New York's Nicolas Jaar wears his sunglasses at night, in dark rooms and dingy basements, although this afternoon on West Holts it appears as though they're for once pertinently donned. However if he burned brightly to the point of spotlight-soaked luminescence at Sónar, he wilts out in the open air: despite the opening half of his set that includes a purely instrumental, potently mesmeric Colomb and shady, skulking Wouh beguiling, the veritable peculiarity of time and place results in his show tailing off prematurely, the droves consequently dispersing. It may well be that none of said deserters head for Jessie J on The Other Stage, although if Glastonbury becomes Somerset's largest city for a solitary weekend per annum, approximately 87% of its population seems to be soaking up her pop shtick like waterlogged earth as she somehow clogs up The Old Railway Track and the festival's western hemisphere. With one foot in a Wellington and the other in a walking boot to protect her broken leg, she governs the multitude from a regal throne like a possessed pop dictator, instructing all before her to "do it like a dude" and informing them that even she's flawed. Vehemently adore or vitriolically loathe, her gravelled husk/honeyed warble is indisputably flawless. Patrick Wolf was once similarly consummate, yet following the aggressive intervention of Alec Empire that ran throughout The Bachelor, paired with S&M-themed live shows and all-too-frequently oscillating lyrical moods, Wolf no longer puts us in The Magic Position, and even less so when reeling off a bastardised and lackadaisical honky tonk piano-led rendition. He appears drunken and deluded, far from the fiddle-toting indie pixie he resembled when last down on the Farm, and voices his resentment at the Eavises' overlooking of PJ Harvey as a Pyramid Stage headliner, before affirming that in 2013 that's just where he'll be. Perhaps on the evidence of his gruesome dubstep reinterpretation of opener Tristan or ignominious saxy set closer The City, the ringleader of the bemused would be best hidden away in the teeny tiny tents until the farcical pastiche pales.
From a band that probably ought to have pulverised the Pyramid to one that, whilst headlining it, are more likely to soothingly caress its angular gradients with swoonsome soft rock: within seconds of Coldplay taking to the stage, fireworks rocket skywards, leaving a musty hue in their wake as mind-altering images bounce about off the mesmeric construction's triangular canvas. Evidently the softly-spoken bunch fronted by the blandest bloke this side of Billy Bragg are more than capable of serenading half of Somerset, having headlined the bash, staggeringly, on three separate occasions, although Yellow, Everything's Not Lost and Shiver generate an irrefutable poignancy in such a substantial setting. Opening with Hurts Like Heaven before going on to air Major Minus, Us Against The World, Charlie Brown, and closing with Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall, the new material is of course Coldplay by numbers, even if the numbers do now correspond to somewhat more jaunty colours. Perhaps the fluorescent shades of the confetti butterflies that soon flutter... Yet it's unadulterated anthemia in the main, as their set evanesces in a blur of neon reminiscent of this year's wristband, tears ruefully streaming down a face or two during Fix You.
Barely managing to manoeuvre the reconfigured access to Shangri-La, befuddled as we snake around the begrimed perimeter, recollections here, for better or worse, dissolve amidst the debauchery.
