Glastonbury live: Saturday’s action begins ahead of Coldplay, Little Simz and more | Glastonbury 2024

Levels, 12.30am
Currently, the only place you can get hold of official Charli xcx merch is at one of her shows or Partygirl DJ sets. That might seem a counterintuitive move given the massive success of her new album Brat, but I think it’s possibly one of the savviest things any pop star has done in recent memory: fans have filled the vacuum with homemade merch, from lime green caps with a printout of the word “brat” safety-pinned on, to handpainted hi-vis vests, non-PG corruptions of the Taylor Swift friendship bracelet craze, and even earrings with tiny dangling lurid plastic bags on them. The evidently loving effort that has gone into all this makes the phenomenon seem even more legit, and it’s the DIY chartreuse faithful who are propping up the front row of Charli’s much-anticipated Glastonbury DJ set at the enclosed Levels space.

As with most of the festival’s flashpoints, it is wildly over-subscribed almost to the point of being anxiety-inducing. A such is the fear of losing one’s spot that there’s a lot of peeing in cups going on. Charli barely needs ask “Who’s having a Brat summer?” when she takes to the decks at 12.30am and plays 365, the song’s narcotic lyrics very much summing up the activity in the front few rows.

A couple of weeks ago, Charli released a magnificent remix of Girl, So Confusing with a new verse from Lorde – accurately rumoured as the does-she-like-me subject of the song – and both of them turned up at Troye Sivan’s show in London on Thursday, leading to fevered speculation that the New Zealand pop star might appear tonight. She doesn’t in the end – and maybe that introspective song wouldn’t have fitted the battering-ram, uppers-o’clock mood of the night. But after Charli plays a snatch of AG Cook’s Britpop, on which she features, the lesser-spotted pop royal Robyn appears (fresh from guesting with Jamie xx on Woodsies). They don’t play their remix of 360 (also featuring Yung Lean), but instead jam Robyn’s classics With Every Heartbeat and Dancing on My Own – scarcely singing the songs, more ecstatically hugging each other to the point of almost tumbling over, and dancing around. Then Romy turns up too and they’re all arm in arm, waving cigs in the air, lairy as a post-victory football team.

Sometimes I never want to hear the phrase “female friendship” uttered again – a phenomenon so examined and fetishised it’s become cloying and commercialised – but the euphoria of this set stems from witnessing the clear, joyous support among the three of them. As Romy takes over and plays a turbo-speed remix of Ariana Grande’s Into You, Robyn leans over her shoulder to take a selfie of them. Shygirl also makes an appearance. It’s adorable and life-affirming, and that mood spills over into the quickly-forming Brat-based friendships in the crowd.

“I need you to go fucking feral!” Charli yells before Von Dutch – evidently not having witnessed the cup-based toilet activities – and makes us sing Club Classics twice to do it louder. Whereas being a fan of some pop stars these days feels like a tiresome act of duty, even like tithing, Charli knows how to make us work for it in a way that feels uniquely reciprocal.

Park stage, 11pm
Few bands have been as successful at leapfrogging up the Glasto lineup as Fontaines DC. Since their 2019 bow, when they squeezed four energetic sets into one festival weekend, the Dublin post-punkers (though that description grows less accurate with every new album) have managed a well-received Other stage set in 2022 and are now here playing their first headliner slot. They seem to be on the glide path to superstardom, and have the swagger to match, particularly in the form of Grian Chatten, channelling Korn singer Jonathan Davis with a leather skirt, and stalking the stage like a third, even surlier Gallagher brother.

It’s up for debate whether Fontaines yet quite have the songs to match the marked upturn in exposure. There are moments here, notably when the band settle into a succession of moody mid-tempo tracks from A Hero’s Death and Skinty Fia, that you can hear the otherwise up-for-it, flare-waving audience’s attention wavering. But the hits really do hit: Chatten is matched word for word by the crowd on the barrelling back room punk of Boys in the Better Land and the caustic anti-ballad I Love You. They conclude rather daringly with two new songs: the pretty jangle of Favourite and the exuberant rap metal of Starburster. It’s a risk that pays off: both already feel festival-sized, and the amount of people copying Chatten’s strange hyperventilating howls on the latter makes for one of the stranger singalong moments of the festival. Pyramid for them next time?

Hello again! After a night of much dancing (and queueing) everyone is back for more – but operating with around 15% less health, like a videogame character who accidentally drank too many frozen daiquiris. And that’s just the Guardian team.

Today has another fabulously crowdpleasing lineup, topped with the most strongly triangulated Pyramid act of all: Coldplay, performing their record-breaking fifth headline set tonight. Before them it’s Little Simz with the biggest gig of her career, and Michael Kiwanuka before her. We’ll be liveblogging everything from now until the confetti has died away post-Coldplay – join us for incisive reviews, amazing photography and a general sense of the magic and mayhem.