They sound fantastic – their gospel-trained frontman, Jacob Lusk, has an astonishing falsetto voice, tender and eerie their sound variously touches on 60s soul, disco and jazz-inflected pre-rock’n’roll pop – but while their songs are beautiful, they are also often measured and opaque. Something similar happens on Saturday morning, when the US trio Gabriels play the Park stage.
The Friday night headliner, Billie Eilish, plays a succession of slow, fragile ballads, but rather than leave in search of something more punchy or easier to bellow along to, the crowd stays and listens.
If arriving onsite is a slightly discombobulating experience at first – even for a seasoned Glastonbury-goer, the sheer volume of people feels weirdly overwhelming after spending a significant proportion of the past two years locked in your home – you quickly notice a fresh, benign happiness that is presumably rooted in gratitude that the event is happening at all.Īccordingly, the audiences seem more attentive than usual. You sometimes get the feeling that if a vast sinkhole unexpectedly opened up, swallowing huge sections of the Worthy Farm site, Eavis would stick his head out of it on Sunday afternoon and start waxing lyrical to a reporter about the magical atmosphere and indomitable high spirits in the crowd.īut this year the atmosphere at Glastonbury does feel a little different. Eavis is famous for cropping up in the media towards the end of every festival, loudly proclaiming the preceding days the best Glastonbury ever, an assessment it can be hard to agree with if you have just spent three days watching people’s belongings being washed away, wading through ankle-deep mud or, on one notable occasion, looking on aghast as the operator of an effluent truck presses the wrong button and inadvertently sprays the interior of one of the dance tents with human excrement. It’s a sweet and oddly moving scene, and it seems to say something about the first Glastonbury since 2019.
The crowd don’t just part to let it through: when they realise who’s inside it, they line the sides of the road, not cheering or shouting, but respectfully applauding as it passes. O n Saturday afternoon, a Land Rover with Glastonbury’s founder, Michael Eavis, in the passenger seat pulls out of the backstage area, on to a road packed with people that runs between Glastonbury’s Pyramid and Other stages.
0 kommentar(er)
