Back from #Glasto2019 which was enormous fun and remains basically the best party on the planet.
Bjorn Again opened it brilliantly, being funny and playing Abba tunes makes for a great show.
Tankus The Henge were groovy and funky and I still love his smoking piano/climbing-frame.
Tim off of the Charlatans has even more stupid hair than I remember and seeing them was an upgrade from Snow Patrol who cancelled. Classic tunes.
Fatboy Slim still knows how to mix tunes together to create weird fusions and keep people dancing for ages.
She Drew The Gun filled up the John Peel stage nicely and performed their stuff brilliantly. Nice work there Louisa and crew. Glad to see you up there.
Janet Jackson was plastic and over polished and felt like a Disney musical at times. Seemed like exactly the same show, down to every beat and micropose, was likely to be playing everywhere regardless of anything the audience did.
Liam Gallagher was the opposite of that, being massively under-polished and generally a self aggrandizing moany drawling bloke.
The Killers did the best headline set of the weekend I reckon, awesome finish to Saturday. Pulling the Pet Shop Boys onto a stage is gonna improve basically anything really.
Baby Metal was hilarious and rocked very hard while also being cute and well choreographed. Hard to think of two genres more wildly different than Japanese Pop and Heavy Metal yet they fused it so you couldn’t see the joins.
Kylie was cheesy and way crowded, almost as crowded as the Rolling Stones a few years back. Which makes it kinda uncomfortable and difficult to concentrate on but she was doing great and it’s good to see her get to play after having to cancel a while back.
The Cure have written some great songs and play them well, but they’re very low energy and barely acknowledged where they were. They’d have made an amazing lazy sunday afternoon slot but just don’t really fit for a headline finisher.
Elvana play mostly Nirvana songs only fronted by a Northern guy pretending to be Elvis, which is almost as incongrous and hilarious as Babymetal, but not quite.
The fact drums are proscribed means the stone-circle had no drummers in it all weekend. And apparently it was the drummers which was the draw, for it was also pretty empty every time I went past. So that’s a big change.
The weather was dry and hot and yet I managed to avoid *too* much sunburn, stayed drunk but hydrated, ate plenty to great food.
And none of that is even what makes Glasto so fun, it’s the audience and the people you meet and the friends you spend time with that do that. Thanks for being so awesome everybody.
I didn’t take many pictures, coz long-shot blury photos of distant stages TV screens are pretty much entirely pointless, especially when the BBC are doing such a good job I’m sure.