Glastonbury Festival

Neil Young has confirmed that he will headline this year’s Glastonbury festival, clarifying on his blog that he had received “an error in information” that had initially prompted him to pull out.

“Happily, the festival is now back on our itinerary and we look forward to playing! Hope to see you there!” he wrote. He did not explain what the “error” was.

Festival organiser Emily Eavis swiftly posted on Instagram: “What a start to the year!” she wrote. “Neil Young is an artist who’s very close to our hearts at Glastonbury. He does things his own way and that’s why we love him. We can’t wait to welcome him back here to headline the Pyramid in June.”

Neil Young has announced that he will not perform at Glastonbury this year, saying he believes the BBC’s involvement in the festival means it is “now under corporate control”.

The 79-year-old Canadian musican wrote a letter on Tuesday on his website, Neil Young Archives, detailing why he and his band the Chrome Hearts were backing out of the music festival, held each year at Worthy Farm in Somerset.

“The Chrome Hearts and I were looking forward to playing Glastonbury, one of my all time favorite outdoor gigs,” Young wrote. “We were told that BBC was now a partner in Glastonbury and wanted us to do a lot of things in a way we were not interested in. It seems Glastonbury is now under corporate control and is not the way I remember it being.”

The BBC has partnered with the festival since 1997.

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Young last performed at Glastonbury in 2009 as a headline act on the Pyramid stage, but only portions of his two-hour set were broadcast on the BBC. In response to criticism from Young’s fans, the BBC said it had “spent the last couple of months” negotiating with Young’s management about how much of his set they could broadcast.

“Neil Young’s career has been conducted on his own terms,” the broadcaster said in a statement at the time. “Neil’s management agreed to let TV and radio broadcast five songs as they watched and listened to his performance. They believe in the live event and retaining its mystery and that of their artist.”

Unlucky fans who did not bag tickets to next year’s Glastonbury Festival have taken to social media to slam the new ticket queue system.

Festival organisers debuted a setup on Sunday (17 November) where punters were “randomly assigned a place in the queue” rather than refreshing the holding page when tickets went live.

Tickets to Glastonbury Festival 2025 sold out after 37 minutes, with hopefuls branding the new process as “outrageous” and “horrendous”.

A report has claimed that music giant Eminem is being lined up to headline Glastonbury Festival for its 2025 event.

The festival, which takes place every year in Worthy Farm, Somerset, had faced criticism for its line-up of headliners this year. Topping the bill at Glastonbury 2024 were Dua Lipa, Coldplay (returning for their fifth headline set), and SZA, while the Legends slot was occupied by Shania Twain.

According to an “insider”, Glastonbury organisers are seeking to avoid similar criticisms next year by securing one of the biggest names in music for the Pyramid Stage.

Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, has never performed at Glastonbury before, though has headlined other prominent European festivals, including Reading and Leeds in 2017.

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Among the other major acts to have been rumoured for a headline slot in recent years are Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Stevie Wonder.

The food at the festival is these days so diverse and delicious that nobody would restrict themselves to just one thing. Food truck culture is firmly embedded in British culture these days – and Glastonbury replicates it on a gigantic scale.

The one thing that does unite the eating experience here, though, is the people you meet while scoffing it – all of whom embrace conversation and food-sharing in a way you would never experience in a Michelin establishment. People like Jessie, the smiliest ice-cream vendor in all of Somerset. Shepherds Ice Cream has been running at Glastonbury for over 30 years now and has built up a loyal following thanks to their niche use of sheep instead of cow’s milk, which produces a lighter gelato. While I demolish a Vietnamese coffee ice-cream with Biscoff topping, Jessie tells me how she has seen children who she once served return to the festival as adults.

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Does all this leave room for the fine-dining experience at Glastonbury? It certainly does – in The Rocket Lounge, not many hours after ska band the Trojans have brought their raucous set to a climax.

Cornish lobster ravioli with brandy bisque and crispy leeks? Lamb, sweetbread and morel wellington? Roasted sea trout with Devonshire crab velouté? It would, frankly, be rude not to try them. But although on Sunday they will be serving 436 roast dinners in 55 minutes, you still have to plan ahead. Unlike most of the food options at Glastonbury, diners can only eat here if they’ve booked the immensely popular tables in advance. The food is stunning, the accompanying Romanian folk band atmospheric, and the company divine – I am on a table next to Caroline and Steve, who have travelled from Amsterdam. They first ate here 10 years ago and have returned to The Deluxe Diner for every festival since. Head chef Andy and restaurant manager Leo tell me in the massive kitchen area how there have been frequent birthdays and engagements here. One punter even books in for each day of the festival so they can sample every item on the menu.

Does such swank fit in with the festival’s essential spirit (a starter and main is £45, two or three times the price you would pay for a similar-sized meal elsewhere on site)? Or is it all a bit like that time the Manic Street Preachers arrived on site with their own personal toilet? Having met the dedicated kitchen team – a brilliantly motley crew of old ravers and tattooed punks – and tasted the fruits of their labour, I’m an unapologetic convert.

Glastonbury’s cinema tent has hosted an impressive range of A-listers this year, from Paul Mescal (whose short shorts are yet to influence the Glasto blokes who adore a practical cargo pocket) to Tilda Swinton, Florence Pugh, Simon Pegg and Cate Blanchett. All dilettantes at this music festival, though, compared with actually singing Russell Crowe at the field’s opposite tent, the Acoustic stage.

