. Because here's the thing: hating Coldplay is boring. You hate Coldplay? Coldplay are like a sweet, well-meaning parental figure. Of course they're a little humiliating — of course they are — but they're trying so hard, and they love you so much. You're going to hate them? Nah, babe. Look what they're doing, all for you: fireworks, lightbulb props, puppets. Don't be a brat. Show some gratitude.
Of course, being a huge Coldplay fan is weird too — never trust someone who wants to hang with their parents that much — but I think we found a happy medium, and when the band launched into "Yellow" first, those colossal major chords ringing out over 120,000 fans in yellow light-up wristbands, we knew we'd made the right choice. As Chris Martin bounded around the stage, hugging his bandmates, the band just oozed positivity and affirmation. And they sounded mighty as they charged through mega-hits like "Higher Power," "Adventure of a Lifetime," "Paradise," "Clocks" and "Viva La Vida." They brought out rapper Little Simz for an unreleased song titled "We Pray" and Laura Mvula for a soft, choral-based rendition of "Violet Hill" (which I contend is a Good Coldplay Song, anyway). It was incredible. Coldplay were god-like.
Of course, there were embarrassments too. They brought out Michael J. Fox, a bit inexplicably, to play on "Humankind" and "Fix You," and spent what felt like 15 full minutes talking in the middle of the show, during which they also serenaded Michael Eavis, Glastonbury's founder. They closed with their new single, "feelslikeimfallinginlove" — a baller move, sure, but ultimately an embarrassing song. Still, the lasting impression was one of a band doing exactly what they've always done, and leaving a trail of a dead in their wake; people who missed the set because they "don't like Coldplay" were left asking those who attended what they'd missed.
Elsewhere, this year's Glastonbury hewed nostalgic for anyone in their thirties: The Streets played a barnstorming Saturday set on the Other Stage, mostly pulled from his twin masterpieces Original Pirate Material (2002) and A Grand Doesn't Come for Free (2004), and showed Mike Skinner's familiarity with Glastonbury as both performer and attendee, as he spent a huge portion of his set in the crowd, hoisted up on fans' shoulders or wearing their hats. Shania Twain, in the famed Sunday afternoon "Legend Slot," drew one of the biggest crowds of the festival to the Pyramid Stage, showing that even if her voice has lost a small step, her charisma more than makes up for it; Bloc Party showed the staying power of their early music ("Hunting for Witches"! "Banquet"! "Helicopter"!) as well as the surprising power of their more recent discography (the hard-hitting "Traps," set-closer "Ratchet"). And in the Stonebridge Bar on Thursday, UK producer Daniel Avery played an electroclash DJ set that got the tent heaving like it was 2007 with tracks by Vitalic and Felix da Housecat.
Of course, there were highlights from relative newcomers, too. Confidence Man, best described perhaps as goth Aqua, played a triumphantly poppy, euro-trashy set on the Other Stage, wearing Oakley sunglasses and voguing extravagantly through earworms like "Now U Do," "I CAN'T LOSE YOU" and "Holiday." Seventeen, reportedly the first K-pop band to play on Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage, were under-attended but wonderful. At their shows, their 13-strong group (confusing!) comes out in different member configurations called "units" — six members for this R&B jam, 12 for that rock song — but they're at their best in full force, when all 13 members are locked into their immaculate choreography.
SZA played an impressive set as she brought 2022's incredible SOS to Sunday's Pyramid Stage headliner. In front of inventive set design that was equal parts mystical forest and ancient cave, her set was punctuated by songs like the hard-hitting "F2F" and a percussion-heavy "Forgiveless," but it felt a little bit like she was set up to fail, too. Glastonbury's Sunday night headliner is typically an artist with huge, sing-along chart-toppers, but SZA doesn't really have those; she played Drake's "Rich Baby Daddy" and a cover of Prince's "Kiss"to add energy, but her strong suit is gentler tracks like "Ghost in the Machine," "Blind," "I Hate U" and "Nobody Gets Me." So when her set ended without fireworks — a Glastonbury Sunday staple — it felt a little bit like SZA's set was scheduled in the wrong spot.
It wasn't just her though: Scottish producer Barry Can't Swim, who I hoped to catch early on Friday, was virtually unwatchable because of crowd surges, a problem that cropped up repeatedly throughout the festival. Gabriel Szatan wrote more ably about the problem for Resident Advisor than I have room to here, but it's something the festival is going to have to address for future iterations — set placement, in terms of both timing and locale, created problems during sets by Sugababes, Janelle Monáe, Avril Lavigne and many others. And while the festival did its best to mitigate crowd crushes as risks popped up (in the form of stewards guiding fans), their efforts ended up creating new crowd problems. The issue is in the scheduling itself, and must be solved there.
Ultimately, though, it was wonderful, communal vibes that defined Glastonbury once again, from the DJ sets and dancing on Thursday night to Sunday afternoon, when some enterprising individual provided a large television and wi-fi setup near the hospitality campsites to make sure England fans had somewhere to watch the team's Euros 2024 Round of 16 fixture against Slovakia at 5 p.m. (That it ended up being former One Direction member Louis Tomlinson who set it up — spot the back of his head in the photo above – made it all the more charming.)
The generosity, ingenuity, camaraderie and celebrations said everything anyone needs to know about Glastonbury. The only downside was having to drive back to London, and real life.