Pop stars don’t respect this festival anymore

The Glastonbury headliner rumour mill never lets up. Each name is more ridiculous and unlikely than the next – if you believed the whispers, this year’s festival was to be topped by Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Madonna, Beyoncé, Girls Aloud and the Spice Girls.

Yesterday’s official announcement features – surprise, surprise – none of them. Instead, we’ve got Dua Lipa, SZA, Shania Twain and Coldplay. There’s nothing original in moaning about a dull Glasto line-up. And anyone who’s been to the world’s greatest festival will tell you the long weekend is about so much more than who is on the Pyramid Stage every night. But this year does feel uninspired.

Coldplay will become the first band to top the line-up for the fifth time and their ubiquity at Glastonbury has become a running joke.

No more exciting, really, is Dua Lipa, who is the Friday night headliner this year. She’s a perfect pop star: bland, likeable, with just enough faux edge to be cool – but her live act is notoriously underwhelming.

The most adventurous and exhilarating headline act on the 2024 line-up is SZA. Unknown to the masses but beloved by her fans, she’s somewhat of an enigma. An R&B singer with exquisite lyricism and only two albums, SZA (pictured) stays mostly out of the spotlight. But she’s more than deserving of a headline slot at Glastonbury. She will also be the first black woman to headline since Beyoncé in 2011.

To its credit, this year’s headline choices are an important correction to last year’s pale, male and stale line-up of Arctic Monkeys, Guns N’ Roses and Elton John.

You might as well go to the overstuffed marketing exercise that is America’s dismal equivalent, Coachella. At least Coldplay have only headlined that festival once.