The New Cue #505: Dorian's Adventures in Glastonbury, 2025
'It’s the best place I’ve ever known.'
Good morning,
We start this week in the company of Dorian Lynskey, who won the prize this year of covering Glastonbury Festival for us.
His mission was simple: wander through the festival site for four nights, documenting what he comes across and we’d publish his reports and photos for all to enjoy today, Monday morning. This he did, though something happened to his phone and, after a series of frantic messages from other journalist’s laptops about two-step identification, we learn that his photos exist only in the cloud. Perhaps one day when Dorian’s Heart of Darkness documentary is released about the making of his technological Apocalypse Glastonbury 25 we’ll get to witness these photos, but no matter. His words paint a lovely picture all the same.
Enjoy the edition and see you Friday, perhaps in person if anybody is going to witness the return of Oasis in Cardiff that night. Don’t forget that Ted and Hamish MacBain’s book A Sound So Very Loud - The Inside Story of Every Song Oasis Recorded (five stars in MOJO, The Telegraph and Record Collector) is published this Thursday and that we have 25% discount online with Waterstones until midnight this Wednesday. Code Loud25 here.
See you soon,
Ted and Niall.
Glastonbury 2025
THURSDAY
“I don’t like drugs,” insists the young woman on shrooms. “I just like laughing.” She and her two friends, as glossy as WAGs and tripping balls, are a cheering sight on a Thursday night at Glastonbury. The adventure begins.
Your correspondent, however, has no room for shrooms. This year I’m determined to see as many bands as is reasonable, which means more walking and not so much psychedelic goofing. I clear the pipes with Pete Paphides’ non-stop set of 80s, 90s and 00s smashers in the Crow’s Nest, with its hillside view of the whole glittering panorama. As will become very clear over the weekend, the young folk know all the words. All the old songs are new again.
FRIDAY
It would have been nice to see Lorde open the festival with a secret set in Woodsies at 11.30am but the “secret” is out and the field is closed off before she even appears. It turns out she performed her new album in full as a release-day stunt so I’ll live. It’s Supergrass who pop the cherry. Midday on the Pyramid is an underrated dream slot: no clashes so a gigantic crowd eager for an adrenalin shot of familiar hits. It’s 30 years (!) since I Should Coco (anniversaries are one of the weekend’s themes) so they obligingly play most of it in the battering sunshine. That’s alright.
If Supergrass are Red Bull, then Burning Spear is herbal tea. Far be it from me to give an 80-year-old reggae legend performance tips but a little conga solo goes a long way, that’s all I’m saying.
To be fair, how could anyone follow CMAT? “My name is CMAT,” says the Irish charisma machine. “I have middle-child syndrome, an amazing ass and the best country rock’n’roll band in the world.” Her tunes alone would make her one of the finest Nashville-leaning singer-songwriters around but my God, the costumes, the dancing, the jokes, the nuclear force of her personality. With new songs like Take a Sexy Picture and the amazing krautrock nervous breakdown Jamie Oliver Service Station hitting hardest, this is feels like a star-making turn from a proper wild-card phenomenon.
It’s a strong year for yer good old-fashioned indie-rock. Wet Leg are brash and brawny, all their former twee window dressing torn down. Rhian Teasdale is a visual advertisement for their newfound swagger: buff, pink-haired and spikily glamorous, like a punk-rock Dua Lipa. The new songs pop, the older ones sound like they’ve been in the pantheon forever. Up at the Park (the most beautiful stage), English Teacher are a more unpredictable beast — an absolute nightmare for a music critic to be honest, each song its own genre. Despite their Mercury Prize triumph, they’re still chronically self-effacing (“I’m shitting myself,” confesses singer Lily Fontaine) but they don’t need to be. Amid the handbrake turns and proggy arpeggios are songs as simply devastating as You Blister My Paint. It feels like they could go anywhere from here.
By contrast, Franz Ferdinand’s showmanship makes no apologies. I feel like I’ve taken them for granted in recent years because they’re still as sharp as swords and as crisp as a pressed shirt. Peter Capaldi, all cheekbones and fine tailoring, joins them for a riotous Take Me Out, showing us the post-punk frontman that acting took from us. This song, of all song, needs no help but having the Doctor/Malcolm Tucker on its side certainly takes it up a notch.
