Saturday at Glastonbury 2023: Rick Astley, Raye and Richard Thompson

Raye reviewed!

Alexis Petridis

Pyramid stage, 1.15pm

“Bloody hell, I didn’t think there would be anyone here,” smiles Raye, peering out at the substantial lunchtime crowd: she’s had festival appearances, she explains, where there were “more people on stage than there were in the audience”.

But then there are indeed a lot of people behind her – her backing band augmented by a brass section and a chorus of vocalists – and they look as formally glamorous as it gets clad in white dinner suits: a fairly serious commitment to image given the punishing heat. But for an artist who has clearly been through the mill, what’s striking about Raye’s live performance is her ease.

“I’ve not had the easiest of journeys,” she notes at one point, alluding to her struggles with a major label who refused to release her debut album. And her songs often feel like diary entries, starkly detailing the pitfalls that await a young woman in the music business, from sexually predatory, abusive producers on Ice Cream Man to substance abuse on Mary Jane (“The truth is that you held me better than any man did,” she sings of opiates) Yet she’s a bubbling font of Croydon-accented charm between songs (“Dating rappers – I wouldn’t advise it”), while her vocals are authentically show-stopping without going in for the kind of flashy over-singing that the late Luther Vandross memorably categorised as “vocal karate exhibitionism”.

There’s something very unforced and natural about her on stage: when she sings Ice Cream Man, the fury of its lyric at odds with the loveliness of its languid melody, her voice occasionally quivers and catches, as if she’s on the verge of tears. She kicks off her shoes and dances with cheerful abandon during Black Mascara. And she talks about self-releasing her album and watching it go to No 2 with a genuine, infectious excitement, as if she still can’t quite believe she pulled it off.

Her music offers a very London stew of influences – street soul, reggae, UK rap, Amy Winehouse-ish retro R&B, house music – allied to a set of genuinely fantastic songs: her Jax Jones collaboration You Don’t Know Me and this year’s No 1 hit Escapism both provoke mass singalongs. Black Mascara offers an object lesson in how to give house music a pop sheen without causing it to lose its edge; Five Star Hotels sounds better live than it does on record, her vocals better for being stripped of autotune.

“My wildest dreams have come true!” she cries at one point, and you can understand why: from an artist that had been more or less written off 12 months ago, Raye’s Glastonbury set feels like an early-afternoon triumph.

Rick Astley reviewed!

Elle Hunt

Pyramid, 12pm

Rick Astley cuts a sprightly figure on Saturday afternoon, bounding out on to the Pyramid stage in a salmon-pink lounge suit, intensely cheerful. From the melodramatic and slightly bizarre Star Wars intro music to the nudge-nudge, wink-wink interpolations of his best-known hit (you know the one), there’s something of an element of the daytime television special to Astley’s performance: upbeat, affable, fun for all the family. “I miss my dog too!” he tells a member of the audience (presumably in response to a flag). Later: “Make sure you’ve got factor 50 on!”

It works for the Pyramid stage at this time of day, as an undemanding crowd-pleaser with which to ease us into another day of music. Well-coiffed and bubbly, Astley is a professional entertainer of a bygone era, but the sizeable crowd and instant recognition of opener Together Forever show that there’s still a huge appetite for fun, feelgood music. Astley himself is hugely good humoured about his reputation as a few-hit wonder, managing the crowd’s anticipation of Never Gonna Give You Up from the outset (“We do that one at the end”) and showing his range with covers of Harry Styles, AC/DC and a bit of Queen. When the song finally comes, it’s festive with hula-hoopers and leotarded dancers onstage – all the feelgood payoff of completing a Zumba class.

The Last Dinner Party reviewed!

Ben Beaumont-Thomas

Woodsies, 11.30am

Since time immemorial, music journos have massively overhyped bands to a degree that isn’t actually fair on them, leaving an inevitable gulf between the hype and reality, disappointing audiences and creating a backlash, which we journos can then write about. It’s the circle of life! Couple this with audience suspicion of anyone who seems to have been anointed by the industry in this way and there have been quite a few dark mutters about “industry plants” of late – none louder than those about the Last Dinner Party, a quintet signed to major label Island Records before releasing any music. Sexism surely amplified the grouching, from men suspicious that a group of young women with a cohesive image could actually have formed themselves.

On the bad-faith internet, the music can feel immaterial – and the stage banter here suggests the band won’t beat the posho allegations. But what are they actually like? They fit into a lineage of proudly theatrical alt-pop alongside Patrick Wolf, HMLTD or Anna Calvi (and while musically they’re nothing like Porridge Radio, they share that band’s massed declamatory vocals). Some of these songs are a bit episodic, shunting from one middling section to another with a bold flourish to paper over the lack of finesse or arc. But the crowd are punching the air to Sinner despite having never heard it before, and while Godzilla isn’t to my personal taste – a sort of big-production blues rock that recalls the most money-soaked end of Britpop – the band really sell it.

Their neo-Victoriana aesthetic stands out, and while some may find lead singer Abigail Morris’s repertoire of Kate Bush-ish twirls and self-conscious prowling a bit irritating, there are plenty more who will find it the very essence of pop panache. She can really sing, too, beautifully topping off Mirror with a pristine chirrup around her high notes. The tent is pretty much full and everyone seems to know insistent debut single Nothing Matters – there’s clearly enough here, in songcraft and rapport, to drown out the keyboard warriors.

Max Richter reviewed!

Gwilym Mumford

Park, 11.15am

The Park is clearly the place to be for celeb spotters this year. After Cate Blanchett’s star turn at Sparks last night, here’s Tilda Swinton, dressed fittingly in a powder blue suit, providing the narration for Max Richter’s 2004 suite The Blue Notebooks.

Richter, supported here by an accomplished string quartet, introduces the performance by noting that it was originally written as “a kind of protest against the Iraq War” but – with the exception of the roiling The Trees, these sombre, stately compositions give off a mood of resignation rather than fury. It opens with On the Nature of Daylight, best known for soundtracking a tonne of films including the Denis Villeneuve sci-fi Arrival. It’s a gorgeous slow-build of a composition that elicits a quiet sob from several presumably worse for wear festival-goers near me.

The rest of the set continues in the same mesmeric fashion, with Swinton’s fragmentary, diaristic spoken-word segments bookending the ambient swirls of strings while Richter feverishly flits between grand piano, keyboard and laptop. It’s an incongruous experience, watching and listening to something so rarefied while in the distance a man in a Crocodile Dundee hat gamely tries to transport four pints of cider at once. But there’s a sense of ceremony and grandeur here that leaves a varied all-ages audience – parents, pensioners, caners – utterly rapt. A sensational start to Saturday.

Good afternoon from a painfully hot Glastonbury (I am not sad to be spending the first three hours of the day inside the cabin, let’s put it that way). Our reviewers are out in the field seeing the likes of Rick Astley, Raye and Max Richter so the piping hot liveblog action is soon to commence…