Glastonbury live: Dua Lipa, Marina Abramović and more to perform as main stages open on Friday – live | Glastonbury 2024

West Holts, 2pm

“This is a new one – it’s about cannibalism.” Ah, the words every Glasto-goer longs to hear. If Squeeze pepped people up and Olivia Dean soothed them again, over on West Holts Squid are suddenly poking them in the ribs and ruffling their hair while wearing giant Mickey Mouse hands, sonically speaking. A few people may have been left wondering if last night’s mushroom chocolate is still hanging around their limbic system, particularly when you notice that one but two shoulder-riding audience members are dressed as actual squids.

Squid’s hyper-intellectual prog-jazz-techno-rock is surrealist, dense, trippy – and, yelping drummer and all, the six of them do build an impressively singular, odd, nervy sound. If your threshold for wackiness is up somewhere around “Danny Elfman juggling guavas” then there’s probably much to love. But I suspect that outside their faithful cephalopod squad, many will find the quality of the grooves isn’t remotely high enough to forgive the complete lack of tunes. At least my hands are exfoliated from the chin stroking.

New hands on deck

Elle Hunt

Afternoon all – I’m relieving Laura of blog duties, having spent the morning reviewing Lynks and Olivia Dean: two very different shows, and together a testament to the range of experiences you can stumble upon (or be assigned to review) at Glastonbury.

I can tell you that it’s heating up outside, though the cloud cover remains persistent, and a big crowd gathering at the Other stage for Confidence Man – our team will be bringing it to you live.

Asha Puthli reviewed!

Alexis Petridis

West Holts, 12.30pm

Asha Puthli represents a genuinely unknown quantity. It is, apparently, 50 years since she last played in the UK, two years before she released the album on which her latter-day cultdom is largely based: 1976’s The Devil Is Loose, an intriguing, off-beam confection of breathy, high vocals and woozy, jazzy dancefloor grooves, much-prized by disco collectors and home to the oft-sampled Space Talk. That aside, Puthli’s oeuvre took in everything from collaborations with Ornette Coleman to Bollywood soundtracks to new wave: who knows which of her musical incarnations is going to turn up on the West Holts stage after all this time?

Nearly 80, swathed in chiffon, Puthli cuts an authentically eccentric figure, alternately reminiscing about her friendship with Holly Woodlawn, Warhol-affiliated drag queen and star of Lou Reed’s Walk on The Wild Side, demonstrating how she came up with the peculiar bubbling sound that appears on her 1973 cover of George Harrison’s I Dig Love (not, as was commonly supposed the noise made by Puthli smoking a bong, but gargling with champagne), and protesting about the weather. “It’s bloody fucking cold here,” she complains. “I just flew in from Miami”.

Singing, as she proudly announces, in the same key she performed in during the 70s, she’s still capable of summoning a genuinely eerie falsetto on the chorus of Flying Fish, while her band, augmented by a tabla player, do an impressive job of conjuring up The Devil Is Loose’s unique sound: her occasionally improvised vocals (“I’d better sing the song to you,” she announces, after one long extempore burst during Hello Everyone) are punctuated by long, spacey instrumental passages. The set has a tendency to lurch about – jumping from a bluesy saunter through JJ Cale’s Right Down Here to the self-explanatory Disco Mystic – but the sun comes out as she plays Space Talk, which sounds fantastic, a beguilingly strange shimmer. “Do you love me? Do you really love me?” she asks. “Say yes!” The audience seem understandably happy to oblige.

Olivia Dean reviewed!

Elle Hunt

Pyramid, 1.15pm

“This is the biggest crowd I have ever played,” says Olivia Dean, having just concluded Echo, early into her early-afternoon Pyramid stage slot. Her Mercury-nominated debut album Messy was released a year ago (to the week, as she points out) so this set – on Glastonbury’s biggest stage, setting the tone for the days to come – represents an anointing of sorts for the neo-soul singer. And the crowd has come out for her, with groups seated but densely packed all the way up the hill.

