Regardless of the perpetual brilliance of the
Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, the beautiful beast that Worthy Farm, Somerset becomes for five days or so mutates substantially not merely musically nor in terms of the muck, but also in its essence, year upon year.
If last year was centred upon the inescapable omnipresence of The xx and hordes of onstage collaborative bashes, this year saw the introduction of a near-Biblical pilgrimage to the round the clock hedonism of Shangri-La, whilst elsewhere the festival's humble beginnings of distant decades were rekindled with the disappointingly underattended Spirit of '71 stage, and a handful of Glastonbury stalwarts accustomed to the vastness of the Pyramid Stage took to The Park to deliver relatively obscure sets to send devotees into varying degrees of rabid hysteria, as a grand total of thirty guests of varying 'special' status peppered the rundown. 2012 however is marred even six months before its induction, as the Glastonbury weekend is ominously blank, devoid for one vacuous estival season of this ever-evolving, forever compelling festival.
The water level rises continually throughout Wednesday and Thursday, climbing in proportion to anticipation and eagerness to bask in the sumptuous fruits of the Eavises' latest line up. Brash chart pesterer
Ke$ha packs out not only the tarpaulin of the Wow! stage on Thursday evening, but also half the Dance Village, before appearing amidst ticker tape and flickering spotlights, delivering a relatively disastrous auto-tune autopsy of much chart fodder currently clogging up the mainstream. Thus thirsts up until this precise point in time sated exclusively by Cider Bus produce are kept hanging on for Friday before musical delectation is to soak in.
Metronomy, at the foot of the Pyramid bill, are seemingly ruffled by nerves. Visibly vaguely perturbed as they were
at their April Shepherd's Bush Empire headline show, Joe Mount, on home turf (more or less) triumphantly offers up The English Riviera to the fairly sodden masses, whisking gleaming pop nuggets She Wants and the bossa nova-strained Some Written with instrumental chuggernaut You Could Easily Have Me and a slew of what have practically morphed into hard-hitting disco "hits" lifted from Nights Out, from a frenzied Heartbreaker to the resolutely sultry On Dancefloors, all before the backdrop of rudimentary portraits of Joe, Gbenga, Anna and Oscar. Stepping up to the plate, scoffing at the big time, and dragging dancing shoes out of canvas shells to the sound of clarity and clunky bass never got quite this great. Glastonbury's trademark eclecticism via ethnicity booking then overhauls the afternoon, as the Cambodian-infused psych of
Dengue Fever largely bemuses West Holts, the troupe's sweltering rhythms far from applicable to the temperamental microclimate at the foot of a Somerset valley. Quintessential East Coast rap collective the
Wu-Tang Clan assume the role of the weekend's token afternoon hip hoppers, as Method Man et al. suitably hurl towels about overhead, whilst comparing UK customs to a well-renowned Middle Eastern terrorist union and
cramming almost as many tracks into an hour as Willie Nelson twelve months previous. Curtailed takes on Bring Da Pain, Old Man, Reunited and Gravel Pit cut the proverbial condiment that seems to swamp most of the weekend's meals, yet the drizzle considerably dampens the outfit's arid rhymes. The
B.B. King Blues Band then waltz through the Two I Shoot blues, before Riley B. King takes a pew stage-centre to noodle and croon to the likes of Every Day I Have The Blues and Key to the Highway. "The King of the Blues" proceeds to glide through slippery guitar slides and more solos than an entire Download Festival during a set that transcends time and overhead tempest.
Keeping things buoyant week in, week out,
Little Dragon offset their intricately textured, vibrant electronica with Erik Bodin's pulsating rhythms and Stanier-esque drumkit athleticism. If they rely heavily on the metronomic wonderment of Machine Dreams, plucking an effervescent My Step and soothing Feather from Lennox-fantasised Sweet Dreams, new cut Little Man suggests that Yukimi Nagano's quirky Göteborg beat brigade are but a hop, skip, and a wail from ubiquity. A resplendently reworked Twice from the quartet's eponymous debut LP documents just how many leaps and bounds their boundary-vaulting, brooding ambience has taken since 2007.