Like Supergrass, Alanis Morissette got the memo. She made her name being furious on 1995’s Jagged Little Pill before going in an increasingly namaste direction, but she’s going back today. The likes of Ironic, which ironically lists things that aren’t ironic, and the restraining-order rock of You Oughta Know simply hit harder than the tea-towel philosophy years. It’s slick in that American veteran way but there are still shards of glass. Morissette somehow looks almost exactly like she did 30 years ago. All that yoga maybe?
Off to Woodsies for Pinkpantheress, who wasn’t born when Jagged Little Pill came out, or indeed most of the records she samples, thus making me feel as old as Burning Spear. Her joyful, TikTok-brained megamix of 90s dance music (a compliment!) is another example of the generation-blurring going on — a kind of pop fan fiction where she only keeps the best bits.
Being in a 90s state of mind, it feels only right to check in on Busta Rhymes for some classic hip hop tomfoolery. Will there be a special song “for the ladies”? Yes. Will there be crass samples of Seven Nation Army and We Are the Champions? Yes. Will the hype man say “Hell yeah?” Hell yeah! The best bit is either Woo Hah!!! Or when Busta does an impression of cleaning a turntable needle in order to educate “all you streaming ass face motherfuckers”. Few things make me happier than old-school hip hop vaudeville performed by a man who looks and sounds like a cartoon bear.
Self Esteem doesn’t have a song “for the ladies”, unless it’s all of them. She’s a kind of dance-pop essayist whose sharp observations on modern womanhood coalescence into something that still feels new and unexplored. It’s not just the fact that she and her dancers appear dressed for a production of The Crucible that makes this feel like beautifully directed theatre. Every move is purposeful and meaningful without forgetting to be fun.
And so to The 1975. I gather from online chatter that Matty Healy’s semi-ironic persona of a vainglorious fuck-up was divisive on TV but in the field I found it mesmerising. Like Self Esteem, he thinks hard about what a show can be. I’ve certainly never seen a better use of the stage-side screens, flashing up lyrics in their signature font (quite Adam Curtis) or montages of slogans and images (very Adam Curtis). I suppose they don’t have that one song that everybody knows — their Take Me Out or Alright — but they have so many good ones and Healy’s calculated, cigs-ahoy messiness is peppered with moments of wide-eyed sincerity about the scale of the occasion. I know they drive some people to distraction (for one song the screens show disparaging comments like “robotic versions of Huey Lewis songs,” which is quite funny) but I think they’re always reaching for something beyond the ordinary. Isn’t that the goal?
On the way to bed I cut through the Levels, the dance area, and hear Amelie Lens play a song that goes “co-co-cocaine” over and over again. A bit on the nose. I leave them to it.
Bands seen: 11
Steps taken: 36,742
SATURDAY
What did I tell you about the midday slot? Today’s indie good blokes are the Kaiser Chiefs, celebrating 20 years of Employment, and the field is rammed. Ricky Wilson’s knowing charm cements the jump-around bonhomie. There’s someone in the Pyramid crowd, seemingly there all day, who lets off coloured smoke flares for whatever they decide is the unbeatable big tune in every set. I Predict a Riot gets the acrid purple vote of confidence.
I’ve neglected the West Holts stage so I catch a bit of Nilüfer Yanya, who appears to like both Sade and Nirvana and thinks they would get on. Then through the Green Futures Field, where it is forever Glastonbury 1983 (tarot readings, weaving, nuclear war), to the Park for (a) some shade from the outrageous sunshine (b) and that annual delight, the American first-timer who finds Glastonbury wonderful and “crazy”. Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner, with her brilliant hats, is fizzingly upbeat, especially on Paprika’s glitter-bomb pop explosion. Lucy Dacus is more amiably low-key, wheeling on actual chaise long (Wet Leg will be fuming) for a lovely duet on Bullseye with jasmine.4.t.
