Midway through the festival, the Spectator’s website published a bonkers article headlined “Glastonbury wouldn’t survive under a Corbyn government”. In it, the writer conjured up a dystopian fantasy more berserk than anything you might find yourself listening to in the small hours at the Stone Circle. Chief among the dire presentiments was the suggestion that the ascension of Labour to power would result in Radiohead ceasing touring and instead taking up a residency at a Las Vegas resort.
The image of Thom Yorke serenading Sin City’s high rollers with a rousing chorus of Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors was mind-boggling, but you could see why some press went on the offensive. Politicians have been turning up to Glastonbury for years, but this year the leader of the opposition was among the most hotly anticipated attractions: when he arrived on site, his Land Rover was mobbed by fans. In fact, it was hard to escape Corbyn: if Glastonbury 2017 had an unofficial anthem, it was his name sung to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.
You heard “oh, Jeremy Corbyn” everywhere: at the silent disco, during Radiohead’s Friday night headlining set, midway through the Other stage appearance by rapper Stormzy, who gamely joined in. When Corbyn finally gave a speech – in a stunning piece of billing that could only happen at Glastonbury, he appeared between hip-hop duo Run the Jewels and Southampton’s foremost R&B loverman Craig David – the crowd brought the entire area around the Pyramid stage to a standstill: in some of its furthest reaches, you occasionally got the sense that some people were eager for him to stop talking so they could get on with the more pressing business of singing “oh, Jeremy Corbyn”.
Meanwhile, the bills on the main stages skewed towards mainstream pop, with mixed results. Lorde’s Friday evening Other stage appearance was one of the weekend’s highlights. The staging and choreography were fantastic – a giant glass tank on a hydraulic platform, in and around which a troupe of dancers acted out the highs and lows of a teenage party – but more striking still was how magnetic and coolly self-assured a performer Ella Yelich-O’Connor was, and how rich and inimitable her songs seemed: unashamed pop music that came with depth and intelligence as standard.
Earlier on the Other stage on Friday afternoon, Charli XCX took a more straightforward, rabble-rousing approach, a flurry of confetti cannon, inflatables and exhortations to wild hedonism: “I hope everyone gets really fucked up this weekend!” But while Katy Perry similarly threw herself into the spirit of the event – crowdsurfing, dancing with a security guard, charming the audience – her peculiar combination of newfound political conscience and longstanding predisposition to DayGlo cartoonishness was simultaneously intriguing and baffling, as a woman delivering between-song speeches about the necessity of taking back power surrounded by dancers dressed as flowers and giant pom-poms covered in fluorescent fur was perhaps wont to be.
Meanwhile, Dua Lipa’s doctored synth-pop felt characterless, as if someone had transported a performance from Radio 1’s Big Weekend to Worthy Farm. She was followed on the John Peel stage by the Lemon Twigs, who proved how bizarrely arcane some alt-rock has become. The Californian duo looked and sounded like the kind of band you would have seen being excitedly introduced on The Old Grey Whistle Test in early 1976, only to find their career suddenly foreshortened by the arrival of punk: the influence of Wings and forgotten 70s songwriters such as Gilbert O’Sullivan hungs over their complex songs, which wobbled along the line that separates fascinating and ambitious from tricksy and faintly annoying.
The first of this year’s big-name heritage acts, Kris Kristofferson, arrived on the Pyramid stage the day after his 81st birthday, amid an unexpected crowd of Hollywood superstars: he was introduced by Bradley Cooper, currently playing the role Kristofferson once played in A Star Is Born; Johnny Depp arrived onstage midway through the set to play guitar, while at its conclusion, the stage-side screens revealed Brad Pitt watching from the wings. Kristofferson’s appearance was simultaneously a little chaotic – “I wish I knew where I was,” he muttered at one point – and weirdly powerful and uncompromising. Played acoustically, glacially paced and sung in Kristofferson’s parched, age-weathered voice, even his more lighthearted songs – Jesus Was a Capricorn, Best Of All Possible Worlds – were leant an eerie gravitas, while Me and Bobby McGee and Sunday Morning Coming Down sounded heartbreakingly careworn and poignant.
