Key events
Sir Rod is gracing Worthy Farm with his famously trenchant political commentary: “There’s been a lot about the Middle East recently, quite rightly so, and I want to draw your attention to the Ukraine with this next song, it’s called the Love Train! Get on board the Love Train!”
Rod Stewart up next!
Shaad D’Souza
Hi all! Shaad here, taking over for Elle for the afternoon. In terms of liveblog shifts, I definitely got the short straw – I wish I could go down to the Pyramid Stage and get Rodded with everyone else – but it’s a sacrifice I don’t mind making for you lovely readers at home. Maggie May is, without a doubt, my song of the summer – as it is every summer – and I’m willing to bet I’ll be able to hear the crowd screaming along from The Guardian’s sad, dank portacabin.
There’s definitely been the rumblings of opposition to Sir Rod’s set throughout the weekend – even before he expressed support for Nigel Farage the other day, I saw stickers around that featured his face and read “Not My Legend”. But you wouldn’t know that based on the crowd at the Pyramid right now – it looks absolutely enormous.
Shaboozey reviewed
Safi Bugel
When the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis interviewed Shaboozey last year, the Virginia artist wanted to double check whether his breakout hit A Bar Song (Tipsy) was also big in the UK. “Big” might have even been an understatement: it broke into the Top 10 of the UK singles chart and became ubiquitous online.
A year on, the appeal holds, and not just for said song. A packed-out crowd have gathered at Glasto’s second-biggest stage sing and wave along for almost the entirety of his set.
As the self-styled “boot-cut kid”, Shaboozey’s music bridges country and hip-hop, with a touch of pop. He sings about four-wheel drives, “pretty ladies” and “getting faded” on whiskey, sometimes in his deep, auto-tune-accentuated drawl and other times via quick, punchy bars.
Today he shows off that range. Highway, Amen and Good News are straight-up Americana ballads, while tracks such as Drink Don’t Need No Mix have a trap-like swing. Midway through, he even performs a rousing cover of Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door before, naturally, closing on the fan favourite A Bar Song (Tipsy).
It’s a pretty cheesy affair. Most of Shaboozey’s material fits solidly in the category of “stomp clap hey!”; bro-y craft-beer songs with earnest sentiments and big chanty crescendos that recall bands like the Lumineers and Mumford and Sons. Meanwhile, the screens on the side of the stage are sepia-toned, AI-rendered desert landscapes (he shouts out the agriculture in the UK, as any textbook country star should).
Admittedly, though, this is a question of taste and preference: thousands of people here are visibly overjoyed. And indeed, whether the music is actually good or not, Shaboozey’s schtick is perfect for a Sunday afternoon festival slot: anthemic and uplifting.
I’m handing over the reins to my colleague Shaad D’Souza for the next few hours so that I can high-tail it to Rod, but thanks for following along – there’s plenty still to come.
Abel Selaocoe reviewed
Ammar Kalia
For South African cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe, the body is an instrument as much as the cello he has spent his life playing. He blends the throat singing and instinctive vocalisations of his Soweto heritage with a distinct approach to his cello, using it as a percussion instrument as much as a vehicle for deeply felt classical repertoire. Selaocoe’s Sunday afternoon set is a full-body barrage of enlivening sounds, rousing a bleary-eyed West Holts crowd to attention.
Backed by his 11-piece Bantu Ensemble, featuring an extensive strings section, vocalists and two drummers, Selaocoe launches into the guttural singing and vocal power of Qhawe, instructing his strings section into dynamic drops and builds while pacing across the stage.
There is plenty of audience participation as Selaocoe leads the crowd through a polyrhythmic clapping exercise and several singalongs, but it’s when he eventually turns back towards the Ensemble and finds an improvisational groove that the set truly excels. Moving through bowed romantic phrases to sharp bursts of throat singing, body percussion and string-plucking, Selaocoe’s technical ability mixed with the power of his emotive intent is joyous to behold.
Reaching a close with the balladry of Lerato, he leaves the audience in a moment of peaceful introspection. It’s a very Glastonbury Sunday moment – harem pant-wearing hungover groups lolling on the grass, both energised and also moved to buy a fresh pint and face the final day of festivities head on.
Into my last 20 minutes of being the blog boss, and I can’t lie, I’m eager to get out of here to get along to Sir Rod Stewart. Mandolin Wind rules, Young Turks rules, Sailing rules (should you be in a particular mood).
I can take or leave the comedy-sexy numbers (they’re supposed to be funny, right?) but I trust that he’s got enough hits to keep the Pyramid stage entertained.
