The New Cue #296 June 26: Dorian Lynskey's Adventures In Glastonbury
"An eerie fog of smoke lies over the hill, making the teepee field look like a phalanx of advancing wizards..."
Good morning,
What a weekend! Scorchio. None of us could make it to Glastonbury this year unfortunately, so we sent our pal the celebrated writer, broadcaster and music critic Dorian Lynskey down to Worthy Farm to let us know how it was. Yes, we could’ve watched it on telly, but none of us have TV licences, nor do we believe that is the way God intended music festivals to be enjoyed. Dorian is the witness we trust.
Normal New Cue business will be resumed on Friday with our Recommender. See you then. Take it away, Dorian!
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start the Week With…Dorian Lynskey’s Glastonbury 2023 Diary
Friday
“I thought I’d be pining for him,” the woman in the campsite tells her friend. “But after three days I’m like, I don’t know who you are. I’m away at war. What happens will happen.”
That’s the spirit. Aided by terrible phone coverage this year, Glastonbury can still feel like a different timeline, disconnected from the rest of the world. Up on the hill, after the traditional Wednesday night fireworks, speculation is rife. Will Alex Turner’s voice recover in time for the Arctic Monkeys to headline? (Yes.) Will the Titan submersible be found intact? (No.) Will Elton John be joined by Harry Styles, Britney Spears and Joni Mitchell? (Wait and see.) An eerie fog of smoke lies over the hill, making the teepee field look like a phalanx of advancing wizards. Everything is still ahead of us.
I start Friday with a cartoon bang, like a flag shooting out of a clown’s gun. The Hives have just one joke - they are the biggest and best band in the world - but it’s still a good one. Pelle Almqvist thanks “all the bands who warmed up the crowd for us and all the bands who will cool down the crowd after us.” Their lightning-flash suits are spectacular and their pop-art garage-rock no more dated than it was 20 years ago. What a blast.
Next up are the Lightning Seeds, a band I last saw here murdered by the pissing rain. In the endless sunshine their tuneful good-blokery glows. Will they play Three Lions even though it’s not a football summer? Won’t that be weird? They do and it isn’t. Ian Broudie calls it “our theme tune for good or ill”. Detached from a tournament, it becomes an immensely moving vessel for almost 30 years of memories, with the bonus of hearing David Baddiel’s verses sung by an actual singer with actual pitch. Tears are shed in my immediate vicinity.
A song that literally everyone knows is always something to behold at Glastonbury and Carly Rae Jepsen has another one in the form of Call Me Maybe. In a year that’s short on pure pop she’s a tonic, dressed like Disco Barbie with a permanent smile. You can see why she never became a heavyweight star - charm delights while charisma fascinates - but the songs! The jollity! On the way out I am recognised by a reader, which almost never happens. “How did you recognise me?” I ask with suitable aw-shucks humility. He points at my press pass, as if explaining to a child. “You have your name around your neck.” Ah yes.
Critics should never pretend to objectivity but I can’t imagine anyone would able to deny with a straight face that Gabriels were up to something special on the West Holts stage: right place, right time, right performance. Jacob Lusk’s tear-stained face at the end says that he knows it too. Lusk can do the lot. He sings like Al Green and Sylvester, pairs a kilt with a cloak and brings together the church and the club. A cover of Soul II Soul’s Back to Life with Celeste gets the biggest reaction but the whole show is a love affair.
There’s some serious action in the wardrobe department this year. Chvrches’ Lauren Mayberry drenches her white gown in stage blood, arms red like Carrie. She’s both an arena-trained pro and someone who can front out losing her nipple shields on live television. They’re perhaps the only band since Depeche Mode who have managed to make synth-pop colossal. Obviously I cry during The Mother We Share. I love a weep at Glastonbury.
Sparks at the Park have also very much made the effort. I’m an agnostic because their music always seems to walk the line between magnificent and doing my head in but my god the Mael brothers know how to do a show. It’s histrionic and absurd and absolutely winning. Plus you get double Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett dancing for one song in a lemon suit, shades and headphones, which is a flex. The Arctic Monkeys aren’t going to get Meryl Streep on are they?
They’re a funny business, Arctic Monkeys. The UK’s last mega rock band to break through, three nights at Emirates Stadium, yet there’s still a crucial component missing. I think it’s affection for the audience. The recipe for a successful Glastonbury headliner is simple. One: play your most beloved songs. Two: throw in a cover version or guest star to make clear that this is not just another gig. Three: say again and again that you’re delighted to be there. This is the Arctics’ third time and they still don’t understand the assignment. Alex Turner’s Phoenix Nights Elvis shtick is like a plastic shell between himself and the crowd. He can make even “thank you” sound sarcastic, which is a rare gift I suppose.
To be in a vast crowd singing every word to Mardy Bum or Fluorescent Adolescent is no chore but much of the set is slow, grinding and introverted. It’s been 10 years since they’ve released a song fit for a big stage. The punters are here for AM and the debut, not the velveteen sounds of the Alex Turner Experience. Opening and closing the main set with songs from The Car is certainly a choice, and one that leaves many people bewildered. Is that it? Notwithstanding its viral success, I Wanna Be Yours clears the area around me quicker than a bomb threat. Everyone goes bananas for I Bet That You Look Good on the Dancefloor of course but it’s as if Turner has a mental circuit-breaker which prevents him from ever making that vital festival connection.
