Latest news with #FourTet
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Yingtuitive's dream-logic electronics plus the week's best tracks
From Singapore/LondonRecommended if you like Fennesz, Four Tet, Laurel Halo Up next Ongoing monthly show on Noods Radio The baked floral scents and hot breezes of the UK's mini heatwave this week pair perfectly with the work of Yingtuitive, AKA Singapore-raised, London-dwelling musician Hannah Chia – though you sense that her shifting, almost synaesthetic music will take on new colours in the drizzle or snow. Chia's debut album Letters To Self 寫情書 was released late last month: recalling the bucolic electronics of early Four Tet but subtly nodding to a range of ambient and club sounds, it doesn't ever settle into predictable emotional beats. Chia focuses on piano on tracks such as Pandan, poignant ambient jazz in the style of Matthew Bourne or Ryuichi Sakamoto; Blue, a study in thick, aqueous reverb; and Do U Forget a Feeling?, with more reverb set against a crisp beat, as if tapped out on an MPC sampler. It's the first of three excellent rhythmic tracks at the album's heart: make sure to stick Exhibition on the best system you can to appreciate the penetrating bass, as well as the melodic effects which recall grime productions (especially Skepta's signature video-game squelch). As this cosmopolitan album plays through, it's like being carried with dream logic from garden to mall to club and back again. Chia has said the album is, in part, borne out of 'a contemplation of a split soul from living between two places for so long'. She captures the poignancy of living so restlessly, seeing such varied beauty, but never fully building a life around it. Ben Beaumont-Thomas Dijon – Higher!After co-writing Justin Bieber's recent UK No 1 Daisies, the R&B musician follows up with his own astounding, surprise-dropped second album. Higher! is charged with gospel fervour, and touched with greatness. BBT William Tyler and Claire Rousay – Covert ServicesThe Nashville guitarist's recent foray into haunted ambience makes him a perfect match for the Canadian experimentalist, though the result is surprisingly poppy, like a whacked-out Alex G. LS Militarie Gun – B A D I D E AHardcore punk's Hot To Go!? Those letters are chanted as if by a demotivational cheerleader squad, as the brilliant LA band return with 109 seconds of pop-minded pogoing. BBT The Belair Lip Bombs – Hey YouThe Third Man-signed Aussies tone down their debut's power-pop euphoria for this tough confrontation of a relationship on its uppers, produced by Joe White of their equally excellent countrymen Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. LS Just Mustard – We Were Just HereThe only trace of dream pop left around the Irish band here is in Katie Ball's searching vocals; the music buzzes, vibrates and grinds like a city electrified. LS Neko Case – Winchester Mansion of SoundA very Neko devotional: comparing a wild friend with 'too much life for just one body' to a haunted mansion, seemingly played on its piano and swooping through its ballrooms. LS Chy Cartier – Miu MiuA masterclass in rap hook-writing from the north London MC, her rhyme scheme locking with perfect symmetry as she trumpets her purchasing power, not forgetting a Merc for mum. BBT Subscribe to the Guardian's rolling Add to Playlist selections on Spotify.