What remains unclear is whether Sir Rod will pick up on his controversial remarks to the Times yesterday, which resulted in the headline: “We’ve got to give Nigel Farage a chance,. (All he is saying, is…)
In the interview, Stewart expresses his concern about the potholes blighting Britain’s roads: “As I travel in Italy, Germany, nowhere else is as bad. Starmer has promised to spend millions on it … We shall see.”
Asked to comment on British politics, he gives this:
It’s hard for me because I’m extremely wealthy, and I deserve to be, so a lot of it doesn’t really touch me. But that doesn’t mean I’m out of touch. For instance, I’ve read about Starmer cutting off the fishing in Scotland and giving it back to the EU. That hasn’t made him popular. We’re fed up with the Tories. We’ve got to give Farage a chance. He’s coming across well. What options have we got? I know some of his family, I know his brother, and I quite like him.”
Setting aside all the other arguments against Farage and Reform UK, I’m not quite that “I quite like his brother” is a reason to vote for anyone. But we shall see if he attempts to expand on his stance on stage, perhaps as a stirring prelude to Hot Legs.
Kate Nash just joined Sprints on stage at Woodsies and led the tent in a big singalong of her classic Foundations. She’s looking and sounding great.
The Libertines are presently on the Pyramid stage, and they’ve brought a bit of home with them, performing in front of a projection of the Albion Rooms, the band’s own hotel/studio/bar in Margate.
Doherty has a copy of the Glastonbury Free Press in the front pocket of his waistcoat – make it the Guardian next time, Pete!
They’re sounding good (“surprisingly un-shambolic” is one colleague’s off-the-cuff account) and the Pyramid field is full. I understand that Taskmaster host himself Greg Davies is among the crowd, having brought his own portable stool.
Celeste reviewed
Jason Okundaye
It is mercifully overcast at Worthy Farm today, without the heat that’s been oppressing festivalgoers so far this weekend. That makes for a pleasant setting at the Pyramid stage to see Mercury prize-nominated and Brit rising star award-winner Celeste. She is preparing to release her sophomore album Woman of Faces, nearly five years after her debut Not Your Muse instantly topped the UK album charts. She says that she did not expect it to take this long for her follow-up, but that“everything happens when it’s supposed to”.
With her brilliantly smoky, soulful vocals, Celeste invokes the likes of Billie Holiday, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, yet her distinctly English lilt provides a girl-next-door entry point to her magnificence. The emotion in her voice and in her songs is so overflowing that she repeatedly flaps her arms, as if shaking out the mood before it swallows her. On With the Show, a formidable, high-octane ballad, reaches big, orchestral moments of brilliance before Celeste transitions into more minimalist tracks with contemplative piano.
Celeste evidently draws from a well of pain for her music. Like her musical influences, she presents herself as a figure caught in that too-common collision between glamour and profound tragedy. It doesn’t require a deep mining of her personal life to imagine she has suffered trauma; her father died of lung cancer when she was 16, and in a recent Parliamentary session on misogyny in the music industry she spoke of feeling too afraid to report an undisclosed figure who she felt was a danger to her life. I think you can read this instinct towards self-protection in her stage styling too; she wears a padded jacket with a throat latch that looks claustrophobic, and her eye makeup is black, smeared and moody.
Celeste often leans into melancholy and uncertainty, singing on a new track: “It’s hard to say cause only time will tell… let’s keep it undecided until it reveals itself.” Mostly, though, heartbreak is her enduring theme. On Both Sides of the Moon, she sings of the pain of temperamental romances, and these references to romantic jeopardy resonate well with the audience.
But Celeste’s set is not just that classic mixture of escalating, big ballads and restrained, mournful quiet. She has worked with electronic producers such as Tieks and the late Avicii – that distinction frequently emergesand she’s not afraid to get weird with it. This Is Who I Am is a classic heavy ballad, and yet it features instances of idiosyncratic warping sounds. A new song, Could Be Machine, is a musing on technological singularity – will we all become robots? Could that insulate and free us from heartbreak, impulses and the burden of decision-making?
Who knows if that future will come; for now, Celeste provides a soundtrack for examining the wreckage that remains after devastation tears up our lives.
Geordie Greep reviewed
Gwilym Mumford
Sunday lunchtime at Glastonbury: heads are heavy, expressions are pained, gazes are set into the middle distance. Time to blow the cobwebs away, and what better way to do that than with some brain-dissolving prog-jazz from Geordie Greep and his band of musician savants? Makes a change from two paracetamol and a Berocca at least.
