Monday, June 27, 2011

The Glastonbury festival showed it's a place where anything can happen

The topic of climatic conditions at Glastonbury is presumably one of which everyone is heartily sick of hearing: everyone appears to have been called to pronounce upon them, up to and including noted festival expert Nancy Dell'Olio, who offered her indispensable take on the situation to the Daily Mail ("I am, how you say, out of my comfort zone. People seem to smell not too good"). But even if you're trying to concentrate on the music, the weather's impossible to avoid, largely because it changes the way audiences react to what's
happening onstage. By Friday afternoon, Glastonbury's usual we're-just-glad-to-be-here atmosphere of blithe acceptance has evaporated, replaced by a kind of grim fatalism: the crowd's mood is more difficult to judge, artists have to work infinitely harder to win them over. It's tough on the Vaccines, who have decent tunes to spare but not a vast amount in the way of charisma. "Who gives a fuck if it's raining?" offers frontman Justin Young, or at least words to that effect. There's a rather wan cheer in response, a sound that seems to say: well, we do mate, largely because, unlike you, we won't be getting on a luxury tourbus and leaving in about an hour.
Over on the Pyramid stage, meanwhile, the Wu-Tang Clan's grimy hip-hop seems as dark and ominous as the skies: some of them appear to be performing with towels over their heads, presumably in a feeble attempt to keep dry. They start badly, introducing Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing Ta F' Wit by complaining about their recent treatment at Heathrow – a subject the crowd, whose travel arrangements have recently involved dragging their worldly goods through six inches of slurry, seem curiously uninterested in – but win people over by the simple expedient of shouting about how good they are in between every track. The audience seems to concede they have a point: there's something thrilling about the way their voices collide, how everything appears to be permanently on the verge of total chaos without ever actually falling apart. They join in happily with a tribute to the late Ol' Dirty Bastard, which even seems to please Raekwon the Chef, who's spent the entire set wearing the kind of expression suggestive of a man who's been told his yurt's been flooded.
Aside from the rain, Glastonbury 2011's other big feature is the surprise guests: last year, Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood fetched up and performed tracks from Yorke's solo album, The Eraser. This year, aside from one doughty soul who insists that Friday night's unbilled performer is going to be Lionel Ritchie, everyone seems to know in advance that they're bringing the rest of Radiohead with them. The crowd that elects to trudge up the vast slippery gradient to The Park area is vast enough to not only fill the area in front of the stage, but the hill that overlooks it. Back at the Pyramid stage, Morrissey is left belting out Smiths songs to a sparse audience – although it starts getting noticeably less sparse when it becomes apparent that Radiohead intend to play a set almost entirely drawn from the recent King of Limbs, an album that received a pretty lukewarm reception, at least by their standards. In fairness, you could argue that expecting Radiohead to start pandering to the wishes of a mass audience is a bit like expecting Radiohead to come onstage and perform a cover of Baggy Trousers while Thom Yorke flies around the stage on wires: on one level it's a strangely appealing idea, but it's never going to happen.
If you believe that you can tell how well a Glastonbury set is going by how easily the audience has its attention drawn from the performer by the panoply of other sights on offer – during Gorillaz's lacklustre headline appearance last year, a large section of the audience was distracted by the diverting sight of a man climbing a wooden structure stage left and exposing his genitals – you might note the fact that about three songs in, the hill keeps exploding into random applause. Alas, they're not cheering Radiohead's boundless determination to look forward, to be unswayed by the demands of those less musically adventurous than them, but the sight of people who've decided to leave and realised too late that if you get too much momentum behind you when walking down a muddy hill, it's literally impossible to stop until you fall over, and sometimes not even then. It's like a cross between You've Been Framed! and It's A Knockout up there, albeit with an incongruously gloomy soundtrack.
You're certainly never going to accuse Friday's Pyramid stage headliners U2 of failing to consider sufficiently the demands of a festival audience. They do pretty much everything they can to win them over short of handing out wet wipes and inviting them back to their dressing room to dry out. They play the hits, hammering home the fact that they have a bigger catalogue of songs, all written with at least one eye on getting tens of thousands of people to punch the air in unison, than anyone else appearing at Glastonbury this year. They play small sections of other people's hits: Primal Scream's Movin' On Up and Destiny's Child's Independent Women. They play Jerusalem. You get the feeling they'd play the music off the Go Compare advert if they thought people would sing along in a sufficiently rousing manner. Bono works the crowd relentlessly, the rain collecting on his sunglasses. In an echo of their famous Zoo TV shows they have huge screens flashing random words – "futon" crops up at one point – and a satellite link-up with astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, orbiting the earth, who quotes David Bowie's Space Oddity. It's hard to think what else they could conceivably do, which means it's hard to work out why it doesn't quite work: you'd never call it a flop, but one of those famous Glastonbury moments of mass transcendence stubbornly refuses to happen. It could be the fact that, by the middle of their set, the rain is falling in a manner that suggests the preceding two days were merely a dress rehearsal.
