There were few sets at this year’s Glastonbury festival more anticipated than Lana Del Rey’s Saturday night Other stage headline slot. It’s been nearly 10 years since the cult American singer-songwriter last played on Worthy Farm; in that time, she’s released six albums and established herself as one of pop music’s greatest living songwriters, period – a bold and experimental musician whose renown only seems to grow as her music becomes more introspective and self-referential. Her latest record, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, is already one of the year’s most acclaimed, and one of the strangest pop records to be released in recent memory: across the sprawling, conceptually dense album, Del Rey samples herself three times, collaborates with “fetish rapper” Tommy Genesis, and, for the first time in her career, writes openly about her family and personal history.
At the time of writing, Lana is the 27th most streamed musician in the world on Spotify – an impossibly huge feat, given how idiosyncratic, and downright anti-pop, her vision of pop music is. While Del Rey will probably never be played on pop radio, her fans are devoutly loyal – more so, perhaps, than the fans of many other pop stars. They prove their devotion at the end of Del Rey’s set: after walking on stage 30 minutes late, her sound is cut at midnight, after a raucous, exhilaratingly dense-sounding rendition of the 2017 song White Mustang. Del Rey pleads with various stage managers as the gargantuan Other stage crowd watch on, aghast; she is eventually escorted offstage, and the crew packing up her gear are met with emphatic, resounding boos.
And you can understand why: the hour of Del Rey’s set that she is able to perform is an absolutely ripper tour through her discography, including intense and psychedelic takes on tracks from 2014 fan-favourite Ultraviolence, a wistful rendition of the title track from 2019’s generation-defining Norman Fucking Rockwell, and rapturously-received performances of songs from her 2012 debut Born to Die. Del Rey is not a high-energy performer, but she doesn’t need to be one: surrounded by a band and about 10 dancers, she puts on an artfully choreographed show that walks a perilous line between discomfiting intimacy and stadium-show grandeur.
In the style of her records, Del Rey’s live show is ramshackle and intensely thought-out at the same time; sometimes, she looks as if she’s forgotten the words to her own song, even as the dancers around her are pulling off an intricate, frenetic routine. It’s hard to pinpoint a specific highlight, because each song brings a new, surprising standout moment: Del Rey leads the crowd in a speak-along to the spoken word bridge of Ultraviolence; fans scream along to 2012’s Ride; White Mustang, perhaps my favourite song of all time but still, nonetheless, an underappreciated track in Del Rey’s catalog, is turned into a depressing-slash-euphoric festival anthem.
When her sound gets cut, after White Mustang, there’s a ripple of discontent among the crowd; if I had to guess, I would think that at least a few hundred people traveled here just to see Del Rey’s first UK show in four years. No matter – the hour that she did perform was compelling and brilliant, a showcase of one of the world’s greatest living pop stars.