Greep’s new outfit manage to simultaneously be more accessible than his previous band Black Midi, dabbling in calypso, salsa and classic rock in place of Midi’s angular postpunk. They’re also far more loose and improvisational: this is a band that opens with a four-minute drum solo, without, seemingly, a set list to speak of. Familiar refrains and motifs wash in and out of focus; I’m not sure even the band know what they will play next. The Park stage audience are a forgiving, open-minded lot – but, it must be said, the general mood is of slight befuddlement.
Until, that is, the arrival of Holy, Holy, Greep’s lascivious Latin pop opus and the closet he has to a bop – it even has a vaguely hummable chorus. As its opening gatling gun riff rattles out, the dead rise to their feet to dance, or at least shuffle limply. Greep’s methods are unorthodox, but he seems to have, in his own special way, salved a lot of hangovers this lunchtime.
It being Glastonbury, there have been quite a few mocking representations of world leaders spotted so far this festival, though the screen behind Nadine Shah might be the most prominent so far.
Roaming photographer Jonny Weeks caught this gang of satirical, suited world leaders doing the YMCA yesterday.
Nadine Shah reviewed
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Last year, Nadine Shah told fans she wouldn’t play Glastonbury because it didn’t make financial sense to do so: “I wasn’t offered a televised stage, so I declined. It’s too expensive a hit for me to take otherwise.”
She’s now been wooed back, perhaps by the prospect of playing the enormous Other stage – and perhaps by the potential it affords to truly reach people.
Shah has long been a proponent of Palestinian freedom – her 2017 album Holiday Destination featured an image (taken by Christian Stephens) of a young boy standing stoically in the ruins of a war-damaged building in Gaza. She has consistently been an articulate interrogator of the hypocrisies and moral failings in the broader refugee crisis.
Here, she plays against a nightmarish AI-generated backdrop featuring Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump enjoying cocktails on a Gazan beach. It’s a nod to Trump’s own offensive simulacrum of the same scene, but here with a savage extra detail: Keir Starmer is serving the drinks.
Wearing a Palestine flag pin, she delivers a statement by Artists for Palestine UK in support of Palestine Action, the activist group that – to widespread disgust – was targeted by the UK government last week, with home secretary Yvette Cooper saying she intends to proscribe them as a terror organisation. Pending the outcome of a vote in the House of Commons, it would become a crime to voice support for them, as Shah does here.
It’s a rather more grown-up mode of political action than we saw from Kneecap on the West Holts stage yesterday, but no less impactful – particularly because the music that surrounds it is gigantically powerful, a buttress for her message. Shah’s singing voice gets more dramatic and distinctive by the year, evolving into Diamanda Galás-style gothic diva stylings
The way her voice shakes with vibrato actually reminds me of Beth Gibbons last night, but where Gibbons’s voice is wind-battered and arid, Shah’s is rich and deep-hued. There are dark Interpol-type one-note riffs, bending slightly as if warped by the building heat; Greatest Dancer trots slowly on a glam-rock groove, Shah’s body twisting as if rent by gunshots, but there’s a goofiness to her stagecraft that stops it from feeling too sombre.
“I just don’t like seeing people being killed, you know?” she tells the crowd before her speech. British music would be richer if more artists were as clear-sighted and frank.
Nadine Shah was just on the Other stage, sounding incredible I’m told, but to a patchy crowd. Her backdrops are certainly arresting, with a computer-generated image of Keir Starmer serving Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu some beachside cocktails as Gaza burns behind them.
On stage, Shah voices her support for Palestine Action, the group the government controversially plans to proscribe as a terror organisation, and reads aloud the open letter from Artists for Palestine UK, noting that she could risk prosecution by doing so, depending on the outcome of the vote in the House of Commons in early July.
“I just don’t like seeing people being killed, you know? … I think protest and demonstration are incredibly important, and they’re a basic human right. And, very kindly, Artists for Palestine UK are letting me share their open letter which is in support of Palestine Action, an incredible group. I’m a pacifist. I’m not a violent person. And the open letter from Artists Palestine UK goes:
‘Palestine Action is intervening to stop a genocide, it is acting to save life. We deplore the government’s decision to proscribe it. Labelling non-violent direct action as terrorism is an abuse of language and an attack on democracy.
The real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s efforts to ban it. We call on the government to withdraw its prescription of Palestine Action and to stop arming Israel.’
And if I read this out after 4 July, I could potentially be prosecuted for that.”
The Glasto camera operators provided lingering shots of Palestine flags and people holding fists aloft.
Shah might be one of the most consistent champions of Palestinian freedom in UK culture: on the cover of her 2017 album Holiday Destination, she ran a photograph of a child in Gaza standing amid the ruins of war, flashing a peace sign.
