Mud, croissants and tears as Glastonbury sings the EU blues
Adele manages to lift spirits on the second night of the festival with a singalong, says Neil McCormick
Grey skies, hangovers, tears, nervous laughter and a subdued mood: Glastonbury on the morning after the EU referendum was probably much like the rest of the country, only with slow-moving queues for overpriced coffee and croissants offering an ominous glimpse of Britain’s possible future.
Glastonbury is usually an annual escape from real-world concerns, a muddy oasis of hedonistic celebration where the only politics is of the Greenpeace one-love, touchy-feely kind; so rapidly spreading news of the Brexit result on Friday morning really did feel like a strange and unwelcome intrusion on the jolly atmosphere. In common with most urban centres (even a pop-up shanty town in the middle of a Somerset farm), Glastonbury’s liberal-leaning crowd clearly identified themselves overwhelmingly with Bremain. People who had gathered in expectation of uncomplicated good times were unsure how to behave.
What they needed were their figureheads to articulate their anxieties, galvanise the mood and effectively give them permission to party.
Main headliner Adele doesn’t really do politics but she does do emotional uplift. “Let’s be miserable together,” she suggested but then performed the kind of set that would be balm to the most broken heart.
Everybody came out for the biggestselling artist in the world and why wouldn’t they? Adele drew what was surely the largest audience for a headliner at Glastonbury since the Rolling Stones.
There were questions about Adele’s suitability to headline this venerable festival, with the notion that a romantic chanteuse and ballad singer might somehow lack the requisite vigour and attack. It is true that she doesn’t do much more than stand and sing and chat but when you’ve got songs that robust and emotional, a voice that luxurious and expressive and a character that funny and engaging what else do you really need? Her band played with resonance and the audience did the rest.
There is nothing in popular music more spine-tingling than a mass spontaneous singalong and, with a crowd of over 100,000, that may have been the biggest and most joyous singalong ever witnessed.
Damon Albarn had opened proceedings on the Pyramid stage, leading out a 90-piece Syrian orchestra. “You can’t believe the problems we’ve had with visas,” he joked. The Blur frontman was visibly upset and peculiarly downbeat for a man charged with getting the party started, confessing to “a heavy heart” and proclaiming “democracy has failed us”. But the music made more positive points, a rich and evocative tapestry of Middle Eastern strings, choirs and percussion performed by musicians convened in the midst of war-torn tragedy. It certainly put our own immigration troubles into perspective.
Perhaps it is hard to make political speeches when confronted with an audience in glitter and spandex, bearded men wearing mud-splattered bridal gowns and women in silver spacesuits and matching wellies.
There was school of giant squid and crustaceans, while a couple of luminous jellyfish could be spotted drifting serenely through crowded fields. If Saturday belonged to Adele’s mass singalong, Friday was a night for rock bands to remind us why electric guitars have dominated this event since its inception. Bearded veteran blues rockers ZZ Top set a high bar for the youngsters, Foals practically blew a fuse with their mantric psychedelia, while third-time headliners Muse demonstrated why they keep getting invited back. The Devon trio are a kind of ultimate rock band, percolating the most over-the-top elements of prog, heavy, goth, electro and anthemic rock into something sleek, fierce and preposterously thrilling.
Effectively delivering an apocalyptic sci-fi rock opera about global destruction, they concluded by leading 100,000 tired revellers in a fist-punching roar of “You and I have to fight for our rights!” Muse proved themselves precisely the right band for a very discombobulated festival.