The Park crowd is smaller than it should be, perhaps because so many people are watching (or trying to watch) public enemies Kneecap at West Holts. I decide against it, partly because it will be closed off, partly because I saw them at Woodsies last year, and partly because it feels like it will be a participatory news event more than a gig, like seeing Jeremy Corbyn in 2017. Apparently it’s quite something, from a musical, political and legal perspective, but I keep moving. One of the sweetest Glastonbury pleasures is cutting between stages through a show by a band you don’t care for and, purely by chance, catching their best songs. Randomly seeing Weezer finish with Say It Ain’t So and Buddy Holly is one of those moments.
“I just got my catalogue back and I’m gonna play every one of ‘em,” John Fogerty blares from the Pyramid. Fun fact: Creedence Clearwater Revival have more billion-stream songs than the Beatles, the Stones or anyone else from the 1960s. The same outrageous contract that wrecked both the band and its songwriter’s mental health ended up syncing them into cross-generational ubiquity. Now he’s won those songs back, he has his two sons in the band with him, and he wants you to know he won. “I outlived all those motherfuckers,” crows this impossibly energetic 80-year-old, all jacked up on old-guy vengeance and going in hard. The person with the flares is foxed by the climactic trio of Fortunate Son, Bad Moon Rising and Proud Mary. They’re going to need more smoke.
The identity of “Patchwork” at the Pyramid is the worst-kept secret at Glastonbury. It’s Pulp. “How did you know?” asks Jarvis Cocker. Everybody knew. The field is fuller than for any of the actual bill-toppers, making Pulp this year’s unofficial headliners. It’s 30 years (again!) since they did it for real, replacing an injured Stone Roses, and became pop stars almost overnight. Today they sound even better, majoring in the Britpop years and back-in-business highlights from new album More in an hour-long celebration of past and present. It’s all ecstatic but Common People is like an earthquake. I find myself pogoing and crying with purple smoke in my face and a Red Arrows fly-past behind me. It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever seen, at Glastonbury or anywhere. Jarvis produces a piece of yellowed card containing the remarks he read out here in ’95 but then tears it up to make the point that you can’t love inside nostalgia — your life is happening right now.
On the subject of fabulous frontmen, I love Father John Misty because no other singer-songwriter has such an appetite for the epic — the kind of music people lost their minds making in the 1970s. I’m not the only one. The crowd is so transfixed that a set heavy on the new album loses nobody. In fact the audience rises to the occasion and takes the music somewhere it hasn’t been before. During Mashashmashana a communal transcendence is achieved and Josh Tillman feels it, too. “That’s something I won’t forget,” he gasps.
As I cut through the Other Stage towards the Park, Skepta (replacing the very not-Skepta Deftones at the last minute) is quite the palate cleanser, if not palate scourer, before Beth Gibbons. The (former?) Portishead singer has assembled a virtuosic band that reminds of latter-day PJ Harvey or the Bad Seeds in its supernatural intensity. It’s music for a spellbound hush, which is to say Park music, with Glory Box as a little treat at the end.
Saturday night this year is an absolute scheduling catastrophe for me, with six tasty options: Neil Young, Charli XCX, Doechii, Caribou, Scissor Sisters and Leftfield. Close to the wire, I opt for a Charli/Neil combo platter, which proves almost existentially jarring. To go from 365 to Harvest Moon in the space of five minutes is to feel like someone in a sci-fi movie who’s been struck by an ageing ray. Charli’s heaving crowd is young and mental while Neil’s is older and more reverent. Charli is dressed for a rave PA; Neil for clearing some boxes out of his garage. Charli is brat summer; Neil is geezer winter.
Young is a master of the art of not giving a fuck. As soon as I arrive he starts playing an interminable song from Greendale and I panic that he’s blowing it but this turns out to be a trough between songs like Cinnamon Girl and Like a Hurricane. I could watch Young play guitar solos for days, which is good because they go on for days. Rockin’ in the Free World gives the camera operator a chance to show the crowd at last and catch people jumping and yelling rather than just old men softly weeping. It’s an unusually low-key Pyramid headliner — no lasers or confetti canons for this guy — but it works.
At the end of the night I hear a young bloke telling his friend, “I’ll be so depressed when I’ve left here. I have to come every year now.”
