If you weren’t at Glastonbury, then it might have seemed like two questions hung over Friday. The first: has Alex Turner’s voice recovered enough for Arctic Monkeys’ headline set to go ahead after laryngitis forced him to cancel shows in Dublin this week? The second: who on Earth are The Churnups?
On the boiling festival site there was relief – yes, Turner seems to have recovered – and from our team at least, a bit of an eye roll. The Churnups, to no one’s surprise, are the Foo Fighters, and Dave Grohl and co (old hands at this festival by now) delivered a set of all the hits and no posturing – this was their first since the loss of their drummer Taylor Hawkins.
Away from the stalwarts, though, was the variety that makes Glastonbury so special: the UK’s most exciting new R&B girlband (FLO), an acoustic Americana legend (Steve Earle) and the thrilling, joyous, freewheeling fun of Carly Rae Jepsen.
Here’s what we loved on day one.
Carly Rae Jepsen, Other Stage
An absolute delight of a set from “Call Me Maybe” hitmaker turned cult pop queen Carly Rae Jepsen as the afternoon got going. A brilliant blonde ball of energy, she lit up the Other Stage and, though it was a little slow to get going (album tracks? snore), the big-hitters went all the way off, starting with “Run Away With Me” and its audacious sax intro.
Jepsen also debuted her addictive and sultry new song, “Shy Boy”, which really underlined the fact that she doesn’t truly need a live band and would sometimes be better off without, though she obviously loves playing with them: big muddy guitars robbed the song of some of its funk and sparkle. Her dance moves are pleasingly awkward and deeply literal, her song intros are cheesy and her bangers are absolute, era-defining classics.
Though “Call Me Maybe” was an obvious highlight (chucked into the setlist a third of the way through), it was “Cut To The Feeling” that left us all imagining we were teens at the apex of a high school romcom: euphoric and in love with absolutely everyone. Perfect for a sunny Glastonbury afternoon.
Kate Solomon
Yaya Bey, West Holts
Brooklyn singer Yaya Bey mesmerised the West Holts crowd with a balmy set of gently funky RnB. In a phenomenal dress – structured, triangular, giving the definite impression that it was made for a Christmas tree topper – she was the most psyched anyone has ever been to play Glastonbury.
This came out in adorably naive comments about it, like, “Raise your hand if you camped here” (that’s everyone), assuring us that it was very gangster of us to sleep in a field in sweaty tents without showering for five days. Her voice is rich and intoxicating, never more so than on her dreamy cover of “Pure Imagination” (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). She also gave an impassioned speech about the dangers of Exxon and the climate emergency, urging the crowd to feel their anger about the situation.
“Get angry – because if we don’t, it’s curtains for you and it’s curtains for me,” she told us before singing the most louche, comforting songs you could imagine.
Kate Solomon
Arctic Monkeys, Pyramid Stage
Rumours had been flying around all week about who would replace Arctic Monkeys as Friday night’s Glastonbury headliner. The band cancelled a date in Dublin earlier in the week, citing Alex Turner’s bout of laryngitis. But there was not a hint of a hoarse throat when Turner and co swaggered onto the stage dressed like they were ready to run kilos of cocaine in a 70s thriller: they were powerful and clever and overly self-aware.
It began somberly with “Sculptures of Anything Goes” and the crowd didn’t quite know what to do with itself. From there, they launched straight into a rager – “Brianstorm” – and it was like uncorking a shaken-up bottle of champagne: flares coloured the darkening sky, people leapt on each others’ shoulders and everywhere was suddenly completely alive. It felt like a patented Glastonbury Moment.
The pattern of sombre new stuff followed by absolute classic indie disco banger continued as the band juggled their artier material with the older, more raucous songs that a Friday night crowd at Glastonbury really wants to hear. It’s difficult to keep a rowdy crowd entranced with delicate, wordy songs when you know that really what they want to hear is a song you released in 2005, and at times it felt like a bit of a chore to indulge them.
Kate Solomon
Steve Earle, Acoustic Stage
I grew up listening to country singer songwriter Steve Earle – especially his 2000 album Transcendental Blues. But I have never seen him live until today and was so moved. He seemed to change instruments with every song in his set on the Acoustic Stage – harmonica, steel guitar, banjo – as he sang songs from across his career, from 1988’s “Copperhead Road” to last year’s soulful cover of “Mr Bojangles”.
Earle is 68 and an old-school troubadour, but his music is political and uncompromising – 2020’s album Ghosts of West Virginia was written about the victims of the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster and here he recited the names of all 29 as the crowd chanted along.
Before “Harlem River Blues”, he recounted the moment he found his son, the musician Justin Townes Earle, who died of an accidental overdose of cocaine laced with fentanyl aged 38 in 2020. “I lost my first-born son, who I love more than anything else in my life. That’s a hole I’ll have to walk around for the rest of my life… People say the hardest thing you ever do is bury a child but somebody does it every day. The only good I can find in it is to be able to stand here and say it out loud,” he said, as he warned of the dangers of fentanyl. “It’s out there.”
It was heartbreaking, but Earle manages to write and sing about unthinkable sorrow in the same breath as a joke about his life as a fool for love (he has been married seven times) – “this one goes out to whatshername, wherever she is,” he said at one point. The most gorgeous moment came when he sang “Galway Girl”, an irresistible Irish-influenced folk song full of the simple storytelling and mournful longing that has defined his life and music. I loved it.
Sarah Carson
Texas, Pyramid Stage
In an interview with us this week, Sharleen Spiteri said that putting her band on the Pyramid Stage – for the first time since 1999 – was a vindication. “It’s saying, ‘Yeah, as a band, Texas are important.’” It felt that way in the crowd: it’s a bold claim on Friday afternoon (when neither Blondie nor Mel C have performed yet) but this could be a contender for the most nostalgic set of the weekend.
Hearing Spiteri belting out “Black Eyed Boy” and “Inner Smile” felt like being whizzed back to the turn of the century; Texas’s music feels full of glimmering energy and optimism of the late ‘90s and while Spiteri is a force of nature on stage – she charges around, swears, punches the air – her songs are deeply, timelessly romantic. When she sings “Say What You Want” with its refrain, “It won’t change my mind/ I’ll feel the same, about you”, it’s with the same fierce, passionate conviction as when she first wrote it.
Close to the end of her set – before a cover of “Suspicious Minds” – Spiteri said she’d been asked the same questions all week about the number of women playing Glastonbury this year (all the Pyramid headliners are male acts). Her feelings, once and for all? “Emily Eavis is a massive supporter of female musicians… Not because she’s ticking a fucking box. She’s putting us on these stages because she thinks we’re fucking amazing.” Spiteri certainly is.
Sarah Carson
FLO, Woodsies Stage
The female trio from London seemed happily surprised by the size of the crowd that greeted them, but it made sense that swathes of R&B fans would have chosen the girl band’s set to kick off their afternoon. After all, if you closed your eyes, Flo’s velvet harmonies and fun lyrics about getting their nails done, and about men being immature, made them sound like a Destiny’s Child tribute band.
They fed a millennial crowd’s hunger for 90s nostalgia, and with Little Mix on a break, Flo fills a girl band-shaped hole in the world of music. The trio have been much hyped, winning the Brits Rising Star award and being the first girl group to win the BBC’s Sound Of…poll. It’s easy to see why – their voices sounded perfect on the Woodsies stage, they moved sleekly together, and they got the crowd going as they performed songs from their EP Believe.
Fun, buzzy, and although not hugely original, they were cat-nip to people who wish Beyonce would get the band back together.
Kasia Delgado