In perpetual, quasi-horizontal drizzle
Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, adorned in billowing cape, acquits himself far better than back in 2005 when he drunkenly slurred disparaging comments about John Peel, whilst headlining the very stage named after the late DJ famed for his dulcet tones and PJ Harvey infatuation. The show is, however, quite shambolic, Oberst stumbling and once again slurring to scatty takes on Bowl of Oranges, Four Winds, raucous Road to Joy etc. In hairstyle-related news, Oberst currently sports the sweeping fringe. The ready-made amphitheatre of The Park is crammed like the Colosseum for
Big Audio Dynamite, yet most linger for something altogether more eternal. With every other Glastonbury attendee in possession of an iPhone or iPhone take-off, the festival's unannounced acts aren't quite as enigmatic as they once were...
However where previous years have seen Jack White nurture an affinity with the venue's intimate vicinity and rumours of Prince have been quashed by the innocuous sounds of The Hotrats' shoddy cover versions, "your budget U2", aka
Radiohead put the truly spectacular and the indubitably special back in the 'Special Guests' billing. Following on from
Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's occupying of exactly the same slot last year, they return, this time accompanied by Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, Phil Selway, and another drummer in the unnerving figure of Clive Dreamer.
The King of Limbs was widely received as a low-key, lo-fi wonder of sorts, albeit one lacking perhaps in the ambition of Kid A, or Amnesiac for instance. Live however, dual drumming is required to harness the swelling grandiosity of a murky Morning Mr Magpie, to create an Ordnance Survey-like mesh to entrap the bustling guitars of Separator. Launching into a bass-hefty Lotus Flower, the sheer disbelief around and about is palpable, the set something of a climbing frame for Yorke to swivel and contort about as the majority of the latest LP is road-tested, and largely road-worthy. However almost as if unsure and uncertain of reaction to its live rewiring, they swiftly duck and dive back into the safe haven of 15 Step. That said, Bloom blossoms in the downpour, whilst Give Up The Ghost is perhaps the most touching "moment" of the festival as acoustic twangs loop and lull. A majestic Weird Fishes/Arpeggi follows, before they delve further into past endeavours, intriguingly unearthing I Might Be Wrong ahead of a sumptuous run-through of Reckoner. "Dedicated to the mellow, liberal, free-thinking people of our country", The Daily Mail rounds off the rain-soaked experiment in which we're all guinea pigs caught in a comfortably numb fuzz of joy. Those that've nattered away incessantly throughout are treated to an impromptu encore of Street Spirit (Fade Out) as banal musings on everything from how much substance an unidentified festival acquaintance had indulged in to how many verses should follow the bridge in some song presumably never to be heard are swiftly exchanged for inaccurate wailing to its grating refrain. For Radiohead appear to have ambled into a musical mindset in which singalongs no longer compute; tip your top hat and enter a realm of Rainbows and Limbs.
If The Park this year became something of a bona fide festival in itself, equipped with headliners and hilltop haunts, in Dan Snaith's
Caribou it found its fest best. With the skies leaking porously, never before has the title to yesteryear's superb Swim LP seemed more apt as they lash out a typically frenetic and energetic festival-friendly set. Kaili sounds Herculean as the mighty pillars that flank the stage flame, Leave House comes across like the soundtrack to Disco 3000, and the cowbell romp of Bowls betters anything experienced all weekend in the Dance Village. Which is probably where tonight's John Peel stage headliner,
DJ Shadow, ought to be, and where he ought to be hours after eleven. With U2's reverb-sodden belters sucking practically all, sundry and soaked within the innumerable-mile radius of the site to the Pyramid like some grotesque hurricane with infinitely more heinous aural accompaniment, there's ample space surrounding every last numerable body witnessing Josh Davis, space enough to breakdance to the likes of I Gotta Rokk and moody encore number, Blood on the Motorway until caked in inches of pungent gunk. Bringing his Shadowsphere tour to Pilton, he performs at the core of a giant, hip hop aficionado-devouring globular screen that emulates the sun one second and a rather rudimentary football, or soccer ball, the next, before whooshing about the pipes of a monumental organ to the night's foreseeable highlight, Organ Donor. At no point thus far has the sound truly had "so much body"...
