Audience comes to Scottish singer’s aid at Pyramid stage, while late-arriving US star performs a cappella after midnight curfew
As this year’s Glastonbury festival comes to a close, here is a look back at some of the weekend’s most memorable moments.
Continue reading...On stage at Glastonbury, Sawayama criticised the 1975 frontman over podcast appearance in which he joined in with mockery of rapper Ice Spice and referred to racially charged pornography
Pop singer Rina Sawayama has spoken out against her labelmate, the 1975’s lead singer Matty Healy, for widely criticised comments he made on an American podcast in February.
Introducing the song STFU!, she said: “I wrote this next song because I was sick and tired of microaggressions. So, tonight, this song goes out to a white man who watches [pornography series] Ghetto Gaggers and mocks Asian people on a podcast. He also owns my masters. I’ve had enough.”
Continue reading...Singer said recent months had been overwhelming and he needs to spend time with friends and family to recover
The Brit award-winning singer Lewis Capaldi apologised to fans after cancelling all of his upcoming commitments to “rest and recover” ahead of Glastonbury.
Capaldi, 26, said in an Instagram post on Monday that he is “struggling” after a “full on” couple of months in which he released the chart-topping album Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent.
Continue reading...Ex-Beatle’s gig seen by many in huge festival crowd as ‘something to tell your grandkids about’
Paul McCartney’s history-making Glastonbury set was hailed as one of the greatest headline performances of this generation as a crowd of more than 100,000 people gathered at the festival’s famous Pyramid stage to watch him play.
He was joined on stage by Bruce Springsteen and Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl – and even sang a duet with his old bandmate John Lennon, using special effects pioneered by the Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
Continue reading...Set at Cheese and Grain sold out in under an hour after being announced on Thursday night
Sir Paul McCartney delivered a surprise performance the night before his Glastonbury festival headline set, which had caused traffic congestion as fans tried to buy a coveted ticket.
The impromptu gig at the Cheese and Grain entertainment venue in Frome, Somerset, was announced on Thursday evening and sold out in under an hour.
Continue reading...From Glastonbury to Radio 1’s Big Weekend there are heady expectations of a vintage season
For a while it felt so far away: listening to your favourite artist, pints flying overhead, queueing for portable toilets, losing your friends and finding new ones. But after two years of cancellations and delays, music lovers can once again look forward to an array of festivals and gigs this summer.
From Paul McCartney at Glastonbury and Tyler, the Creator at Parklife, to Adele and Elton John at BST Hyde Park and Liam Gallagher at the Etihad Stadium, there’s something in the music calendar for everyone.
Continue reading...As the festival returns from Covid-enforced hiatus, over half of the acts announced so far feature women
Paul McCartney, Kendrick Lamar and Olivia Rodrigo have been announced as among the stars performing at this summer’s Glastonbury festival.
Out of the 89 names announced so far, 48 are women or acts that include female artists, meeting festival co-organiser Emily Eavis’s previously stated intention for Glastonbury to achieve gender parity on its bill. “Our future has to be 50/50,” she told the BBC in 2020.
Continue reading...Driven by a ‘groundswell’ of young devotees and fortysomething nostalgia, a series of events is celebrating the youth movement
It is perhaps one of the most ignored subcultures in modern British history, but rave music and the free party movement of the early 90s is coming back into focus.
Over the next few months, a series of films, exhibitions, memoirs and podcasts will reappraise free parties and the crackdown on them by John Major’s government, as well as their modern echoes.
Continue reading...The punky master of outsider art was once a pariah, thrown out of Britain for his anarchist ways. Now, he’s a national treasure. Joe Rush relives 40 years of sticking it to the ‘straight world’
“They thought we were terrorists,” says Joe Rush, remembering the day not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall when he and a fellow anarchist took over a patch of no man’s land at the heart of the German capital. They filled it with military hardware: tanks and artillery and the like – along with a MiG-21 fighter jet that they pointed directly at the nearby Reichstag.
“The authorities were furious,” he says. And no wonder. The police feared that, just as the cold war was ending, another military face-off had begun. “They thought we were going to fire missiles into the Reichstag,” says Rush. “So we pointed the MiG into the ground to make it clear we weren’t.”