Off to Arcadia, past a gaggle of children chanting “Arcadia! Arcadia!” You’d think it was an adventure playground rather than an open-air terrordome presided over by a fire-breathing spider. Of all the many many rave options, this is the only one that allows you to feel like a member of a dystopian cult while dancing to the Chemical Brothers. Dance, drink, eventually bed.
Saturday
I didn’t see many new bands yesterday did I? To make amends, I start with hot new things the Last Dinner Party in the Woodsies tent. With dresses like Emily Dickinson and names and accents out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, they have inspired predictable suspicion but they’re intriguingly hard to pin down. There’s some Siouxsie, some Lana Del Rey, some Sparks and much more beside, each song its own identity. I failed to write down what new single Sinner sounds like but I’d never heard it before and was singing my head off by the end so they’re on to something.
Reviewer confession: I fully intended to investigate the fuss about Lankum but after a few songs of cheering mate-rock I realised that I was actually watching the Lathums. A sign on the kickdrum (“From nothing to a little bit more”) advertises the Wigan band’s endearing humility but with songs this immediate and frontman Alex Moore’s Garveyesque bonhomie, they seem likely to outgrow lunchtime slots in no time. Anyway, good band. Not Lankum. Jockstrap are definitely Jockstrap but they have more sunny-afternoon pop appeal than I expected. Traversing bumping techno, meaty trip hop and synth ballads, they are as grabby as singer Georgia Ellery’s Confidence Man-style gold bodysuit.
Worth filling up on glamour before Generation Sex. Whoever says punk’s not dead hasn’t seen former members of the Sex Pistols and Generation X prop up the carcass. This is punk stripped down to grotty geezer-rock, all the danger and provocation burned away. God Save the Queen is one of the most exciting songs ever written but when Billy Idol songs it I feel nothing. A version of My Way, memorably slaughtered by Sid Vicious, is akin to grave-robbing. I can almost hear Johnny Rotten’s contemptuous cackle.
I need the Manic Street Preachers after that. A consummate festival band with more hits than two of the headliners, they spice up the anthems with This Is Yesterday (sung by the Anchoress) and the masterful downer Die in the Summertime, dedicated to Richey Edwards and their notorious 1994 Worthy Farm debut. They’re so good at this.
One great thing about Glastonbury’s multiplicity is you can go straight from the Manics singing “I am an architect, they call me a butcher” to Lizzo asking “Do we twerk at Glastonbury?” and not get whiplash. This is the multi-generational hit of the weekend: a feelgood onslaught in which half the songs sound like Dove adverts and the other half are total filth. The music has obvious antecedents but Lizzo herself feels like a new kind of pop star, the queen of raunchy self-help.
Meanwhile at Woodsies what seems like the weekend’s biggest crowd assembles for Rick Astley and Blossoms singing the songs of the Smiths. It’s perhaps not great that glorified karaoke is such a big draw but the music is deft and affectionate and it’s fun to picture travelling back in time to 1987 to tell people that in 2023 Astley is more beloved than Morrissey. “What has Morrissey done to be less popular with Smiths fans than the Never Gonna Give You Up guy?” the 80s introverts would ask. Oh just you wait.
Yer actual Johnny Marr is busy playing with the Pretenders, whose set also features Paul McCartney silently waving (why not? i guess) and Dave Grohl on drums. This is less notable because King Good Bloke is a tireless guest star. I imagine bands cowering in the portakabins backstage while Grohl hammers on the window with his drumsticks shouting “Who wants to rock?”
Craving the rave, I take in a bit of Leftfield at the Park but have to abandon the bosh to catch Lana Del Rey, only to stand in silence for half an hour while she fails to appear. Doesn’t that mean she’ll have to cut short her set to meet the curfew? Doesn’t she know that?
Lana had it and she blew it. A friend said that she knew next to nothing about LDR but felt like she’d absorbed the whole story in one hour: the perfect bubble of a self-created world brutally punctured by reality. The good stuff first. This might be the most aesthetically beautiful set I’ve ever seen at Glastonbury - an intricate spectacle of ultra-stylised performance art with dancers circling a woman who has made the transition from ingenue to diva, somewhere between Jackie O and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd. Wearing a crystal-encrusted headband, she is both regal and vulnerable: an empress who requires careful handling.
She starts slow and hushed with doom ballads like Young and Beautiful and Bartender. It’s funny that she clashes with fellow Los Angelenos Guns’N’Roses because the women in her songs seem to have dated the bad bad men in their songs. Even near the back nobody drifts away and nobody talks. Her voice is perfect, the staging fabulously strange if borderline ridiculous. Everyone is transfixed, to say the least. During a magnificent Born to Die one young woman holds up a sign reading “Lana Del Rail Me.” Around this point I’m convinced that I’m watching the set of the festival. Lucky me!
