Hinds – Park stage

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hinds … endearingly messy. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

“We’ve been here since Thursday and have only just had a shower,” announces Hinds singer Carlotta Cosials proudly. Certainly the Madrid four-piece don’t seem like the sort to let a little mud get in the way of having a good time. Live, they’re an endearingly messy prospect, all jangly Throwing Muses guitars, howling, out-of-tune vocals and seemingly unplanned tempo shifts. Frequently, on songs such as opener Fat Calmed Kiddos, the whole thing looks in very real danger of falling to bits, though the fact that it never does suggests they might be a little more accomplished than they let on.

The one problem is a lack of variety: there’s only so many times you can hear the same ramshackle indie jangle without fatigue creeping in, and too many of the songs here begin to blend into each other. A few more tunes and they’d be a real prospect. GM

Kamasi Washington – West Holts stage

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kamasi Washington … left of the mainstream. Photograph: The Guardian

At times it felt like a religious Sunday service – fervent converts bowing to the sight of Washington blowing hard

Six years ago, the Jazz World stage was retitled West Holts with a promise to bring “the best groove-based music from around the world” to the festival. For a huge lunchtime crowd, Kamasi Washington and his band did just that. But the 35-year-old Los Angeles saxophonist – who cropped up on the left-of-mainstream’s radar after playing on Kendrick Lamar’s to Pimp a Butterfly before making a mark with his own album of last year, The Epic – sits firmly in the jazz tradition.



Copious shades of Coltrane are evident in his sound, but bassist Miles Mosley and keytar player Brandon Coleman, plus drummers Tony Austin and Ronald Bruner Jr, produced thunderous rhythms that recalled Jack Johnson-era Miles Davis, too. The punishing notes produced by Mosley’s amplified double bass at the start of the show were surely enough to unblock the bowels of anyone at the festival yet to brave the loos. There was little letup thereafter, even when Washington was joined by a special guest, his own father, Rickey, on soprano sax and flute.

Given that The Epic runs to 173 minutes, it was impossible to do it justice here, but allied to the blaring funkiness was depth and complexity, and the vocals of Patrice Quinn lent proceedings a spiritual air. At times, it even felt like a religious Sunday service – but seeing fervent converts bowing to the sight of Washington blowing hard couldn’t but make you think how fantastic it would be to see this group playing high on the bill on the Pyramid stage one day. CLS

Bat for Lashes – John Peel stage

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bat for Lashes … ecstatic drama. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Dressed like a tropical Miss Havisham in a teal gown and blood-red veil, an invigorated Natasha Khan brings tales of doomed romance to a rainswept tent. She’s in the unenviable position of having a new album of songs, The Bride, that no one has actually heard yet – but they are nevertheless received warmly, particularly big single Sunday Love with its determined, driving disco. This is Khan’s core style, where Springsteenian tableaux of hearts and roads are painted in melancholic, burnt-orange hues and underpinned by a pumping rhythm section. Her big hit Daniel, which closes the set, is a classic example, with ultra-lucid Emily Dickinson-type images (“Under a sheet of rain in my heart”) adding a serious beauty to pretty pop.

The melodrama sometimes teeters on cartoonish – In God’s House concerns a groom dying in a car crash on the way to a wedding – but Khan’s pitch-perfect voice, cruising ecstatically into its upper register, gives even these songs real drama. Her ballad Laura, meanwhile, has boys in baseball caps swaying like willows, and vies with Adele for the weekend’s queen of piano-driven emotion. After calling for solidarity in a post-Brexit Britain, she rounds off the marital imagery by throwing a bouquet into the audience, telling them: “If you catch this, you’ll love yourself for ever.” BBT

Beck – Pyramid stage

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beck … slickly uneasy. Photograph: Richard Isaac/Rex/Shutterstock

“If you’re standing in the mud and you don’t give a damn say, ‘Hell, yeah!’” cries Beck Hansen, more attuned to his current surroundings than his band’s pristine outfits suggest. Eerily unchanged from the man who stared out from album sleeves 20 years ago, Hansen looks like he’s arrived in the Glastonbury swamp fresh from a fashion runway: leather jacket, polka-dot shirt, hat at a rakish angle. His guitarist appears to be wearing red suede boots, an impossibly daring choice given the conditions. Their set cuts a populist swathe through Hansen’s back catalogue: noticeably heavier on crowdpleasers such as E-Pro and stuff from 1996’s Odelay – New Pollution, Devil’s Haircut, Where It’s At – than on the introspection found on albums such as Sea Change or Morning Phase. Understandably, the fatalism of Loser goes down particularly well.

He keeps mentioning his uneasiness on stage: “I feel like we’re trying to find our thing here”; “This is like a blind date”. Frankly, if he didn’t keep mentioning it, you’d never guess: he’s incredibly slick and appears to know exactly what to do. He cannily introduces new material by turning it into an audience singalong, segues from Think I’m in Love to a cover of Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, and gets his band to introduce themselves by performing brief snippets of Prince’s 1999, Kraftwerk’s It’s More Fun to Compute, Chic’s Good Times and David Bowie’s China Girl; the latter might have made for a more heartfelt tribute if Hansen had known the words, but those standing in the mud failing to give a damn clearly decide that it’s the thought that counts. HG

Mac DeMarco – John Peel stage

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mac DeMarco surfs the crowd. Photograph: Ekaterina Ochagavia/The Guardian

Leave it to Mac DeMarco and his band to be the spiritual slackers for Glasto’s great unwashed. They turn up on stage looking like Somerset’s finest farmers, happily telling the crowd about the matching raincoats and bucket hats they blagged in Frome. Each member of the band is infinitely watchable, striking yoga poses at the keyboard and blowing kisses to the camera and the audience. It could easily descend into pure comedy – indeed, there’s something very 2016 Happy Mondays about their muckabout shtick.

