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.