Glastonbury live: Dua Lipa, Marina Abramović and more to perform ...

28 Jun 2024

The Guardian

Glastonbury live Dua Lipa Marina Abramović and more to perform

The festival’s biggest stages are opening today and the sun is almost shining – join us as we review sets and look towards sets from LCD Soundsystem and more

We can hear the soulful oomph of Olivia Dean wafting over the Portakabin. Here she is having a lovely time on the Pyramid stage!

Waiting around at the Other stage for Headie One to begin when I have what looks like a voodoo stick waved in my face. David (pictured) tells me this is Keith Richards, “from the Rolling Stones, but he’s not with them right now, he’s with me.” Are David and Keith regulars? “Keith’s never missed a year.”

Here’s Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis performing on the Park stage yesterday!

Hat news: Safi Bugel reports that there’s “about 2m bucket hats in the Barry Can’t Swim crowd”. More on Glasto fashion from Sirin Kale later!

Marina Abramović has set herself a tall order for later today – to get the Pyramid crowd to be silent for seven whole minutes. Read more from Lanre Bakare here.

Can Marina Abramović get Glastonbury to be silent for seven minutes?

I’ve never been happier that I went to bed last night instead of trekking up to the Crows’ Nest for the ALLEGED Four Tet DJ set!

Funniest moment of Glastonbury so far was going to a 'secret set' billed as Will b2b Kieran. Rumoured to be Burial and Four Tet, people in the crowd announcing it as fact, confirmed by 4 undisputed sources etc. They come on and it's just two random lads called Will and Kieran

— patrick hinton (@patrickch_) June 28, 2024\n\n"}}" config="{"renderingTarget":"Web","darkModeAvailable":false,"updateLogoAdPartnerSwitch":true,"assetOrigin":"https://assets.guim.co.uk/"}">

Funniest moment of Glastonbury so far was going to a 'secret set' billed as Will b2b Kieran. Rumoured to be Burial and Four Tet, people in the crowd announcing it as fact, confirmed by 4 undisputed sources etc. They come on and it's just two random lads called Will and Kieran
— patrick hinton (@patrickch_) June 28, 2024

Pyramid, 12.00pm

Generally the Pyramid stage opening act gently eases you into the day but Squeeze get you on your feet, shove a largarita in your hand and tell you to get back in the game. Snappily dressed in sharp tailoring, they kick Take Me I’m Yours instantly into a high gear, almost towards a rockabilly tempo, with Glenn Tilbrook’s soul-boy voice heated up into rock’n’roll. Suitably warmed, he swerves expressively around his upper register for Hourglass as the backing band prop him up with five-way vocal harmonies. Later, his songwriting partner Chris Difford gives Cool for Cats quite the opposite vocal treatment. On release in 1979 it was the pub-bar chatter of a twentysomething likely lad; grizzled and even deeper-voiced, he now sounds like the pub’s landlord delivering an old yarn.

New song One Beautiful Summer gets a warm reception, and when I interviewed Difford earlier this week he told me it was inspired by a Guardian article about late-in-life romance at an Eastbourne care home. “Unfortunately the guy passed away and she was left to pick up the pieces of her heart,” he said. “We’ve written this song to reflect what it must be like to be in a care home and have a relationship at very late stage of life. Because it’s just around the corner for us!”

He and Tilbrook celebrate 50 years together this year, and as this set shows, seem energised by the very spunk that fires up the songs they wrote in their youth. Difford told me they’re even planning to revisit some unrecorded mid-70s demos. “It’s been kind of like an archeological dig, we’ve going around with a brush with each song and taking it out of the ground,” he said. “I think: those young lads had incredible ambition and commitment to writing those songs, and here they are all these years later.”

While Tilbrook and Difford remain the heart of the band, the supporting players are terrific: their keyboardist doing an analogue synth solo in Slap and Tickle by karate-chopping the keys, while Pulling Mussels (From the Shell) has hard-pounding piano and punchy congas, and later their pedal steel player gives a magnificently gurning solo. But this Pyramid crowd pull their weight too. Up the Junction provokes one of the loveliest sounds you get on this stage – thousands of people wordlessly singing a riff – and Tilbrook leads a giant call and response for Black Coffee in Bed. “You’ve made an old man cry,” says Difford, and the wave of love surges back towards him.

Woodsies, 11.30am

How best to open a festival? Some winsome, gently cooed folk ballads, to ease hungover punters into the day? That’s one option, but the schedulers at Woodsies have instead opted for a bracing blast of thrash metal to blow away the cobwebs. The first Indonesian band to ever play at Glastonbury, Voice of Baceprot are a female power trio whose cheerful onstage disposition masks an impressively beefed up brand of old-school metal. Dressed head to toe in black, including hijabs, it’s immediately clear they mean business from the very first chugging drop D riff they launch into.

Their sound owes much to the big four of 80s thrash, but there’s a hint of System of a Down in their off kilter melodies and a dash of Primus in Widi Rahmawati’s frenetic slap bass riffs. She’s given plenty of room to show off her chops, as is drummer Euis Siti Aisyah, whose extended mid-set solo gets the biggest cheer of the day. But perhaps most impressive of all is vocalist Firda Marsya Kurnia, who is equally at ease delivering a lacerating growl or a clean, soaring pop-metal melody. There’s a lovely moment where, right after concluding one of their many bruising breakdowns, the band pause to wish Rahmawati happy birthday and Kurnia gets a little teary at the sight of hundreds of Glasto punters joining in. “This is the best gig ever” she yelps, and in the moment it’s hard to disagree.

Woodsies, 12.45pm

Pouring Red Stripe down each other’s throats at midday, here come Lambrini Girls, careering around the stage in a blaze of guitars-aloft feedback, blitzkrieg drums and savage lyrics that cut through the bullshit of 2024 culture wars.

“Big dick energy / You’re such a fake / Stay the fuck away from me!” screams singer Phoebe Lunny, before asking for a show of hands for “queer legends and non-binary legends” and launching into Help Me I’m Gay. Then during Terf Wars there’s a call and response routine: “Shut your stupid fucking mouth,” yells Lunny while the crowd yell back “You stupid fucking terf!” One suspects the Radio 2 playlist does not beckon.

But in a year in which Coldplay, Dua Lipa and Shania Twain are taking the plum spots it’s thrilling to hear the exact polar opposite, a truly righteous racket of youthful anger.

Elle Hunt, in the field, sends an important update:

Long, dusty trudges across the countryside are a hallmark of the Glastonbury experience but people’s fits often provide food for thought. I’ve just passed a man whose slogan t-shirt has given me food for thought to sustain me for the entire walk from Park stage to the Pyramid. It read: “STOP GLORIFYING RATS”. They’ve had it too good for too long!

A couple of lovely snaps from our intrepid photographer David Levene from yesterday.