The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From awol to A-lister: how pop stars from Charli xcx to Addison Rae found the fun in fame again
On Lorde's 2021 album Solar Power, the New Zealand pop star ditched fame. She threw her phone in the sea, sang 'if you're looking for a saviour, well, that's not me' and advised looking to nature for answers instead. But her sun-bleached third album proved divisive, so much so that just a year later, she placated fans by promising she was making 'bangers' again. This April, her comeback single What Was That returned to the incandescent synth-pop of her beloved 2017 album Melodrama; her new album Virgin opens: 'It's a beautiful life so why play truant? / I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.' Lorde was back roaming the streets, swapping Auckland fishing trips for New York Citi Bike rides, addicted to her phone again, playing Glastonbury at 11.30am and then disappearing to get high at Four Tet. Where Solar Power was introverted, Virgin is hungry for experience and connection, sticky with sweat and other bodily fluids. But it's also still preoccupied with the cost of finding fame at the age of 16 and how to carry it at age 28. The erratic album has divided critics again: is the sometimes spindly sound and lyrical status anxiety another attempt by Lorde to push listeners away? Or are the intermittent Melodrama 2.0 bangers her giving in to expectation? Ever alert to her own myth, she said recently: 'I just am this person who's meant to make these bangers that fuck us all up.' While Lorde is figuring out her relationship to celebrity, an emerging group of pop stars are striking straight for its jugular – hungry for success and toying with its aesthetics – no matter what cautionary tales previous generations of superstar have been telling them about the perils of your dream coming true. Just a few years ago, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift dialled down the intensity of their work as they've sought privacy and reckoned with wounds sustained from lifelong visibility. Justin Bieber has stressed how negatively media invasion has affected his life. After her Vegas and Munich residencies, Adele has split the scene. And the revelations about the abuse of Britney Spears prompted a host of documentaries in which 90s and Y2K pop stars including Robbie Williams aired their damage. These stories are in stark contrast to the playfulness of the current moment. Unsurprisingly, Brat parted the waves. In the video for lead single Von Dutch, Charli xcx led a bloody fight against a paparazzo stalking her around an airport – something unlikely to have happened to the still not-quite-mainstream pop star before the release of her sixth album. Then Brat became a phenomenon and Charli a household name. Commanding, spontaneous and feckless, she made being a celebrity look like a monstrously good time that she couldn't get enough of. Charli admitted to calling the paps on herself and exposed the lie of humility among her peers: 'It would almost be seen as inauthentic now for a musician to say, 'I want to be famous', because it's supposed to be all about the art,' she said in a conversation with actor/model/It-girl Julia Fox. Pop stardom has always been about the art of being famous, one that can take many forms. Retreating from it is its own kind of pose; admitting to its seductions in the slipstream of its deserters may feel somewhat subversive. Lorde's album campaign drew nakedly from the Brat playbook, and she clearly wanted some of the freedom and notoriety her Girl, So Confusing collaborator had found. Renée Rapp's return flaunts her hedonistic A-list life; former Little Mix member Jade launched her career with the fantastically nuts Angel of My Dreams, which lurched through her love-hate relationship with stardom: 'When the camera flashy, I act so happy / I'm in heaven when you're looking at me,' she sang, and also battled paps in the video. The year's breakout pop star, Addison Rae, has been candid about pursuing fame at any cost. She found attention as a dancer on TikTok, a start that invited scepticism on her move into pop, and how a figure some perceived as culturally lightweight won patronage from more left-field acts in Charli xcx and Arca. She told the New York Times of her dance days: 'When I reflect back on that time, I've recognised how much choice and taste is kind of a luxury.' Rae grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, and her parents had a troubled relationship. She said she had been 'strategic' with building a career to change her situation. 'It was a lot about like: 'How am I just going to get out of here?' It wasn't about like: 'Let me show the intricacies of myself right now.'' As a pop star, Rae's image is startlingly close to that of vintage Spears: low-rise skirts, dancer's abs, full choreo. They share Louisiana roots and comparable origin stories. But the distance between where their respective escape routes landed them stretches the whole arc of how fame, once ordained by record label boardrooms, can now be self-determined. At 43, Spears may be freed from her abusive conservatorship arrangement but exists in a sort of purgatory. Rae, 24, has found freedom and taunts her detractors: 'When you shame me, it makes me want it more.' In that sense, pop stars admitting their desire to be famous also feels wildly appropriate to the times: more than half of gen Z aspire to be influencers (and 41% of