Shahd’s film-maker brother Karim Shah recently had his documentary Gaza: Medics Under Fire shelved by the BBC due to impartiality concerns; just yesterday Channel 4 confirmed that it would be picking it up.
The Selecter reviewed
Safi Bugel
As Pauline Black announces, 2025 marks 45 years of the Selecter, the West Midlands band who used their punky, ska-inspired rhythms to address the sociopolitical issues of their time: racism, sexism, mass unemployment and the rising far right.
Bounding on to the Pyramid stage, sharply dressed in her signature double-breasted suit and trilby combo, she promises to “fly the flags of two-tone”, and it feels as pertinent as ever.
The next 45 minutes is an energetic romp through the heyday classics, plus a selection of their newer material. Their jaunty, swinging rhythms, laced with winding sax and whistling organ chords, prove to be the perfect boost for the start of the day.
Black is an excellent performer, consistently charismatic and occasionally cheeky. “I would come all the way down there,” she says pointing to the barrier, which is a rite of passage for many Pyramid performers. “But I’ll probably fall ass over tits, so I’m not going to.”
She also addresses some persistent political problems – in a relatively BBC-friendly yet still compelling way. Introducing the 2017 track Frontline, she shouts out the underpaid NHS workers in the crowd (she used to be one), and encourages those around them to pay their respect — they might be needing their support for “all those knees and all those hips in the not-so-distant future”.
Later, she brings on a sound technician whose T-shirt bears a not-so-subtle anagram of “fuck Trump”. “Until the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned everywhere, there will be war,” she announces, before crashing into the also-recent War War War.
In both song and conversation, Black’s punchy, echo-laden voice booms across the field. Only when she reaches for the punky falsetto in On My Radio does it falter (who can blame her, she’s 71), so she invites the crowd to help her deliver the high notes. Maybe it’s the day-four fatigue, but the moment is so heartwarming it brings a tear to my eye. Even after almost five decades, the spirit of two-tone lives on.
While we await our first wave of reviews, feast your eyes upon our latest photo essay, wrapping up all the action from yesterday.
Looking ahead to the rest of the day, we’ve got a stacked lineup on the Pyramid stage – with the Libertines at 2pm, followed by Rod Stewart in the legends slot, then fellow legends Nile Rodgers & Chic.
Noah Kahan will be taking us through to the evening, then there’s the final headliner, Olivia Rodrigo. She played the Other stage in 2022, but has since had a massive couple of years. Having seen her Guts tour in London last year, I’m expecting a high-energy, pop-punk spectacle – and perhaps some special guests… (In 2022, Lily Allen joined her on stage for Fuck You, dedicated to those who overturned Roe v Wade.)
Over on the Other stage, I know plenty of people whose plans for the day start with Shaboozey (rumoured to play his hit A Bar Song (Tipsy) three times a set – not one time too many!). I can imagine a big crowd forming for Snow Patrol, followed by Wolf Alice, but the real energetic high point will be the Prodigy.
Other highlights ahead are St Vincent, AJ Tracey and Jorja Smith over at Woodsies, the Maccabees and Future Islands on Park, and plenty more.
From the chat I’ve heard around the site this morning, it seems that everyone was pleased with the choice of headliners last night. It sounds as if Charli xcx gave the show of her life over at the Other stage, the climax of her barnstorming Brat era, and blessedly without any crowd issues as had been feared. Read Shaad’s five-star review here.
For those who didn’t want to risk it, Doechii – over at West Holts – was hardly a compromise. I was sent to review her set, and was blown away by her precision and sheer power. And only 26 years old! As the women behind me in the queue for the showers put it, catching Doechii felt like catching a phenomenon just at the point of exploding.
Finally, on the Pyramid, there was Neil Young with his Chrome Hearts, dubbed by Alexis as “the best backing band Young has assembled since Crazy Horse”.
Five stars all round!
Welcome to Sunday’s liveblog!
Elle Hunt
Good morning and welcome to the last day – of the Glastonbury live blog and, of course, the festival. I’ve just been out at the Other stage, catching a bit of Louis Dunford with my pal Chris and all the other Arsenal fans on site. North London Forever might have got the first arm-sway of the day going – personally, I’m saving my energy for Rod Stewart’s Sailing …
We’ve got lots to look forward to, and our reviewers are posted in the field, primed to deliver – thanks for following along.
#Glastonbury #Sunday #Rod #Stewart #Olivia #Rodrigo #Chic #follow #live #Glastonbury
