Shaad D’Souza is over at the Park Stage where rapper Sampa the Great is performing and history is being made. “I’m standing on this stage with the first Zambian band to perform at Coachella,” she says. “The first Zambian band to perform at the Sydney Opera House … and the first Zambian band ever to perform at Glastonbury!”
Tara Joshi
Shangri-La, Glastonbury’s notorious late-night area, is a very strange place to be in the daytime. Someone in a blue wig just came up to me and asked if I had considered becoming a hologram.
Gabriels reviewed
Alexis Petridis
The Park stage, 2pm
A sunny early Saturday afternoon proves the perfect slot for Gabriels. Their breakthrough debut single, 2021’s Love and Hate in a Different Time, might lead you to the assumption that their sound is rooted firmly in 60s soul, an impression bolstered by the synchronised movements of their three backing singers and the dapper attire of lead singer Jacob Lusk, who removes a sky-blue robe to reveal evening dress, complete with bow tie. But the reality is more wide-ranging than that: they variously evoke disco, gospel – Lusk is a choir director – and jazz-inflected pre-rock’n’roll pop.
Their songs sound beautiful, but they’re often slow paced and opaque: rather than grabbing you by the throat, they require attention from an audience, which the crowd assembled at the Park stage seems happy to give them. Lusk has a genuinely spine-tingling voice – a former American Idol contestant, his falsetto can sound by turns tender and eerie – and he’s a natural performer, addressing the audience as the Glastonbury Missionary Baptist Church, encouraging them to turn to whoever’s standing next to them and tell them they love them at some length. When he performs an unexpected and beautifully delicate cover of Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were to a wave of applause that takes an age to die down, it’s clear they’re entirely won over.
Over at West Holts, Black Midi are having a ball with their frenetic jazz racket. Geordie Greep (surely the greatest name in indie) keeps shouting “Cassanova, Cassanova” in a cod-Italian accent in between songs. They’re currently playing a sort of funk-metal track that sounds like Red Hot Chilli Peppers with a head concussion. Musically it’s about as self-indulgent as it gets, but great freakish fun, too.
Per Laura Snapes, Self Esteem is wearing a quite preposterous outfit: “Sort of a cross between Madonna’s cone bra and a satellite?? With nipples?” Pics to come!
Self Esteem, Guardian 2021 album of the year winner and one of the big must-watch sets of the weekend for many here, is just getting going over at the John Peel. Half of our cabin has headed over to watch her: she puts on a hell of a show.
Time for another fashion vox pop. Here’s the spectacular-looking group of Carly, 28; Nigel, 28; Rory, 27; Rian-Louise, 27 and Tara Davina, 26.
“The theme is Inter-gay-lactic, which is intergalactic with a gay spin: metallic space cadet sexiness. A lot of planning has gone into this, considering we got the tickets three years ago. It’s been a long time coming, this weekend. The other themes are Euphoria Fairy (after the TV show); then 1970s for Diana Ross – she deserves it. Give the queen her crown. We’re all Glastonbury virgins, it’s our first one. We’ve been taking our vitamins religiously so we stay smiling through the weekend. It’s way bigger than we expected. It’s crazy. It’s another world!”
Black Midi’s drummer Morgan Simpson has some serious chops. They just rattled off Welcome to Hell, the lead single from their upcoming album, Hellfire. It’s deeply strange – think King Crimson meets Cardiacs with a detour into thrash metal midway through – but deeply ace, too. You can watch on the iPlayer, FYI.
Black Midi, the hugely divisive – though to my mind, brilliant – avant garde art-rock band are tearing through a set on the West Holts stage. They sound heavy as hell, opening with the riff-fest 953 from their debut Schlagenheim.
Guardian fashion update: along with the obligatory bucket hat, this year’s must-have item is a 90s football kit, preferably of a lower league or European club. So far I’ve already seen Coventry City, Grimsby Town, Bradford City, Plymouth Argyle, this belter of a Sunderland away kit, Margate FC (sponsored by the Libertines, no less), Lazio, Borussia Mönchengladbach, at least three Benfica tops and a gorgeous Real Betis away kit. (For my part, I’m sporting the 1991 Wales away kit today.)
The football shirt dominance feels like a fairly recent development: there was a time, back when football fans felt from a very different world to festivalgoers, when rocking a football shirt at Glastonbury would have made you stick out like a sore thumb. But now there’s a bit more of a hipsterish credibility to rocking a slightly obscure kit – it’s replaced the band T-shirt. One problem though: those 90s ones are quite heavy on the polyester, about as unbreathable a fabric as you can get, so things are likely to get very sticky for the football hipsters in the dance tents this evening.
Skunk Anansie have just torn through Weak, prompting a big, big festival singalong. From the cabin I can report that Skin very much still has the range. Oof!