adults) according to a 2023 survey by Morning Consult. When Eilish, Swift and Lorde retreated from celebrity, it chimed with the hopeless feeling of the first Trump presidency – a time Pitchfork recently called 'nearly banger-less' – as well as Covid-era antipathy towards superstars, as best embodied by the backlash to the video of Gal Gadot and pals singing Imagine to inspire hope during the pandemic. You could read their retreat as good business sense, as if they were saying: look, we don't like this any more than you do. But listening to famous people complain has never been relatable, even if audiences have become more sympathetic to the suffering celebrity can inflict. And in the gloves-off era of Trump 2.0, it's cool to be rich, famous and scandalous again. And chasing success on the broadest possible terms entertains a powerful individualist fantasy: while stardom may have crushed weaker mortals, bridling it just takes savvier hands. Always simultaneously operating as cultural theorist and pop star, Charli xcx said in a recent TikTok that despite being conscious of overexposure, she was 'also interested in the tension of staying too long', in stretching the limits of public tolerance. The controversial cover for Sabrina Carpenter's forthcoming album Man's Best Friend has a tang of Trumpian political infamy: the flashed-out photo looks like a pap shot; the suit on the faceless man pulling Carpenter's hair implies some status. On her knees, she's either the exploited Lewinsky-ish innocent or a woman happily enjoying sexual power play. It's a private interaction that's about to become everyone's business, and Carpenter knows the woman loses either way. But as an image-maker, she wins, understanding that it's better to be talked about than to cry off attention as invasive. (Even if she did eventually release a more PG-friendly alternative cover 'approved by God'.) When the president's intentionally dissonant agenda and systemic dysfunction has left people questioning reality, uncomplicated pop stars offer a glowy-skinned port in a storm. Notably, it's only white pop acts who always have the option to default back to escapism. It's easy to see this moment as innately conservative, aspiring to conventional beauty standards and success markers in order to make bank; the Not That Deep vibe defying fan demand for pop stars to be nuanced spokespeople in the wake of #MeToo and reckonings with racial injustice. Creatively baiting attention is at least more interesting than releasing consolidation efforts harking back to past glories, a plague on recent pop. Drake conscripted PartyNextDoor to make $ome $exy $ongs 4 U to remind fans why they liked him after he was eviscerated by Kendrick Lamar. The Weeknd's business-as-usual Hurry Up Tomorrow failed to produce the sort of year-defining single Abel Tesfaye can usually expect. Katy Perry's 143 tanked. Never shy of a bold statement, Lady Gaga said that her album Mayhem 'started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved' and compared its creation to 'reassembling a shattered mirror'. Which is one way to say: giving fans what they want after some sizeable flops. The artist who once made an artform of fame rued 'you love to hate me' on the Mayhem song Perfect Celebrity. The sentiment feels a little yeah, duh. Especially in 2025, when the perfect pop celebrity is a satirist who also revels in the privilege that people love to hate. Romy Mars is the 18-year-old daughter of director Sofia Coppola and Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars. She went viral in 2023 for a museum-worthy TikTok in which she admitted she had been grounded for trying to charter a helicopter to visit her camp friend using her dad's credit card, didn't know the difference between garlic and an onion while trying to make pasta sauce, and aired her parents for being perpetually out of town and not allowing her to have social media because 'they don't want me to be a nepotism kid'. The nepo baby concerns didn't seem to last long: last year, Mars launched her debut single, passable songwriterly synth-pop that only garnered any notice because of her family. But this year, she has a potential song of the summer: the earwormy A-lister comes with a video directed by Coppola and perfectly judged lyrics about the allure and ennui of celebrity. When Mars meets a hot actor who claims he 'hates the spotlight', she knows he's full of it because she knows exactly how delicious the spotlight is. Her newly minted TikTok account overspills with it: footage of her flying on private jets with Adam Driver; joining her mum and younger sister Cosima at the Chanel couture fall/winter show in Paris last week; quipping that she only respects her grandpa – Francis Ford Coppola – because Lana Del Rey is a fan. Mars seems to be building her nascent career on the awareness that regular people both hate celebrities and can't look away from them. You wonder about the level of strategy involved: she posts with the unfettered urgency of a teenager who still remembers how it felt to have her phone confiscated. But she's also shameless about the spoils of being a nepo baby life, an accusation that makes her fellow scions defensive or apologetic. In A-lister, Mars's crush's apathetic pose does nothing to deter her: she's still obsessed with him and this 'golden sunny west coast sceney plastic world' that has taught her to want him. She knows she can bank on us being similarly powerless to resist her.