She’s been dreaming of playing this stage since she was eight years old, she says, “so this is a really big moment for me”. You wouldn’t know she turned 25 only in March – Dean holds herself like a superstar, switching between instruments (guitar, keys, tambourine, a maraca shaped like a banana that I now desperately wish for myself) and engaging graciously with the crowd. Last year, she points out, she played the smaller Lonely Hearts stage, “so this is a big ol’ jump for me”.

For the first few songs, she doesn’t take off her cat-eye sunnies – a cool move that enhances the confessional nature of her set, creating the sense of layers unfurling by increments when she finally takes them off. On the breastplate of her mini-dress, there’s a photo of her grandmother, further indicating what this performance means to her.

That she sees herself as engaging with the singer-songwriter tradition is clear from her introduction to each song, telling the story of their inspiration – and emphasising her relatability. My Own Warfare is about the concept of “the other half”: “I don’t really believe in that … you don’t need someone else to complete you”, she says, to cheers from the crowd (presumably the single ladies). UFO is about her feelings of alienation, she explains; I Could Be a Florist is about her daydream of an alternate path and another life. (“Any florists in the crowd?” A smattering, apparently.) Time, her new song which was released only this week (“I don’t expect you to know the words”), is about the question of how to spend it.

It’s all very introspective for a Pyramid stage set, and generally on the slower side tempo-wise, but Dean has a beautiful voice and knows how to use it, precisely expressing her themes of sadness, relief, heartbreak (“‘tis the season, yeah?”), yearning or self-doubt. She’s accompanied by a brass section, generating a sense of occasion and elevating what is, after all, early in the day on Glastonbury time. When the band get a chance to let loose during her more upbeat songs, the set really starts cooking, but before long the temperature is brought back down to Dean’s mid-tempo comfort zone.

The Hardest Part, the song she says changed her life, draws the most recognition from the crowd, but it’s her cover of Kelis’s Millionaire that I enjoy most – I’d love to hear her write her own songs with similar swagger. Her unwavering smile through Messy speaks to its genesis as anthem of self-acceptance; the next step might be embracing that mess in her music.

But Dean’s home key, it’s clear, is more ballads than ballsy, more schmaltzy than spiky. (An audience member’s sign, requesting that she play at their wedding, is met with a maybe: “I love weddings!”) That reflective instinct is at its best with Carmen, her second-to-last song and a touching tribute to the sacrifices that got her here. Holding back tears, she dedicates the song to her grandmother – watching on the telly, Dean says – and the rest of her Windrush generation: “She came to this country when she was 18, she’d never been before, and decided to change her whole life … I’m a product of her bravery.”

It’s a lovely note on which to end the set – or, in Glastonbury time, start the day.

Jason Okundaye

Top Boy actress Saffron Hocking with friend, actress Lois Chimimba ready for Headie One. “We love Headie, he’s so sweet, our baby!” says Hocking.

Jason Okundaye

Waiting around at the Other stage for Headie One to begin when I have what looks like a voodoo stick waved in my face. David (pictured) tells me this is Keith Richards, “from the Rolling Stones, but he’s not with them right now, he’s with me.” Are David and Keith regulars? “Keith’s never missed a year.”

Squeeze reviewed!

Ben Beaumont-Thomas

Pyramid, 12.00pm

Generally the Pyramid stage opening act gently eases you into the day but Squeeze get you on your feet, shove a largarita in your hand and tell you to get back in the game. Snappily dressed in sharp tailoring, they kick Take Me I’m Yours instantly into a high gear, almost towards a rockabilly tempo, with Glenn Tilbrook’s soul-boy voice heated up into rock’n’roll. Suitably warmed, he swerves expressively around his upper register for Hourglass as the backing band prop him up with five-way vocal harmonies. Later, his songwriting partner Chris Difford gives Cool for Cats quite the opposite vocal treatment. On release in 1979 it was the pub-bar chatter of a twentysomething likely lad; grizzled and even deeper-voiced, he now sounds like the pub’s landlord delivering an old yarn.

