Complain all you like but Glastonbury has delivered the goods again

There’s yet to be a Glastonbury line-up that hasn’t provoked a chorus of naysaying. Refrains like ‘looks rubbish. I wouldn’t go’ and ‘not like it used to be’ are de rigueur. Dismissing the headliners as ‘crap this year’ rivals football as the nation’s favourite sport. Yet there’s something to be said for trusting the Glastonbury bookers: check out, say, the lower-tier bands on the 1994 poster and see how many greats they discovered before they were famous – Radiohead, Pulp, Oasis…

Glastonbury’s prestige and legendary ‘vibe’ are now such that the festival is bigger than any of the artists playing there. This works against US headline acts, which treat the festival like an extension of their Vegas residency, recalling the scene in The Simpsons where Spinal Tap have to check the back of the guitar to remember what town they are playing. But it pays dividends for clued-up veterans like Coldplay who know exactly how to milk the occasion to the point where even those in the audience who think they loathe ‘anthemic rock for bedwetters’ suddenly find themselves tearful with nostalgia. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, so there are no haters in a Coldplay crowd.

On the whole, it was a year where the veterans capitalised, with LCD Soundsystem, the Streets and James providing some of the most rousing sets. Knowing little of her act, I was very prepared for Sunday headliner SZA to be brilliant – but streaming figures (she was Spotify’s 16th most played artist) don’t necessarily translate to the stage. Though the termite-cave set design was some of the Pyramid’s best, her vocals from the speakers were so garbled that the lyrics were indistinguishable, and the Pyramid lay unusually empty.