Bands seen: 12
Steps taken: 39,673
SUNDAY
Things have gone horribly awry. Somehow my phone screen has been damaged in a way that makes it misbehave like a haunted device in a horror movie and is absolutely useless. For the first time since 1994, I am phoneless at Glastonbury, as helpless as a babe in the woods. Excuse me while I rewrite my entire review so far from memory, by hand.
OK I’m back. It’s 3pm, I haven’t seen a single band and I need a laugh so I opt for Reform-curious pensioner Rod Stewart in the increasingly kitsch legends slot. Nobody has ever sold out like Rod. Midway through the 1970s he liberated himself from any notion of cool whatsoever and decided he would do literally anything for a hit. His shamelessness is a kind of superpower. Even so, hoo boy.
Dominated by what they used to call leggy dollybirds, Rod’s stage aesthetic is midway between Saturday night telly and an oligarch’s wedding. I don’t know if he’s about to announce the lottery numbers or dedicate You Wear It Well to the CEO of Gazprom. The early stuff sounds serviceable although he loses the thread of Maggie May and grubby thigh-rubber Tonight’s the Night is very much “of its time”. But elsewhere it’s mayhem: Benny Hill sax parping, Riverdance interludes, chintzy animations and confoundingly pointless cover versions like Love Train, awkwardly dedicated to the people of Ukraine. I snap during Do Ya Think I’m Sexy and therefore miss special guests Mick Hucknall and Lulu, in the same way one might miss a bullet. This five-alarm catastrophe of a set is by some distance the worst thing I have ever seen at Glastonbury. Something like this must never be allowed to happen again.
Nile Rodgers and Chic are the clean-up squad. The novelty of them ripping through Rodgers’ platinum back catalogue may have faded over the years but the delight never does, especially on a sweaty summer’s evening. I’m Coming Out and Upside Down sound radically better than they did when Diana Ross performed them two years ago, and you’re never going to hear Daft Punk play Get Lucky or Bowie do Let’s Dance. Let Rodgers brag and namedrop — his hit machine is always welcome.
It's been a rough day so I decide to please myself by revisiting three highlights from Glastonbury 2022. The best of these was St Vincent in her 70s rock’n’soul era. This time the look is sleek black minimalism and the sound more adjacent to Nine Inch Nails. She’s always evolving, always rearranging. She’s unusually sentimental tonight, dedicating New York to anyone who found themselves at Glastonbury: “You lose yourself, you find yourself. That’s how it always works.” Reader, I cried again.
Wolf Alice are also moving on. Ellie Rowsell has gone all rock star with her white thigh-high boots and cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams. The roaring new songs are more Wolf than Alice but the sweetness still matters — the way they can go straight from a Black Sabbath riff into a storm of bubbles for Don’t Delete the Kisses. They look so happy in the glow of the setting sun.
Apparently there’s a picture of Olivia Rodrigo on someone’s shoulders during Pulp’s set yesterday. It’s the same winning enthusiasm that leads her to bring on Robert Smith as a surprise guest to duet on two Cure classics and to call him Britain’s best songwriter. She’s a real fan, lovably sincere. It’s good to see anyone nail a headline set, let alone a 22-year-old with only two albums under her belt, offering an unusual combination of break-up ballads and gnarly punk-pop. The recipe for success is very simple: special guest, pyro, flattery, gratitude. Rodrigo does it all (bonus points for her anglophile shout outs for lunchtime pints and M&S cakes) yet never comes across as calculated. At the core of her professionalism is a pure and ingenuous desire to give everyone the best time she can. She makes you root for her because she’s rooting for us. It’s a bit of a triumph.
Attentive readers may have noticed a consistent theme regarding age and the passing of time. Jarvis asked us if we remembered the first time. Mine was 1994 (Blur, Orbital) and I’ve been coming every year since then bar one. For various reasons I can’t be sure if I will be back in 2027 but I love seeing all the new people joy-dazzled by their first times, when everything is overwhelmingly new. If this does turn out to be the last time for me, then I’ll surely miss it but I’ll just be happy it exists. It’s the best place I’ve ever known.
Bands seen: 5 (see previous phone-related excuse)
Steps taken: A lot