Glastonbury 2023 review: giggly rap on Friday, Smiths covers on Saturday – and a mystery act that surprised no one

This year’s Glastonbury festival site seemed to be as awash with wild speculation as ever. Sunday’s headliner Elton John would supposedly be performing with special guest Britney Spears – for some reason, a post on Spears’s Instagram account featuring a photograph of a segmented apple was held up as incontrovertible proof that she was boarding a Somerset-bound helicopter. Others were convinced that Elton was going to bring on Harry Styles: after last year, when you could barely walk a few feet without hearing someone sagely informing someone else that Styles was definitely going to turn up on stage with Paul McCartney, or Billie Eilish, or Kendrick Lamar, or perhaps dishing up pad thai in a food stall just south of the Other stage, the former One Direction heart-throb now appears to be a permanent fixture of the Glasto rumour mill. Most lurid of all, there were those who insisted that the final British show of John’s record-breaking farewell tour was going to be enlivened by the spectral appearance of a hologram of the late George Michael.

Nevertheless, what was supposed to be the weekend’s biggest surprise turned out to be its worst-kept secret. Stories that the mysterious band who appear on Friday afternoon’s Pyramid stage bill as the Churnups are actually Blur or Pulp – two Britpop heroes currently reformed and playing shows – have long died out: everyone seems to know it is actually Foo Fighters, playing more or less the same slot at the festival as they did 25 years ago, when they were making their Glastonbury debut. Still, the audience gamely play along, roaring as if it’s an incredible and welcome revelation when the Churnups’ logo vanishes from the stage-side screens and is replaced by that of Dave Grohl and co.

Foregone conclusion or not, theres a genuine sense of excitement about their hour-long performance. Foo Fighters’ recent albums have arrived with an accompanying sense of obligation, as if they have been made simply to give the band an excuse to continue touring without slipping into the “heritage rock” category, filled with songs designed to tolerably plug the gaps between the hits in concert. However, this year’s But Here We Are – their first album since the 2022 death of drummer Taylor Hawkins – felt charged with a fresh sense of purpose and energy, as does their Glastonbury set. The band literally run on stage, already playing their guitars; as they charge through All My Life and a version of 2020’s No Son of Mine that comes interpolated with the riffs of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid and Metallica’s Enter Sandman, they sound more raw and vital than any artists rightfully should 28 years into their career. Grohl’s daughter Violet makes a brief appearance on vocals – impressively, she’s the very model of gum-chewing nonchalance in front of tens of thousands of people – but the most striking thing about their performance is how relaxed the songs sound, extended with lengthy solos and impressive fills from Hawkins’ replacement, Josh Freese. However awful the circumstances leading up to their most recent album, they sound like a band with something to prove, who are enjoying themselves enormously in the process of proving it.

Glastonbury is famously eclectic, its sheer scale and plethora of stages enabling it to be all things to all people: this is an event at which you can kickstart your Saturday morning by watching Rick Astley performing AC/DC covers while playing the drums, the Unthanks essaying trad arr folk, New York alt-disco trio Say She She followed by veteran Congolese soukous musician Kanda Bongo Man, or indeed by heading up to the Park stage to take in post-minimalist composer Max Richter accompanied by a string quartet and Tilda Swinton, reading the spoken word passages from his 2003 suite The Blue Notebooks.

Even so, the sense that the festival is now actively trying to court two different generations at once feels very pronounced on the two main stages. On Friday afternoon, the Lightning Seeds lead a nostalgic singalong through Three Lions, before being replaced on the Other stage by Carly Rae Jepsen, resplendent in a pink trouser suit, belting out the dance-pop of Call Me Maybe and I Really Like You from atop a platform draped with gold lamé. Jepsen is held to be one of pop’s great mysteries: since her 2015 breakthrough Emotion, her albums have been rapturously received by critics – she’s very much a poster girl for the influential strain of music criticism known as “poptimism”, a reaction against rock’s dominance of the music press – but have consistently underperformed commercially. Her Glastonbury set gives an indication of what the issue might be, beyond the fact that people who buy pop albums couldn’t give a monkey’s what music critics say about anything. Jepsen is infectiously enthusiastic – running from the stage to press the flesh with the front rows, before realising she’s not going to make it back to the stage in time for the start of the next song – but she isn’t a hugely charismatic performer: her songs are great, but whatever ingredient she has that might set her apart from the serried ranks of pop vocalists isn’t obvious. Still, if it’s charisma you’re after, Sharleen Spiteri has it in abundance during Texas’s parallel set on the Pyramid stage: there is something hugely engaging about the gulf between the honeyed sweetness of her singing during Summer Sun, and her Glasgow-accented earthiness between songs, berating the crowd for their “shit dad dancing”.