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From awol to A-lister: how pop stars from Charli xcx to Addison Rae found the fun in fame again
On Lorde's 2021 album Solar Power, the New Zealand pop star ditched fame. She threw her phone in the sea, sang 'if you're looking for a saviour, well, that's not me' and advised looking to nature for answers instead. But her sun-bleached third album proved divisive, so much so that just a year later, she placated fans by promising she was making 'bangers' again. This April, her comeback single What Was That returned to the incandescent synth-pop of her beloved 2017 album Melodrama; her new album Virgin opens: 'It's a beautiful life so why play truant? / I jerk tears and they pay me to do it.' Lorde was back roaming the streets, swapping Auckland fishing trips for New York Citi Bike rides, addicted to her phone again, playing Glastonbury at 11.30am and then disappearing to get high at Four Tet. Where Solar Power was introverted, Virgin is hungry for experience and connection, sticky with sweat and other bodily fluids. But it's also still preoccupied with the cost of finding fame at the age of 16 and how to carry it at age 28. The erratic album has divided critics again: is the sometimes spindly sound and lyrical status anxiety another attempt by Lorde to push listeners away? Or are the intermittent Melodrama 2.0 bangers her giving in to expectation? Ever alert to her own myth, she said recently: 'I just am this person who's meant to make these bangers that fuck us all up.' While Lorde is figuring out her relationship to celebrity, an emerging group of pop stars are striking straight for its jugular – hungry for success and toying with its aesthetics – no matter what cautionary tales previous generations of superstar have been telling them about the perils of your dream coming true. Just a few years ago, Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift dialled down the intensity of their work as they've sought privacy and reckoned with wounds sustained from lifelong visibility. Justin Bieber has stressed how negatively media invasion has affected his life. After her Vegas and Munich residencies, Adele has split the scene. And the revelations about the abuse of Britney Spears prompted a host of documentaries in which 90s and Y2K pop stars including Robbie Williams aired their damage. These stories are in stark contrast to the playfulness of the current moment. Unsurprisingly, Brat parted the waves. In the video for lead single Von Dutch, Charli xcx led a bloody fight against a paparazzo stalking her around an airport – something unlikely to have happened to the still not-quite-mainstream pop star before the release of her sixth album. Then Brat became a phenomenon and Charli a household name. Commanding, spontaneous and feckless, she made being a celebrity look like a monstrously good time that she couldn't get enough of. Charli admitted to calling the paps on herself and exposed the lie of humility among her peers: 'It would almost be seen as inauthentic now for a musician to say, 'I want to be famous', because it's supposed to be all about the art,' she said in a conversation with actor/model/It-girl Julia Fox. Pop stardom has always been about the art of being famous, one that can take many forms. Retreating from it is its own kind of pose; admitting to its seductions in the slipstream of its deserters may feel somewhat subversive. Lorde's album campaign drew nakedly from the Brat playbook, and she clearly wanted some of the freedom and notoriety her Girl, So Confusing collaborator had found. Renée Rapp's return flaunts her hedonistic A-list life; former Little Mix member Jade launched her career with the fantastically nuts Angel of My Dreams, which lurched through her love-hate relationship with stardom: 'When the camera flashy, I act so happy / I'm in heaven when you're looking at me,' she sang, and also battled paps in the video. The year's breakout pop star, Addison Rae, has been candid about pursuing fame at any cost. She found attention as a dancer on TikTok, a start that invited scepticism on her move into pop, and how a figure some perceived as culturally lightweight won patronage from more left-field acts in Charli xcx and Arca. She told the New York Times of her dance days: 'When I reflect back on that time, I've recognised how much choice and taste is kind of a luxury.' Rae grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, and her parents had a troubled relationship. She said she had been 'strategic' with building a career to change her situation. 'It was a lot about like: 'How am I just going to get out of here?' It wasn't about like: 'Let me show the intricacies of myself right now.'' As a pop star, Rae's image is startlingly close to that of vintage Spears: low-rise skirts, dancer's abs, full choreo. They share Louisiana roots and comparable origin stories. But the distance between where their respective escape routes landed them stretches the whole arc of how fame, once ordained by record label boardrooms, can now be self-determined. At 43, Spears may be freed from her abusive conservatorship arrangement but exists in a sort of purgatory. Rae, 24, has found freedom and taunts her detractors: 'When you shame me, it makes me want it more.' In that sense, pop stars admitting their desire to be famous also feels wildly appropriate to the times: more than half of gen Z aspire to be influencers (and 41% of adults) according to a 