From K-poppers Seventeen to performance artist Marina Abramović, via Cyndi Lauper and Little Simz, it was one of the most diverse editions yet. But the real fireworks came with a band who have taken things to another level

Friday morning at Glastonbury underlines that the old cliche about the festival having something for everybody is only a cliche because it’s true. Your options range from the beatific (Sofia Kourtesis’s lambent brand of techno) to the profoundly challenging (artist Bishi Bhattacharya performing Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano, which sounds every bit as nerve-shredding as you might expect). From the dependable – a sharp-suited Squeeze on the Pyramid stage, offering up one of the late 70s most beloved run of hits – to a largely unknown quantity. Now 80, Asha Puthli last performed in Britain in 1974: her oeuvre takes in everything from collaborations with Ornette Coleman to Bollywood soundtracks to new wave. A tiny figure swathed in chiffon, she turns out to be as spacey and idiosyncratic as the album on which her cult status is based, 1976’s The Devil Is Loose, highly prized by disco collectors and hip-hop producers in search of samples. Between songs, she reminisces about her friendship with legendary drag queen and Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn, complains about the weather (“it’s bloody fucking cold here – I just flew in from Miami”), and demonstrates how she achieved a curious bubbling sound that appeared on her 1973 cover of George Harrison’s I Dig Love: not, as was commonly supposed, by smoking a bong, but by gargling. Her voice is still capable of summoning up the eerie falsetto that punctuated her underground disco classic Flying Fish, while The Devil Is Loose’s acknowledged classic, Space Talk, still sounds incredible: a seductive, trippy dancefloor shimmer.

After UK drill rapper Headie One uses his 18-song set on the Other stage to unveil his new album – no fan of understatement, he incentivises fans to download it by informing them it is “a masterpiece” – the Pyramid stage plays host to the first-ever Glastonbury appearance by a K-pop band, the almost unreasonably pretty Seventeen, whose name refers to the number of members in the band and whose last EP, FML, was the biggest-selling in the world last year. The crowd they draw isn’t vast but at least some of it is very vociferous indeed: the stage-side screens unfortunately pick out a middle-aged onlooker wearing an expression for which the adjective “nonplussed” might have been invented, but equally, there are teenage girls down at the front expressing their appreciation by making a noise not dissimilar to Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano. And Seventeen, whose music varies from toothsome pop that comes accompanied by film of cartoon unicorns to what sounds like a peculiarly fresh-faced take on nu-metal, work very hard indeed to win over the merely curious. The hook of their closing track Very Nice is difficult to dislodge from your brain for the remainder of the day, simply because they repeat it so many times: every time you think they’re about to leave the stage, they start singing it again.

Pyramid stage
Her show may be situated in a fantastical world full of insects, swords and fallen trees, but the US singer’s lyrics are earthy and induce bedlam in her devoted fans

Towards the end of her set, SZA informs the audience that she was “so nervous to be here”. You can understand why. Of all the headlining artists at this year’s Glastonbury, the announcement of SZA seemed to cause the most consternation. It wasn’t the kind of dreary what-about-indie-rock complaining that used to attend the unveiling of any hip-hop or R&B headliner, more that if social media was to be believed, a significant proportion of Glastonbury-goers had simply never heard of her.

That probably says more about the atomised nature of algorithm-catered pop culture in 2024 – a world in which it’s far easier to stay in your particular musical bubble than it once was – than it does about SZA’s popularity. Her last album SOS wasn’t just a critical success, it sold 3m copies in the US and became the longest-running No 1 album by a female artist in the 2020s: in the UK, her last tour packed out a succession of arenas, including two nights at the O2. But as anyone who was at those London shows could attest, it was largely packed out with screaming, devoted teenage girls, who aren’t Glastonbury’s main demographic. Indeed, you could interpret her appearance as Glastonbury playing a long game, sending out a signal to a new generation of potential festival-goers that they feature the kind of artists they want to see.