The prospect of the xx performing in front of the vast crowd was faintly uncomfortable: their music is hushed and intimate; they’re not exactly renowned for their magnetic stage presence. But they seemed completely transformed. For one thing, even the sparsest of their songs sounded suddenly thunderous, powered along by Jamie xx’s percussion. And for another, Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim have unexpectedly turned from performers who radiated shyness and the general sense they would rather be anywhere than onstage into a genuinely charismatic double act: their set was an unexpected triumph.
Radiohead’s headlining slot was a more tricky proposition. There were people in the crowd who clearly thought they were in for a greatest hits set, commemorating the 20th anniversaries of both OK Computer and their legendary appearance amid the torrential rain of 1997’s Glastonbury: PLAY THE FUCKING BENDS read the legend on the flag one audience member held aloft. Those people were in for a disappointment, at least initially.
There was something distinctly low-key, even wilfully alienating about the band’s performance. A scattering of OK Computer tracks were interspersed with more abstract latterday material – the clatter of 15 Step and Myxamatosis. The stage-side screens showed images of Radiohead’s members overlaid with each other, static interference and computer graphics: it looked impressive, but if you couldn’t actually see the stage itself, it was impossible to work out what was going on up there. But after the crowd began to thin out, its less committed members perhaps headed for the uncomplicated pleasures of Major Lazer’s set, there was a noticeable shift. Thom Yorke’s onstage pronouncements became less abstract and more effusive, they played the songs the less committed audience members doubtless wanted to hear in the first place: Paranoid Android, Creep, Fake Plastic Trees and Karma Police. At the end of the latter, Yorke happily led an audience singalong.
Saturday dawned with Chicago alt-rockers Whitney – whose 70s-tinged sound blended West Coast country rock with brassy soul flourishes and came studded with great songs – fulfilling the festival’s traditional role of Visiting Americans Who’ve Never Been to Glastonbury Before and Seem Visibly Baffled and Slightly Horrified by the Whole Thing.
As the band paused between songs, a gust of wind blew a distinctive Worthy Farm odour in the direction of drummer/vocalist Julien Ehrich: “Wow,” he frowned, “this place smells of cow shit.” Meanwhile, for those who doubted the sheer breadth of music Glastonbury offers, a short walk took you from Thundercat’s exploratory, spaced-out take on jazz-funk – where the smooth sound of yacht rock crashed into extended passages of improvisation to thrilling effect – to the aforementioned Craig David, clad entirely in white and padding out his set by the simple expedient of playing other people’s records and singing along to them, and thence to Liam Gallagher on the comeback trail.
The latter was genuinely impressive. There was a real urgency and conviction to his performance, presumably fuelled by the fact that he realises his forthcoming solo album may represent the last roll of the dice for his post-Oasis career, after the widespread indifference that greeted his band Beady Eye. His voice seemed to have vastly improved from the period towards the end of Oasis, when he was less like a vocalist than a man caught in the throes of straining and failing to pass a stool; his new songs appeared to justify drafting in the help of songwriters for hire; his versions of Slide Away and (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? recaptured the feral power those songs had on arrival.
Run the Jewels’ post-Corbyn set, meanwhile, was another of the festival’s unalloyed triumphs. It is not just that their brand of underground hip-hop was spectacularly potent, although it was. It was the way Killer Mike and El-P had the ability to constantly shift the onstage mood, from infectious fury to cross-talking comedy, from heated political rhetoric to self-deprecation. There was something genuinely moving about the moment when El-P beckoned Killer Mike to the centre of the stage, silently indicated the size of the crowd – by some considerable distance the largest audience the duo have ever played to – and the pair embraced.
A similar mood of stunned disbelief permeated Stormzy’s fantastic Other stage set. This time last year, he noted, he was playing to “300 or 400” people in the festival’s dance area. “My mum’s going to be so confused by seeing 20 or 30,000 people watching her little boy,” he told a crowd he had such control over they created a vast moshpit at his behest.
But watching him, it was easy to see why he’s become grime’s biggest breakout star. He’s a unique and gripping performer, cutting an endearingly gangly figure at odds with the standard macho rapper’s bluster, and has talent.
His speech about the Grenfell fire – “we are urging the authorities to tell the fucking truth … we are urging the government be held accountable for the fuckery they’re holding up” – was impassioned and heartfelt, while his concluding performance of Shut Up turned into a delirious singalong, one of those moments where being in the middle of a Glastonbury crowd seems about as exciting and stirring an experience as live music can offer.