2023 survey by Morning Consult. When Eilish, Swift and Lorde retreated from celebrity, it chimed with the hopeless feeling of the first Trump presidency – a time Pitchfork recently called 'nearly banger-less' – as well as Covid-era antipathy towards superstars, as best embodied by the backlash to the video of Gal Gadot and pals singing Imagine to inspire hope during the pandemic. You could read their retreat as good business sense, as if they were saying: look, we don't like this any more than you do. But listening to famous people complain has never been relatable, even if audiences have become more sympathetic to the suffering celebrity can inflict. And in the gloves-off era of Trump 2.0, it's cool to be rich, famous and scandalous again. And chasing success on the broadest possible terms entertains a powerful individualist fantasy: while stardom may have crushed weaker mortals, bridling it just takes savvier hands. Always simultaneously operating as cultural theorist and pop star, Charli xcx said in a recent TikTok that despite being conscious of overexposure, she was 'also interested in the tension of staying too long', in stretching the limits of public tolerance. The controversial cover for Sabrina Carpenter's forthcoming album Man's Best Friend has a tang of Trumpian political infamy: the flashed-out photo looks like a pap shot; the suit on the faceless man pulling Carpenter's hair implies some status. On her knees, she's either the exploited Lewinsky-ish innocent or a woman happily enjoying sexual power play. It's a private interaction that's about to become everyone's business, and Carpenter knows the woman loses either way. But as an image-maker, she wins, understanding that it's better to be talked about than to cry off attention as invasive. (Even if she did eventually release a more PG-friendly alternative cover 'approved by God'.) When the president's intentionally dissonant agenda and systemic dysfunction has left people questioning reality, uncomplicated pop stars offer a glowy-skinned port in a storm. Notably, it's only white pop acts who always have the option to default back to escapism. It's easy to see this moment as innately conservative, aspiring to conventional beauty standards and success markers in order to make bank; the Not That Deep vibe defying fan demand for pop stars to be nuanced spokespeople in the wake of #MeToo and reckonings with racial injustice. Creatively baiting attention is at least more interesting than releasing consolidation efforts harking back to past glories, a plague on recent pop. Drake conscripted PartyNextDoor to make $ome $exy $ongs 4 U to remind fans why they liked him after he was eviscerated by Kendrick Lamar. The Weeknd's business-as-usual Hurry Up Tomorrow failed to produce the sort of year-defining single Abel Tesfaye can usually expect. Katy Perry's 143 tanked. Never shy of a bold statement, Lady Gaga said that her album Mayhem 'started as me facing my fear of returning to the pop music my earliest fans loved' and compared its creation to 'reassembling a shattered mirror'. Which is one way to say: giving fans what they want after some sizeable flops. The artist who once made an artform of fame rued 'you love to hate me' on the Mayhem song Perfect Celebrity. The sentiment feels a little yeah, duh. Especially in 2025, when the perfect pop celebrity is a satirist who also revels in the privilege that people love to hate. Romy Mars is the 18-year-old daughter of director Sofia Coppola and Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars. She went viral in 2023 for a museum-worthy TikTok in which she admitted she had been grounded for trying to charter a helicopter to visit her camp friend using her dad's credit card, didn't know the difference between garlic and an onion while trying to make pasta sauce, and aired her parents for being perpetually out of town and not allowing her to have social media because 'they don't want me to be a nepotism kid'. The nepo baby concerns didn't seem to last long: last year, Mars launched her debut single, passable songwriterly synth-pop that only garnered any notice because of her family. But this year, she has a potential song of the summer: the earwormy A-lister comes with a video directed by Coppola and perfectly judged lyrics about the allure and ennui of celebrity. When Mars meets a hot actor who claims he 'hates the spotlight', she knows he's full of it because she knows exactly how delicious the spotlight is. Her newly minted TikTok account overspills with it: footage of her flying on private jets with Adam Driver; joining her mum and younger sister Cosima at the Chanel couture fall/winter show in Paris last week; quipping that she only respects her grandpa – Francis Ford Coppola – because Lana Del Rey is a fan. Mars seems to be building her nascent career on the awareness that regular people both hate celebrities and can't look away from them. You wonder about the level of strategy involved: she posts with the unfettered urgency of a teenager who still remembers how it felt to have her phone confiscated. But she's also shameless about the spoils of being a nepo baby life, an accusation that makes her fellow scions defensive or apologetic. In A-lister, Mars's crush's apathetic pose does nothing to deter her: she's still obsessed with him and this 'golden sunny west coast sceney plastic world' that has taught her to want him. She knows she can bank on us being similarly powerless to resist her.