In his Oscar-nominated performance in Gladiator he was “father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife”, and I rather thought he’d be uncle to a series of murdered cover versions, but I’m proved wrong. Billed as his Indoor Garden Party and backed by a sizeable band, he sings a series of self-penned songs inspired by moments in his own life, from thwarted love to the death of his father.

If you’re wondering what Russell Crowe’s music sounds like, yes, it’s that. He lives up to his everybloke image with music that isn’t just middle of the road but actually paints the white lines down it: a bit blues-rock, a bit country-rock, a bit rock’n’roll, a bit AOR, a bit singer-songwriter. His capable, unremarkable band cover all the bar-band bases: rhythmic piano, workmanlike trumpet, backing singers in minidresses sashaying and fingerclicking. Chords resolve with all the dull predictably and solidity of a straight-to-streaming three act drama. You rather imagine if Crowe transposed his lyrics into film dialogue, he’d wrinkle his nose at the script’s cliches and aphorisms: “Time keeps rolling on to the happy ever after”, “water is stronger than stone”, “how do I take this losing hand and somehow win”. A number of tracks are from a new album with the quite operatically Alan Partridgean title of Prose and Cons. There’s also flash of danger early on when his mic has a touch of static and he gives a glance sideways of pure intimidation. A new one is duly provided within about four seconds.

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He has that unreachable reality-bending presence of Hollywood actors, while being remarkably down to earth: a potent combo. Crowe may not be the world’s greatest songwriter, but he’s a very decent singer, and a truly world-class star.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/14095967

A black cloud makes its way across Glastonbury Festival’s Park stage - though today it’s a metaphorical one, for the bleakness that Dublin folk group Lankum bring feels entirely out of place in the current setting of gleaming sun that shines its way in a cheery halo around the area. In similar spirit, the band’s performance is one of polarity; great despair and intense joy, ebullient jigs and dismal doom. And in a word, the experience is spectacular.

After welcoming their crowd of “sexy weirdos” - the band are continually warm and witty - Lankum creep into their ten-minute cover of traditional folk song The Wild Rover from 2019’s The Livelong Day. The crowd are eerily silent (which is impressive, for this commonly chatty Glastonbury lot) as strings build into a see-sawing, foreboding melody to frontwoman Radie Peat’s bewitching voice, who is soon joined by the rest of her band - Ian Lynch, Daragh Lynch and Cormac MacDiarmada - in haunting harmony. Then, the strings bend, aching and swelling all the more into chasm-deep wells of dread. Lankum’s sense of doom is both disturbing yet euphoric, a tragic, glorious rebirth of the senses that finds its way into each of their following songs.

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Images of grisly landscapes echo in the mind later for the closing Go Dig My Grave from 2023’s Mercury Award-nominated False Lankum, its overwhelming cacophony bleeding out into the best folk horror soundtrack never written. As they finish, the tense shoulders and held-breaths of the crowd give out into roaring, satiated applause, and the momentarily, oh-so-deliciously dark corner of Glastonbury returns to its former, now somewhat more ordinary light.

BBC Music have their Glastonbury performance of Bear Creek.

It’s been home to some of the UK’s loudest singalongs, most propulsive rap lyrics and most cacophonous guitar solos. But the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury experienced something almost unprecedented in its history on Friday: total silence.

The Serbian artist Marina Abramović, invited by festival organisers Michael and Emily Eavis, led the audience in what she called a “collaboration” called Seven Minutes of Collective Silence, to “see how we can feel positive energy in the entire universe” and act as a bulwark against the horrors of war and violence.

Given it was announced only a day prior, there were understandable fears that the audience would not come along in the spirit of the collaboration, and might end up chattering or even shouting out during the intended silence. But in the end, aside from some very isolated screams and shouts, the only sound moving across the grass of the Pyramid stage field was the wind blowing through the valley, and the distant thump of other stages’ performances.

As the Glastonbury Festival weekend garners further momentum, Nottingham’s acclaimed post-punk duo Sleaford Mods took to the stage but were left unamused by the crowd.

Celebrating their extensive career, Sleaford Mods delivered an intense set on the Woodsies stage on Saturday evening, which received a positive reception from their fans. However, the band did not view it in the same light.

Vocalist Jason Williamson, who was annoyed by the less-than-impressive numbers in the audience during their slot, hit out at the festival for the arrangement. “There’s too many fucking people here. Not at our gig, I might add,” he said. “We played this stage ten years ago, and it’s still the fucking same. Glastonbury, fuck off.”

Since their set clashed with those from The Streets and Orbital, the scheduling might have had a big role to play in that. Furthermore, with Coldplay set to play on the Pyramid Stage later that evening, many of those at the festival had already flocked to see the Chris Martin-fronted band.

There comes a point at Glastonbury 2024 where it becomes easier to give up about a mile away from the stage.

Much like Sugababes’ overcrowded set, the grouchy, nostalgic pop-punk queen Avril Lavigne is one of the festival’s must-see acts, yet is shoved on a too-small stage in front of an overwhelming sea of people. Janelle Monae, over on the Pyramid Stage at the exact same time, is the unlucky recipient of poor planning – a genius pop star performing to a barely-there crowd. It’s not great.

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This is a brilliant show, but Glastonbury must learn lessons from a year that has vastly underestimated the appeal of pop nostalgia, and overestimated the interest in many performing over at the Pyramid.