Foo Fighters’ headlining Pyramid stage performance made for an intriguing study in contrasts with Radiohead’s appearance 24 hours before. From abstruse experimentalism to undemanding, gonzo post-grunge rock; from a band for whom the mere mention of a traditional rock cliche would bring on a terrible case of the vapours to a band who gleefully embrace every traditional rock cliche going – up to and including the late Freddie Mercury’s old “day-oh!” audience participation routine – and from Thom Yorke mumbling about ley lines and “useless politicians” between songs to Dave Grohl’s relentless bonhomie and hearty cheerleading, which didn’t just happen between songs, but during them: you were never more than 90 seconds away from a cry of “do you like rock’n’roll?” or “you guys need a break or you wanna keep it up?”.
From The Best of You to The Pretender, their own material invariably came equipped with huge choruses designed to be bellowed along to; they covered Another One Bites the Dust and Under Pressure; they gave every impression of being willing to play all night were it not for the curfew.
As an exercise in crowd-pleasing it was hugely impressive, and incredibly effective.
Clearly not a man much given to shy understatement, Grohl nevertheless seemed genuinely taken aback by the sheer fervour of the crowd’s reaction: the sound of them still singing the coda of Run long after the band finished finally seemed to render him speechless.
For a moment he stopped asking them whether they liked rock’n’roll or if they were having a good time and walked away from the microphone laughing in disbelief.
Sunday afternoon brought with it bright sunshine, and a crowd that stretched so far outside the John Peel tent that those at the back may well have not even been in the same postal district as the actual stage on which The Killers were performing an ostensibly “secret” set. Over on the Pyramid stage, meanwhile, two of the greatest back catalogues in pop history were on offer. There was a real emotional charge about Barry Gibb’s performance in the traditional Sunday afternoon heritage slot: for all their brilliance, and the vast quantity of records they sold, the Bee Gees songs he performed were once largely reviled or treated as a joke. Gibb seemed both startled and moved by the reaction from the Glastonbury audience, but his set never put a foot wrong - it offered wall-to-wall classics, from the late 60s balladry of I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You to relentless disco pulse of You Should Be Dancing to Islands In The Stream. You could hear an echo of the years the Bee Gees were mocked in the note of apology with which he introduced Stayin’ Alive – “we have to do songs from that film” – but by the end of the set, with the crowd chanting his name, the security guards at the front of the stage performing synchronised John Travolta dance moves and Gibb wearing a gold jacket passed to him from a group of audience members dressed as him is his 70s pomp, the note of apology was gone. Nile Rodgers and Chic, meanwhile, had so much sublime music at their disposal that there was no room for some of his greatest songs – Sister Sledge’s Lost In Music and Dance Dance Dance among them. Their performance still felt like a relentless, delirium-inducing barrage – We Are Family, Le Freak, Good Times, Get Lucky, Upside Down, I’m Coming Out, Let’s Dance.
It’s a tough act to follow, particularly given that Ed Sheeran elected to perform the weekend’s final Pyramid stage headlining slot almost entirely solo: a traditional Irish band appeared for one song, but that’s about it for unexpected surprises. At this point in the weekend, the crowd tends to respond to something comforting and familiar, which was precisely what Sheeran provided. In fact, stripped back to an acoustic guitar and a loop pedal, his music was noticeably more visceral than on record – Bloodstream in particular concluded with a genuinely gripping torrent of overdubbed guitar noise – but it was clearly the singalong factor that the audience are there for.
They didn’t leave disappointed. For all his nerves as he took the stage – he kept suggesting the crowd might not know the songs, which taken into account their ubiquity in recent years seemed profoundly unlikely – there was nothing tentative about his performance; given that he didn’t really do much other than play his guitar, hammer out beats on it with his hands and sing, he made an oddly compelling onstage presence, and the audience clearly loved him, bellowing along to the oft-mocked Galway Girl and the genuinely fantastic Sing alike. Sitting on the edge of the stage at the show’s end, draped in a flag and singing You Need Me, a bullish screw-you written when he was 15, he didn’t look much like a man still plagued by nerves over headlining Glastonbury.