BBC News
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
What's it like spending a night in Glasto's 'Naughty Corner'?
After ten years of experimenting, I've found there are just two ways to master Glastonbury's after-dark first involves picking one night to really go all in - your step count will be absolutely astronomical, but with the correct intake of carbohydrates and tinned cocktails that 18-hour day will pay you can take the second approach, which involves going fully nocturnal for the long weekend, but has to involve a few mates who are also willing to emerge from their tents at dinner time each the sake of my colleague's workloads this weekend, I picked the first option and dedicated my Friday night to the famous Glasto "naughty corner". The best (and least overwhelming way) to tackle each of the vast dance sites is to not do too much planning and instead see where the evening takes warming up with Four Tet's Woodsies headline slot, I strolled down to Silver Hayes, which is actually Glastonbury's newest dance in 2013, it recently expanded to include two huge stages - Levels and Lonely Hearts was at the latter that I caught a bit of Scouse duo CamelPhat, whose unique blend of tech house attracted huge crowds, despite clashing with some of the main stage afterwards, I made my way to perhaps the festival's most visually alluring site - was first built in 2007 and became a permanent stage in 2014, gaining an international reputation as the giant spider where some of the world's biggest DJs have a huge dragonfly repurposed from a former Royal Navy helicopter, it was lit up last night by Australian DJ and producer Sonny Fodera, who told the BBC that performing there "was one of the most insane experiences of my life".Arcadia is often top of the to-do list for first-time Glasto goers, thanks to its lasers and pyrotechnics, which certainly look great on an Instagram the stage's sound system has received criticism over the years for being too quiet to those who aren't directly under it - so you have to really push your way to the front for the best I stood pretty far away from the main structure and could still hear his hits pretty 39-year-old, who has performed at Worthy Farm twice before, said the stage was "unmatched" this year."The production and the sound system were definitely the best I've ever had at a festival," he added. Glastonbury's late-night dance music offering has evolved massively in the last 25 years - expanding from one humble tent in 2000 to multiple sites across the South East Corner is perhaps the greatest innovation of them all - first formed in 2008, it is so far from the main stages that the walk itself has become the time I began my journey to the site, it was 1am and my legs were beginning to give in on luckily I managed to find a friend to join me on the pilgrimage - beginning with a quick peek in the Cabaret tent, where comedians James Acaster and Nish Kumar were much to my surprise, going back to back in a DJ was just a primer for the assault on the senses that is one of the most well-known after-dark locations at Glastonbury, mostly due to its intricate instillations that often reflect a political topic or environmental area, which began to take shape more than 17 years ago has undergone many changes, but was completely reinvented for this year's festival to open up the you turn there is something weird and wonderful enough to get you to stop and look - from a mattress sprouting plant leaves to a phone line that serves to connect you to stages have also had a makeover, which is really exciting to dance vocalist Katy tells the BBC: 'I love dance music and I'm definitely someone who loves Glastonbury at night. I'm playing Shangri-La main stage at four in the morning, which is going to be intense'.Katy says the area being expanded shows Glastonbury's organisers have "recognised the demand for dance music" and says she remembers coming to the festival when "the dance section was literally just two tents". You could describe the experience as like being at a theme park - even part of the South East corner is designed like a fun fair which just so happens to have techno blasting from every of the joy of late night Glasto is that it attracts everyone - as I take a walk round Block 9 I see a woman covered in top to toe glitter enjoying some house music next to a man in a Liverpool points through the night, as extreme tiredness truly starts to set in, everything starts to feel like a marvel at the never-ending queue for Glasto's LGBT hotspot NYC Downlow, where it turns out the singer Lorde was enjoying a night similarly long waits to get into Temple - the home of drum and bass at the festival. Nights here end at 6am and with so much to see, its often hard to call it a we go our separate ways back to camp, feet aching and heads pounding, people are still streaming into the a fallow year on the horizon, I realise it may be my last trip to the naughty corner for a while and make a detour to the Greenpeace stage on the way home, where a disco night is taking if you can't allow yourself one last solo dance to some Sister Sledge, then what is the point?
