From K-poppers Seventeen to performance artist Marina Abramović, via Cyndi Lauper and Little Simz, it was one of the most diverse editions yet. But the real fireworks came with a band who have taken things to another level
Friday morning at Glastonbury underlines that the old cliche about the festival having something for everybody is only a cliche because it’s true. Your options range from the beatific (Sofia Kourtesis’s lambent brand of techno) to the profoundly challenging (artist Bishi Bhattacharya performing Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano, which sounds every bit as nerve-shredding as you might expect). From the dependable – a sharp-suited Squeeze on the Pyramid stage, offering up one of the late 70s most beloved run of hits – to a largely unknown quantity. Now 80, Asha Puthli last performed in Britain in 1974: her oeuvre takes in everything from collaborations with Ornette Coleman to Bollywood soundtracks to new wave. A tiny figure swathed in chiffon, she turns out to be as spacey and idiosyncratic as the album on which her cult status is based, 1976’s The Devil Is Loose, highly prized by disco collectors and hip-hop producers in search of samples. Between songs, she reminisces about her friendship with legendary drag queen and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, complains about the weather (“it’s bloody fucking cold here – I just flew in from Miami”), and demonstrates how she achieved a curious bubbling sound that appeared on her 1973 cover of George Harrison’s I Dig Love: not, as was commonly supposed, by smoking a bong, but by gargling. Her voice is still capable of summoning up the eerie falsetto that punctuated her underground disco classic Flying Fish, while The Devil Is Loose’s acknowledged classic, Space Talk, still sounds incredible: a seductive, trippy dancefloor shimmer.
After UK drill rapper Headie One uses his 18-song set on the Other stage to unveil his new album – no fan of understatement, he incentivises fans to download it by informing them it is “a masterpiece” – the Pyramid stage plays host to the first-ever Glastonbury appearance by a K-pop band, the almost unreasonably pretty Seventeen, whose name is linked to the number of members and subgroups in the band and whose last EP, FML, was the biggest-selling in the world last year. The crowd they draw isn’t vast but at least some of it is very vociferous indeed: the stage-side screens unfortunately pick out a middle-aged onlooker wearing an expression for which the adjective “nonplussed” might have been invented, but equally, there are teenage girls down at the front expressing their appreciation by making a noise not dissimilar to Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano. And Seventeen, whose music varies from toothsome pop that comes accompanied by film of cartoon unicorns to what sounds like a peculiarly fresh-faced take on nu-metal, work very hard indeed to win over the merely curious. The hook of their closing track Very Nice is difficult to dislodge from your brain for the remainder of the day, simply because they repeat it so many times: every time you think they’re about to leave the stage, they start singing it again.
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