As midnight approaches, though, I get anxious. Lana claims that she was late because her hair needed doing - not great when her hairdresser has to finish the job on stage - and says she’s going to proceed as normal and “see what happens”. Just imagine the people on the side of the stage begging her to cut to the finale before it’s too late. Does she think the curfew is negotiable? My stomach clenches.
So what happens is this. Just when things are flying, with toweringly intense versions of Ultraviolence and White Mustang, the plug is pulled. No Video Games, no National Anthem, no Venice Bitch, no anything. Lana tries to address the crowd. Her lips move but no sound reaches us. A dancer claps her hand over her mouth in the universally recognised symbol for OMFG. Lana falls to her knees to literally beg the stage manager for an extension. No dice. She tries to talk again. The lights go out. The screens cut to a crowd safety announcement. She still won’t leave the stage. This is excruciating. “Oh my god I’ve never seen such drama!” says a woman behind me. “I love it!”
It’s mesmerising to witness such rare chaos. Lana had an extraordinary show and a besotted crowd and she inadvertently scripted a tragicomic denouement. For a singer who writes about messy, self-destructive women who make bad choices and act like life is a movie, it’s perfect isn’t it? This is what happens when a woman who writes her own rules discovers that she is powerless in the face of Mendip District Council. Ten out of ten for psychodrama. I want to tell the merry masses leaving the Park after Fatboy Slim what just happened, like a war correspondent.
Sunday
When I’m not giving people a blow by blow account of Lanagate I see some bands. If I go from the Pyramid to the Park via the Other Stage I can do the old review-and-walk. So I cut from the Chicks doing a lovely country-rock version of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide to the sci-fi shredding of the Nova Twins, a band with the power to redeem the notion of rap-metal from sports-bro hell. I get to the Park for eyepopping Soulwax proteges Charlotte Adigery and Boris Popull, who channel Grace Jones’ amused hauteur into sly club bangers. Contrast!
Weyes Blood does that classic American first-timer thing of mentioning paganism and drugs straight out of the gate to get the crowd on side. She does look vaguely druidic in white gown and cape. She calls her mixture of swoony soft-rock and ambient hymns a party set for “the kind of party where you cry and dance”. When I say that I slumbered blissfully for a few minutes in the middle, that’s a compliment. These are sad songs you can bathe in.
Today’s heritage punks are Blondie, with Debbie Harry’s CBGB’s T-shirt and the presence of Glen Matlock on bass compensating for absent members of the classic line-up. For a while the most gifted pop songwriters of the punk era, they pelt the immense crowd with hits, of which Atomic appears to be the Gen Z choice. But the force of Harry’s personality has held up better than her voice and one too many fiddly guitar solos sends me to Woodsies for unlikely Glastonbury debutantes Slowdive, who sound every bit as transporting as they did 30 years ago. Shoegazing springs eternal.
It’s always on Sunday evening when I suddenly feel overwhelmed by all the bands I see, all the stages I never visited, all the friends I couldn’t catch up with. But there is no Glastonbury multiverse. You choose one path, or it’s chosen for you, and you follow it while fitting in boring things like eating, sleeping and sitting down. Even if you plan it like a bank heist you can catch fewer than 30 acts - a drop in the ocean. You see who you see and don’t dwell on who you missed.
There is just time to see art-pop darling Caroline Polachek glam up Woodsies before braving the throng for Elton John’s last ever UK show. Pyramid audiences are notoriously fickle, ready to run for the hills at the sound of album tracks and new songs but Elton’s crowd actually grows during the set because he understands the three laws of headlining.
Firstly, it’s wall to wall hit singles, with a run of ballads sandwiched between two lots of bangers and bookended by fireworks. Guests are generously welcomed and mostly new artists who would benefit from the showcase: Rina Sawayama romps through Don’t Go Breaking My Heart and Gabriels’ Jacob Lusk was born to sing Are You Ready for Love. Someone near me lets of a grey flare that smokes like a Victorian factory so I spend half the song coughing but apart from that it’s fabulous. The relative old-timer is Brandon Flowers, who brings some Vegas to Tiny Dancer. Wearing a typically understated gold suit, Elton slips into the role of cheerleading master of ceremonies. Dedicating Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me to George Michael on what would have been his sixtieth birthday is another reminder of Elton’s long-time role of pop’s mother hen.
Thirdly, he heaps praise on the festival, especially all the people doing 70s Elton cosplay down the front. The fact it’s his farewell show gives the finale a real emotional kick, so when he says “I will never forget you” it sounds like more than shtick. “Thank you so much Glastonbury. Thank you so much England.” As the fireworks burst during the final chorus of Rocket Man you don’t have to be much of an Elton John fan to be blown away by the generosity of this show - the sheer determination to give people a good time. Future headliners take note.
At this point it is impossible to sum up the glorious abundance of Glastonbury, the endless opportunities for joy. Even when it’s not a vintage line-up, it’s a wonderland. So I will steal a line from an American I overheard earnestly describing his first Glastonbury to someone: “I think it’s such a miracle in action. It cannot be understated.” Amen.