But these guys have the musicianship to balance out the nonstop playfulness. The title track of last album Salad Days shows off their knack for reeling in the crowd with laidback 60s pop and guitars that sound as if they’ve been licked by sunshine, as well as a smattering of older songs such as My Kind of Woman, romantic ditties obscured by a stoner pace and delivered with a gap-toothed smile. But there are also enviable, noodlesome instrumentals where the band do a Jimi Hendrix, everyone guitar-playing behind their heads, and raucous dance-alongs for Freaking Out the Neighbourhood, when Kirin J Callinan and Jay Watson from Tame Impala join them on stage for a spot of interpretive dance or, in Watson’s case, just to have a quiet sit down.

Mac De Marco shows are often raucous affairs, breaking almost instantly into moshpits, but this is more of a cheery affair. A lively warm-up for their no doubt messfest of a secret set at the Crow’s Nest later tonight. Tame Impala wish they were this cool. KH



PJ Harvey – Other stage

Facebook Twitter Pinterest PJ Harvey … a buoy to cling to. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

Flying through all the variously stumbled and rushed Brexit responses on stage this weekend was PJ Harvey’s perfectly weighted dart. Introducing The Glorious Land, she read John Donne’s poem No Man Is an Island, written in 1624, with its assertion that “every man is a piece of the continent”. But her entire set was a reflection on the priggishness of alpha-male politics that wreaks havoc from Syria to Essex.

Using martial drums and drill-sergeant strictness is on one level sarcastic, an arch version of chest-beating masculinity. But it also acknowledges just how infectious such rousing military music can be. Opening with Chain of Keys, she marches out playing a saxophone with the burly middle-aged blokes in her band, dressed in leather gloves and midnight folds of fabric. Moving to the mic, she holds the sax out like a totem, starting up a blood ritual. She holds poses amid the Guernica-like imagery of The Ministry of Defence, then marvels like a child at the “insects courting” in Let England Shake – all of it hypnotically authoritative stagecraft.

It would be nothing, of course, without great music, and aside from Dollar, Dollar’s overly spartan passages, it’s beautiful – like a New Orleans blues band commissioned for a dance in an Elizabethan court. Phrases are repeated again and again with almost techno-like levels of fixation; perhaps in these troubled times, words become buoys to cling to, sure things to focus on. To Bring You My Love, meanwhile, becomes a study in psychotic eroticism, backed by scorched desert blues.

You get the feeling that the chaos and pathos of Brexit will provide fresh grist for this immensely fertile period of her career – it’s almost worth living in shit to get pearls like this from it. BBT

Grimes – Park stage

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grimes … unleashing noisy digital hell. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

Glasto’s final sunset was a complete non-event, obscured behind a sheet of blank grey – enter Grimes to fire a barrage of Technicolor into the sky. Claire Boucher may have started out in grimy warehouses, but is proudly in thrall to the arena-filling sound of K-pop and electro, and has so much love for expressing it all that she positively vibrates with passion.

It makes for a thrilling set, as she darts between iconic vogueing at the front of the stage and tweaking synths at the back; during Venus Fly, she goes from coquette to demon in a single bound across the stage, unleashing noisy digital hell at the flick of a switch. She’s backed by a guitarist given to whipping hair and shredding, plus two dancers wielding ribbons and knives – a combo that pretty much sums up Grimes’s music. A new version of Be a Body is jacked up, the foursome dancing through what looks like the world’s scariest fitness video; quite often Grimes herself, dressed like a Nintendo hero, is like a cheerleader who has grasped the potential malevolence of a pep rally. World Princess Pt 2 is particularly striking, whipping itself up again and again towards a chorus drop of gigantic satisfaction.

Glastonbury may seem as if it’s all earthy emotions and gong baths, but Grimes is a reminder that it can provide intensely immediate thrills. BBT

LCD Soundsystem – Other stage

Facebook Twitter Pinterest LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy … mesmerising. Photograph: Gary Miller/Getty Images

Those of a cynical disposition might suggest that the re-emergence of LCD Soundsystem, less than five years since James Murphy retired them, had a little ring of the cash register about it. Fine, but even if these 2016 shows are financially motivated, Murphy is certainly earning his corn. Case in point: this Other stage headline set, in which, clad in a pristine white suit, he stalks the stage like some evangelical preacher, manically barking out the lyrics to Daft Punk Is Playing Out My House, cowbell in hand.

Every hit lands, from an itchy performance of Tribulations, to a hyperactive Losing My Edge, to Murphy belting out New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down as if he’s auditioning for Hamilton. Things culminate, as they always should, with a mesmerising All My Friends. Over on the Pyramid, Coldplay unleash their 25th fireworks display of the night. No one pays it a moment’s notice. GM