Continue reading...Ahead of a livestreamed version of the festival, here are some of the biggest and best performances from years gone by
Continue reading...Exclusive: Founder says another cancellation would ‘be curtains’ for festival and has hopes for testing scheme, with daughter Emily saying they will ‘mutate to survive’
Glastonbury organisers Michael and Emily Eavis fear they could be in serious financial danger if the festival was cancelled again due to coronavirus.
Speaking exclusively to the Guardian to mark the festival’s 50th anniversary, Michael said: “We have to run next year, otherwise we would seriously go bankrupt … It has to happen for us, we have to carry on. Otherwise it will be curtains. I don’t think we could wait another year.”
Continue reading...Record 2.4 million fans tried to secure ticket for festival’s 50th year next June
Tickets for the 50th year of Glastonbury have sold out in 34 minutes, as a record number of fans tried to secure a ticket for the event at Worthy Farm next June.
Emily Eavis confirmed that a record number of people had registered to be eligible for the sale, which started at 9am on Sunday and was finished in little over 30 minutes. A record 2.4 million people signed up to have a chance of securing a ticket.
Continue reading...David Attenborough and the climate crisis take centre stage, while single-use plastic is banned for the first time. But have the festival’s environmental efforts gone far enough?
Twelve years ago, Sheryl Crow was laughed at for suggesting that green-minded people should use only a single square of toilet paper every time they go to the loo (or two to three sheets for “pesky situations”). Well, we’re not laughing now, are we?
On the day before the hottest day of the year so far (temperatures at Glastonbury hit 30C, elsewhere in the UK 35C), Crow knocks out hit after hit on the Pyramid stage under a giant globe, Glastonbury’s reminder that we’ve only got one planet, and dedicates Soak Up the Sun to Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist and school striker. Thunberg’s spirit is embedded in Worthy Farm this year. There are murals of her face with the slogan: “What would Greta do?”
Continue reading...Festival shuts down showers and offers extra shady areas, while sales of ice-cream soar
Long queues at taps and shower closures were seen across the Glastonbury site as the festival dealt with its hottest day as temperatures rose to 30C on Saturday.
Showers were closed across the site as a precautionary measure to preserve water as temperatures soared and the festival’s management coped with the demands of 200,000 people requiring drinking water in challenging conditions.
Continue reading...As his band gear up for Glastonbury, the singer talks about his Jewish politics and how there are musicians far more privileged than him
If you have never been to Glastonbury, you will always get people telling you that “it’s just got a different vibe to other festivals, man”. Even platinum-selling musicians. “It’s like being in some weird medieval village,” says Ezra Koenig, frontman of Vampire Weekend, who had played Glastonbury three times with the band before going as a punter in 2014, when it finally clicked. “I stayed up all night and understood: this is very special. I can’t think of many festivals where there are old hippies who do their thing and keep to themselves, and keep that spirit of the 60s alive with arts and crafts. And there’s all the secret stuff you find in the woods, the various raves, little mini pubs everywhere ... Everybody’s walking through the mud and there’s a real communal energy to it. Probably a lot of them are on drugs, too.”
His band are playing their biggest-ever slot at this year’s festival, Sunday night on the Pyramid stage just before the Cure’s headline performance. They released their fourth – and best – album Father of the Bride in May, and like the previous two, it went to No 1 in the US and Top 3 in the UK. It came six years after the last one, Modern Vampires of the City, with Koenig having taken creative control after fellow songwriter Rostam Batmanglij left the band.
Continue reading...Emily Eavis says there are male execs in music industry who insist on speaking to her father
The Glastonbury festival organiser, Emily Eavis, has said some men in the music industry still refuse to deal with her despite her taking over responsibility from her father for overseeing the lineup.
Speaking days before the start of this year’s event, Eavis, 40, who has been booking acts at Glastonbury for half her life, said she was often the only woman in meetings with music moguls.
Continue reading...Music festival will no longer sell single-use plastic water bottles in bid to cut waste
With its sea of discarded tents and litter-strewn fields, Glastonbury has become almost as infamous for the mountain of rubbish left in its wake as it is renowned for its music.
But this year, organisers are hitting back – by banning plastic bottles in a bid to stem the tide of waste.
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