New song One Beautiful Summer gets a warm reception, and when I interviewed Difford earlier this week he told me it was inspired by a Guardian article about late-in-life romance at an Eastbourne care home. “Unfortunately the guy passed away and she was left to pick up the pieces of her heart,” he said. “We’ve written this song to reflect what it must be like to be in a care home and have a relationship at very late stage of life. Because it’s just around the corner for us!”

He and Tilbrook celebrate 50 years together this year, and as this set shows, seem energised by the very spunk that fires up the songs they wrote in their youth. Difford told me they’re even planning to revisit some unrecorded mid-70s demos. “It’s been kind of like an archeological dig, we’ve going around with a brush with each song and taking it out of the ground,” he said. “I think: those young lads had incredible ambition and commitment to writing those songs, and here they are all these years later.”

While Tilbrook and Difford remain the heart of the band, the supporting players are terrific: their keyboardist doing an analogue synth solo in Slap and Tickle by karate-chopping the keys, while Pulling Mussels (From the Shell) has hard-pounding piano and punchy congas, and later their pedal steel player gives a magnificently gurning solo. But this Pyramid crowd pull their weight too. Up the Junction provokes one of the loveliest sounds you get on this stage – thousands of people wordlessly singing a riff – and Tilbrook leads a giant call and response for Black Coffee in Bed. “You’ve made an old man cry,” says Difford, and the wave of love surges back towards him.

Voice of Baceprot reviewed!

Gwilym Mumford

Woodsies, 11.30am

How best to open a festival? Some winsome, gently cooed folk ballads, to ease hungover punters into the day? That’s one option, but the schedulers at Woodsies have instead opted for a bracing blast of thrash metal to blow away the cobwebs. The first Indonesian band to ever play at Glastonbury, Voice of Baceprot are a female power trio whose cheerful onstage disposition masks an impressively beefed up brand of old-school metal. Dressed head to toe in black, including hijabs, it’s immediately clear they mean business from the very first chugging drop D riff they launch into.

Their sound owes much to the big four of 80s thrash, but there’s a hint of System of a Down in their off kilter melodies and a dash of Primus in Widi Rahmawati’s frenetic slap bass riffs. She’s given plenty of room to show off her chops, as is drummer Euis Siti Aisyah, whose extended mid-set solo gets the biggest cheer of the day. But perhaps most impressive of all is vocalist Firda Marsya Kurnia, who is equally at ease delivering a lacerating growl or a clean, soaring pop-metal melody. There’s a lovely moment where, right after concluding one of their many bruising breakdowns, the band pause to wish Rahmawati happy birthday and Kurnia gets a little teary at the sight of hundreds of Glasto punters joining in. “This is the best gig ever” she yelps, and in the moment it’s hard to disagree.

Lambrini Girls reviewed!

Tim Jonze

Woodsies, 12.45pm

Pouring Red Stripe down each other’s throats at midday, here come Lambrini Girls, careering around the stage in a blaze of guitars-aloft feedback, blitzkrieg drums and savage lyrics that cut through the bullshit of 2024 culture wars.

“Big dick energy / You’re such a fake / Stay the fuck away from me!” screams singer Phoebe Lunny, before asking for a show of hands for “queer legends and non-binary legends” and launching into Help Me I’m Gay. Then during Terf Wars there’s a call and response routine: “Shut your stupid fucking mouth,” yells Lunny while the crowd yell back “You stupid fucking terf!” One suspects the Radio 2 playlist does not beckon.

But in a year in which Coldplay, Dua Lipa and Shania Twain are taking the plum spots it’s thrilling to hear the exact polar opposite, a truly righteous racket of youthful anger.