by The hottest ticket at this year’s Glastonbury is a bacchanal of sweat led by pop’s chief scientist. Charli XCX, who has spent the last 12 years making fun of sex, cars, gambling and all the messy stuff, arrives at Tron-like Levels in a puff of toxic green smoke — the color of lo-fi. cover art for blanket, her new album just released and the sound of this summer for anyone with a vape habit and a history of self-loathing.
Dressed in a puffer jacket and cream bodysuit and hidden behind dark, don’t-look-me-in-the-eye sunglasses, she spun through a DJ set that drew from Flag, modern dance-pop, and club classics like “Finally” by CeCe Peniston. Robyn shows up. So, too, does Shygirl. There are lasers, screams, keys, nonsense. Charli means greetings girls, party girls, girlie girls. Everyone here knows they are in the presence of a superstar.
Anecdotally, at least, few other Fridays at the festival shimmer with such A-list dynamism. You’re either Charli or you’re a flop. Couldn’t get past the hastily built barricades around Levels? You just tried hard enough. For Glastonbury, few could have predicted that Charli’s pop explosion was about to be unleashed just weeks before the festival began. Even fewer could have predicted that Friday’s Pyramid Stage headliner, Dua Lipa, would be an outlier in a year dominated by brilliant, personal, ambitious pop. It’s no one’s fault exactly, but it speaks to Glastonbury having the wrong genre this year.
Glastonbury’s relationship with pop music, and especially the purest, most classy kind of pop music loved by girls and gays, is rarely discussed in relation to the festival’s evolution over time. Historically, pop artists here have felt so culturally and creatively significant that their art is unimpeachable (think Kylie Minogue in 2019 or “Run the World (Girls)”-era Beyoncé in 2011). Or they exude an undeniable and sometimes enigmatic charm, from Sugababes in 2003 and their packed Friday version this year, to Rita Ora in 2013 – which also helps to be British.
This has usually been the approach of the festival, and it has usually gone very well. Look at the pop musicians who have played here in the last 25 years, and only Katy Perry in 2017 feels like a left-field choice – yes, she has incredible commercial strength, but there’s something about her catalog that feels overwhelming. more Radio 1 Weekend than Worthy Farm, right?
Why, then, is this year’s pop music at Glastonbury so strange? Judging by the sea of people eager to enter Levels at midnight on Friday, Charli is one of the biggest names here, her little set rocking elite chic. That’s the point, following on from several previous DJ sets — in places like New York, Mexico and London’s Dalston Department Store — in support of the Flag release defined by their generous exclusivity and celebrity guests. But there should have been more to her, some main stage time to acknowledge that she is Britain’s most innovative and important modern pop star.
The error feels particularly egregious when Camila Cabello has nabbed the prime time slot of Next Step. The singer, who rose to fame in the sub-Little Mix US girl band Fifth Harmony, has recently rebranded as Charli’s evil twin: an embodied collection of messy party girl aesthetics that feels like an uncomfortable and odd skin suit. Cabello’s new material is not as much indebted to Charli as many assumed it would be – the double erection C, XOXO, rReleased on Friday, Drake jumps between hip-hop, hyper-pop, ballads and ill-timed collaborations — but it’s strange that she’s been given such a big platform here considering the blandly commercial pop music that defined her early fame.
Missing at this year’s Glastonbury, too, are the ladies of pop. Where is Chappell Roan? A gloriously flamboyantly beautiful pop drama that has been stuck for the past six months courtesy of a handful of year-old bangers going into the stratosphere all at the same time, few contemporary American artists feel more lab-built for a Glastonbury slot. Arguments could easily be made that Sabrina Carpenter should have had a slot here this year too – her witty, euphemistic and thoroughly enjoyable brand of bopping was one of the main sounds of this summer.
There is at least a slot for Rachel Chinouriri, one of Britain’s most promising young pop stars working at the moment, but it would be nice to see her given more than the lunchtime Other Stage slot on the Sunday. After all, there’s clearly a huge audience for pop music here, as evidenced by the crowds that turned away from the Sugababes, and the relatively meager gatherings for many on the Pyramid Stage on Friday – the gulf between the crushing mania of those watching the “Push the Button Hitters” and the muted reception for PJ Harvey on the main stage an hour later was outstanding.
The big elephant in the room, of course, is that Lipa – who should be this year’s must-see headliner alongside the reliable if unexciting Coldplay and the better-on-record SZA – at Glastonbury in the middle of a creative lull. . Radical optimism, Her May record fizzled, an all-too-familiar summer collection that struggled to match the “psychedelic pop” sounds Lipa hinted at in pre-release interviews, and exposed some of her artistic limitations: great vibes but limited personality; steam in era calling out from something solid.
Her headlining set on Friday was, by all accounts, very good, but she was dominated by older hits, suggesting an artist who knows what has captured the zeitgeist and what hasn’t. In his review, The Independent‘s Jazz Monroe wrote that her series Radical hope Cuts felt like “fixed, almost defensive inclusions” compared to undeniable classics like “Physical” and “Don’t Start Now”.
Meanwhile, Charli had a strong buzz on Friday night – eye-catching, attention-hogging, seductive. It didn’t even matter that some of the biggest tracks are on Flag did not play. Was I sad we didn’t get Lorde’s remix of “Girl, so confusing”, a complete transport blur of diaristic melancholy and f***-it-let’s-party synths that is the best song of 2024 so far? Of course! But that wasn’t the vibe either: her set was about chaos, noise and body heat, and the thrill of being a complete unimpeachable train wreck and worrying about the fallout later.
“I want you to be wise,” Charli shouts at one point, drawing out the last word in her cut-glass British accent with her LA drawl. “I want you to be bitchy. I want you to be c***y.”
This was a series that spoke to the power of pop music when it is in the hands of a genius. Next year, I hope Glastonbury gives the genre the respect it deserves. And the right steps.