Other stage
The Canadian singer plays to the biggest Other stage crowd of the weekend, all in thrall to an expertly written catalogue that has real strength and depth

If Shania Twain’s legends slot feels strangely timely given the amount of pop-country currently in the UK singles chart, you could say the same thing about Avril Lavigne’s performance, which seems a little like a legends slot in all but name. Pop punk is very much a thing again, and while you can trace the genre’s roots back to the Buzzcocks’ debut single, no artist can claim to have made punk more pop than Avril Lavigne did in the early 00s: refashioning its sound – and a dash of grunge’s angst – as bratty but harmless tweenage entertainment. She shifted so many copies of her debut album in the process that its follow-up was deemed a commercial disappointment on the grounds that only sold 10m as opposed to its predecessor’s 16m. Moreover, pop punk’s current practitioners have been more than happy to pay tribute to a woman they clearly consider to be the OG: Olivia Rodrigo covered Complicated when she played Glastonbury two years ago.

“Here’s to never growing up,” Lavigne sings, as well she might: after briefly dabbling with a more mature sound – moody Christian rock – on 2019’s Head Above Water, she clearly realised which way the wind was blowing and leaned back into her original mall-rat teen-punk persona.

Pyramid stage
Fireworks! Lasers! Confetti! More fireworks! Coldplay pull out every last stop for their record fifth headline performance, and you’d be churlish not to love it

It is, as Chris Martin points out, 25 years since Coldplay’s Glastonbury debut, a silver anniversary they commemorate tonight by unexpectedly dusting down an acoustic version of Sparks from their debut album Parachutes. Perhaps more pertinently, it’s the fifth time they’ve headlined the festival, and they’ve got the hang of it to such an extent that it increasingly feels like the job the quartet were put on earth to do.

Since their last appearance in 2016, they’ve completed a 180-degree turn from earnest stadium balladeers to purveyors of relentless, balls-out, more-is-more visual overload: their gigs are now effectively a 21st-century equivalent of U2’s Zoo TV shows, albeit without any of U2’s accompanying theorising about the media or the relationship between art and commerce.

Pyramid stage
The British singer’s Friday night set underlines her claim to be one of the world’s great current pop stars, with a cast-iron hit always around the corner

According to the most intriguing bit of her between-song chat, Dua Lipa’s headlining Glastonbury slot came about as a result of an act of childhood manifesting. The singer claims she wrote out her desire to top the bill on the Pyramid stage in detail, up to and including what night said event should take place on: a Friday, so she “could spend the rest of the weekend partying”. And now here we are: watching a slightly peculiar video of Dua Lipa signing her name and writing the words “GLASTO 24” on a pane of glass, then licking it.

Whether you buy the stuff about manifesting or not, Dua Lipa has clearly spent a lot of time carefully studying and absorbing how a successful Glastonbury headline set works, and putting what she’s gleaned to good use. The announcement of her appearance led to a degree of consternation, particularly after her most recent album, Radical Optimism, failed to replicate the kind of world-beating success afforded its predecessor, the lockdown smash Future Nostalgia. But she already has a stockpile of inescapable hits, from New Rules to her Elton John collaboration Cold Heart, which is half the battle won. And furthermore she throws everything she has at her set in order to lend it a sense of event, rather than it being simply another pop show transposed to a field in Somerset, another stop-off on a world tour that happens to be on a farm.

(Polydor)
Leaving behind gooey balladry and family-friendly fare, the US star’s reinvention owes a clear debt to Charli xcx but leaves her grasping for space on her own album

The release of I Luv It, the first single from Camila Cabello’s fourth solo album, brought with it something new for the 27-year-old singer: a degree of musical controversy. Ever since her 2017 single Havana sold a staggering 10m copies in the US alone, Cabello has made her way dealing in pleasantly undemanding, low-risk Latin-American pop, the kind of thing that makes its way onto the playlists at Radio 2 as easily as it does Radio 1. Something of the eager-to-please TV talent show contestant she had once been – Cabello first found fame as part of US X Factor semi-finalist girl band Fifth Harmony – seemed to cling to her: her lyrics contained no swearing, she told one US journalist in 2019, because she wanted to be “a good example for younger girls”.

I Luv It was audibly different: a brief burst of wilfully repetitious and tinny-sounding hyperpop that staggered along the line that separates insistent from annoying. Moreover, some people suggested it bore rather too much resemblance to Charli xcx’s 2017 single I Got It, although if you’re playing spot the influence, the offending chorus also seems to have a dash of Ariana Grande’s No Tears Left to Cry in its DNA. Among said voices was that of Charli xcx herself, who posted a parody of Cabello’s announcement video to TikTok, with I Got It replacing I Luv It on the soundtrack: cue the ever-delightful sound of diehard fans arguing with each other online.