The task of following Foo Fighters hangs heavy over Royal Blood, who perform to a significantly smaller crowd than you might expect of a band second from top of the bill on the Pyramid stage. You get the feeling people have had their fill of hard rock and headed off to hear something different. Certainly, the crowd that assembles at the Other stage for dance auteur Fred Again suggests so. There are so many festivalgoers there that queues form just to get into the field, a state of affairs that seems to render Fred Again himself almost speechless: whenever he attempts to talk to the audience, his voice dissolves into disbelieving giggles. But, watching him, you can totally understand his popularity: his sound draws on Burial-esque dubstep, grime – Rumble features MC Flowdan – and house, neatly tied up with a keen pop sensibility. You could argue that the end result is a little depthless – there’s a one-size-fits-all quality to the vocal samples he uses, which tend to non-specific evocations of vague melancholy (“pull me out of this”,“the night is dark”), but that feels like quibbling in the face of its ability to generate mass euphoria, particularly this evening, where it fits the moment perfectly. It appears that a lot of those present are using his set as a kind of aperitif before hurling themselves into an evening of dance tents and altered states, a job for which it’s perfectly suited: it’s music that carries a sense of anticipation – the promise of the night, if you like – within its textures.

Arctic Monkeys’ headlining Pyramid stage set presents something of a conundrum. They are probably the biggest alternative rock band in Britain, but, judging by the albums chart, their mass popularity rests on two albums, their 2006 debut and 2013’s muscular, hard-rock influenced AM: certainly, there have been fewer takers for the more expansive and serpentine sound of the more recent Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and The Car, albums which also deal largely in slow-paced atmospherics. The obvious thing to do when confronted with a huge festival crowd would be to lean heavily on their biggest sellers, but a band who called their debut album Whatever You Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not were perhaps never likely to take the obvious, crowd-pleasing option. They open with The Car’s brooding Sculptures of Anything Goes, play Whatever You Say I Am …’s Mardy Bum at funereal pace, dramatically rearrange 505 – a huge viral hit on TikTok that one suspects introduced them to a younger audience – throw in occasional songs from AM, then dissipate the excitement they generate with the next track. It’s a state of affairs compounded by the fact that frontman Alex Turner inhabits a character on stage – a kind of parodic version of an oily cabaret crooner. You can understand why he does it, and the band’s diehard fans love it, but it’s hard to generate a rapport with a broader audience if they aren’t in on the joke, if everything you say to them sounds sarcastic: he even has a way of saying thank you that sounds like it’s got inverted commas around it.

The set peters out rather than ends explosively – an extended version of The Car’s Body Paint – but by then, a significant chunk of the crowd have drifted off: for all Glastonbury’s reputation for bountiful good vibes, there’s a certain no-thanks brutality to audiences here, borne out by the fact that there’s always something else to go and see. It’s hard to work out whether to applaud the band for bullishly sticking to their guns and doing things their way, or see it as a missed opportunity: on social media, it provokes a debate that rages into the night.

Saturday’s bill looks like such an embarrassment of riches, it’s hard to work out a path through it: you’re going to miss something you want to see. There’s a strong UK rap presence on both main stages. It would take a fairly mammoth effort to dislike the cheeky shtick of Manchester’s Aitch – he arranges a moshpit in the crowd and plays My G, a song dedicated to his sister, who has Down’s syndrome, featuring a sample of Ed Sheeran, then follows it with the words “but let’s not get soft and sentimental, let’s go fucking mental instead”, then brings on singer Anne-Marie to perform their hit Psycho in character as a warring couple. Central Cee, meanwhile, is both a lavishly gifted rapper, capable of giving drill a pop sheen without denuding it of its edge – a hugely impressive feat – and responsible for perhaps the flat-out weirdest moment of the weekend, when he elects to perform his current No 1 hit Sprinter not just in the company of guest star Dave, but a profoundly nonplussed-looking baby (the same baby, apparently, that features in the song’s video).