Heading over to the Other stage after their set finishes, you can catch the last three songs of Primal Scream's set: there's none of the grand spectacle of U2, but as they tear through Rocks there's a genuine sense of connection with the audience that makes U2's performance feel a little removed and distant, despite their efforts to the contrary.
On Saturday afternoon, the sun comes out and Glastonbury is revealed in all its multifarious, eclectic glory. On the West Holts stage, the middle-aged Syrian vocalist Omar Souleyman is playing pounding Arabic techno – this is apparently what they listen to at Syrian weddings, which certainly makes a mobile DJ playing YMCA and the Macarena look a little jejeune – while insouciantly smoking a fag; the audience understandably adore him. On the Pyramid, pop-rapper Tinie Tempah has to work noticeably less hard to get people moving than the Wu-Tang Clan did 24 hours previously, although the string of top 10 hits in his set probably helps. Rumer draws a far smaller audience than you might expect, given how many albums she's sold, but she covers Laura Nyro's Stoned Soul Picnic and sounds fantastic: cosseting and languid and warm. Meanwhile, the overlooked Fool's Gold fit the newly buoyant mood perfectly: songs sung in Hebrew, tinged with the kind of African influences that suggest comparison to Vampire Weekend, but more loose and fluid and joyous.
Tonight's secret guests on The Park stage are even less secret than Radiohead: the Sun has already informed the world that it's Pulp. The crowd is even bigger than the preceding night's, the atmosphere utterly different. As with the re-formed Blur's set two years ago, it's not merely celebratory, but marked with the lovely feeling of restitution, as if the crowd is trying to apologise on behalf of the British public. As Jarvis Cocker noted at the time, one of the reasons Pulp split up was that "nobody was that arsed" about their records any more. They seem very arsed indeed tonight: the set is a reminder both of what an engaging frontman Cocker is, and of how many fantastic songs they had, overshadowed in the collective memory by Common People: Razzmatazz, Something Changed. Anyone who cleaves to the is-the-audience-distracted theory of Glastonbury success might care to note that, up on the hill, during the latter song, a man climbs a stepladder, inflates a long blue balloon, then appears to swallow it to barely a flicker of interest.
It's a triumphant return, as is the appearance of Elbow on the Pyramid stage, three years on from the televised performance that belatedly catapulted them to mainstream fame. The line about them being The People's Band is both a cliche and a bit daft, suggesting as it does that every other band's fanbase largely comprises hamsters or chickens, but you see immediately why it's come about: the warmth radiates irresistibly from the stage, the sense of their performance as a kind of dialogue between artist and audience impossible to avoid. The crowd adore Guy Garvey: every time he smiles, which he does a lot, in the manner of a man who can't quite believe his luck, they go berserk. They encourage him to down a pint, he gets them to sing Happy Birthday to the band, formed, he claims, 20 years ago to the day. The elusive Glastonbury moment of collective transcendence doesn't just happen, it keeps happening, over and over again: a majestic, charged version of Open Arms, the beautiful drift of Weather To Fly. There's something inevitable about the finale of One Day Like This, but what you can't prepare for is the sheer emotional force of the audience's reaction, which knocks you sideways: you'd have to be a pretty flinty character to remain unmoved. Certainly flintier than Garvey, who understandably looks close to tears as he leaves the stage.
The feeling that it's a performance that's going to be hard for Coldplay to top is hard to avoid, and in a sense they don't: you certainly don't feel the kind of intense emotional connection that ran through Elbow's set, nor do you get the visceral power emanating from the Other Stage, where the Chemical Brothers, never the most opaque band, sound particularly cataclysmic and thrilling. What you do get is the feeling that Coldplay are a band who know exactly how to headline Glastonbury, having had a lot of practice at it: front load the show with hits, place the handful of new songs in such a way that the audience barely notice them – with the best will in the world, the fact that they're not terribly memorable probably helps – and get them singing along. Whatever you think of their music, you'd have a hard time arguing that it doesn't work in this situation, and it's impossible not to be impressed by how assured their performance is. It makes U2's set feel weirdly tentative by comparison, something nobody, not even you suspect the members of Coldplay, expected to happen. One of the least surprising bands in the world springing a surprise: proof, should it be needed, that even after 40 years Glastonbury is a place where almost anything can happen.

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