The Guardian
28-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Welcome to the Ministry of Happiness! Glastonbury kicks off for 2025
Each year there are tweaks and adjustments to the tried and tested Glastonbury formula, and this year the eccentric Shangri-La area has had a makeover. On Thursday afternoon David Levene took a stroll around the revamped area – see more pictures here in our gallery. The thoroughfare through the revamped Shangri-La. Photograph: David Levene Late on Thursday night we happened upon a secret set at Floating Points' new Sunflower Sound System in the Silver Hayes dance area – a special back-to-back performance by Four Tet (Kieran Hebden) and Floating Points (Samuel Shepherd) himself. They played a set on a painstakingly built sound system which had been assembled in a special tent with mycelium-based sound-baffling discs and tweeters hung from the top of the tent. The system has six stacks arranged around the dancefloor in a circle, enabling the selectors to pan sound around the tent. Kieran Hebden, AKA Four Tet, plays with Samuel Shepherd AKA Floating Points, perform together at Sunflower Sound System. Photos by David Levene Thursday evening, with no open performance stages in action, has evolved into a bit of a party night as festivalgoers ease into the proceedings. Over in Silver Hayes, crowds packed out the Lonely Hearts Club, for Nooriyah's set around midnight. Festivalgoers at Lonely Hearts Club for Nooriyah's set on Thursday evening. On Friday, the first day proper, we kicked things off with a Guardian Live talk between features writer Zoe Williams and drag queen Bimini at Astrolabe. Drag queen Bimini during an interview with Zoe Williams at Astrolabe fora Guardian Live event. Photograph: Jonny Weeks. Love was in the air as the festival kicked off for Guardian photographer David Levene: he snapped newlyweds Charlie and Charles in the south east corner by the Rum Shack. Charlie and Charles Shires, from Harrogate, held their wedding ceremony at the festival. In the words of our reviewer Safi Bugel: 'In many ways Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso's music is perfect for the chronically online: they rap knowingly about hashtags and OnlyFans; their hook-heavy tracks rarely push beyond the three-minute mark. But despite the in-jokes and commitment to the bit, the music is strong; they deliver a tight, confident performance for the full hour, which frequently climaxes in their frenetic percussive breakdowns. And when the music drops and the audience join in for a full-blown a capella, you know they're bona fide popstars.' Fans watching Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso at West Holts stage. Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso at West Holts stage. Photographs: Jonny Weeks Lola Young played Woodsies, and Jonny Weeks was there to capture the young British artist's assured performance – who shot to fame with her viral track Messy, and who has had a rocky year thanks to a sometimes scabrous public. Lola Young at Woodsies. Photograph: Jonny Weeks Later into the evening on the big stages we saw Busta Rhymes on the Other stage, Self Esteem up at the Park stage and the 1975 closed the first day's programme on the Pyramid stage. Self Esteem plays the Park stage at Glastonbury. The Guardian's Elle Hunt was at Self Esteem: 'Many in the crowd know every word – and these are very wordy songs – and really seem to get something out of shouting them to the sky. It's stirring, serious-minded yet still upbeat.' Busta Rhymes with Spliff Star on Other stage. Reviewer Jason Okundaye called Busta Rhymes's show 'absolutely hilarious, and the interaction with the crowd is gold standard'. Anohni and the Johnsons plays the Park stage. And closing the Pyramid was the 1975: 'A bold, experimental, occasionally confounding, but ultimately hugely impressive performance,' said the Guardian's Alexis Petridis. Matty Healy of the 1975 on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury on Friday evening. Matty Healy with a pint of Guinness. Photographs: Jonny Weeks