Pop star Raye can rap, too, although your attention is grabbed more by the astonishing power of her voice – she’s emotive and effortless, never descending into showy oversinging – and her easy Croydon-accented charm on stage. “Dating rappers,” she advises, “I wouldn’t recommend it.” She’s also blessed with a plethora of fantastic, hard-hitting songs that act as a kind of diary, detailing the pitfalls that await a young woman in the music business, from sexually predatory producers to unsympathetic record labels to substance abuse. A year ago, she had been more or less written off by her label, she explains, and now she’s holding a sizeable Glastonbury crowd rapt, investing Ice Cream Man with such force that she seems to be struggling not to cry as she sings. For the more nostalgically minded, there’s punk supergroup Generation Sex blazing their way through a set of Sex Pistols and Generation X classics on the Other stage – “I’m at a party at Stonehenge later, I’m gonna get fucked up tonight,” offers the surprisingly elocuted voice of Billy Idol as a parting shot – while up on the Woodsies’ stage, Rick Astley – him again – is performing a set of songs by the Smiths accompanied by indie band Blossoms. The response is immediate euphoria, a mass singalong of such volume that it threatens to drown Astley out entirely, a sense that he’s not playing a gig so much as performing a public service in reclaiming the joy of the Smiths’ back catalogue for anyone put off by some of the more troubling pronouncements from the band’s former lead singer. He also looks as if he’s having the time of his life doing it: stopping the sets to drink “a snifter” with his backing band, literally miming hanging someone during Panic, flailing the microphone lead around in an affectionate impersonation of Morrissey. The fact that there’s an enormous inflatable sausage being batted around the crowd – something you suspect would cause the notoriously meat-opposing Morrissey to abandon the gig at a stroke – only seems to add to the dizzy enjoyment.

There’s also dizzy enjoyment on the Pyramid stage, courtesy of Lizzo, who looks incredible in a succession of catsuits, surrounded by plus-sized dancers and an all-female band – called, magnificently, the Lizzbians – her face a constantly shifting mass of stagey expressions. You could, if you wished, take a cynical attitude to the way she constantly underlines her message of self-love – and a more cynical attitude still to the fact that she starts hawking her shapewear range, Yitty, between songs – but her performance is such an explosion of elation, filled with wit and energy and hooky tunes, that you don’t really feel like taking her to task over any of it.

Perhaps Lizzo and Astley’s good humour is infectious: the big surprise about Guns N’ Roses’ headlining performance is how polite Axl Rose – once the living embodiment of shows-starting-hours-late and litigious bad attitude – is. Their performance starts bang on time (no such luck for Lana Del Rey fans, who wait half an hour for the singer to show up on the Other stage and see her set cut short by eight songs as a result). “You had a good day?” he asks the audience, solicitously. “Glad to hear it.”

If Rose’s falsetto is a little more ragged now than it was in the late 80s, he can still hit the high notes, while the band’s appealingly loose stew of Stones-y slide guitar, metallic edge and punk insolence – their version of Back on the Farm is presumably the first time a song by second-wave Brit punk band UK Subs has boomed forth from the Pyramid stage – underlines why they were so successful in the first place. Their set not only picks its way through their back catalogue, it pays homage to their influences, sartorially and musically: bassist Duff McKagan sports a leather vest with the logo of the debut album by Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers; as well as the UK Subs, there are covers of the Stooges’ TV Eye and snatches of Jimi Hendrix and Alice Cooper worked into their own songs. It ends with a pile-up of authentic classics – November Rain, Night Train, Paradise City, the latter featuring Dave Grohl, beaming like a man keen to suggest that the famous feud between Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana was nothing to do with him. “What a lovely evening,” offers Axl Rose, like a man taking his leave from a dinner party: unexpectedly charming to the last.