GLASTONBURY, ENGLAND – JUNE 29: Chris Martin of Coldplay performs as the band headline the Pyramid … [+] stage during day four of Glastonbury Festival 2024 at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 29, 2024 in Glastonbury, England. Founded by Michael Eavis in 1970, Glastonbury Festival features around 3,000 performances across over 80 stages. Renowned for its vibrant atmosphere and iconic Pyramid Stage, the festival offers a diverse lineup of music and arts, embodying a spirit of community, creativity, and environmental consciousness. (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage)
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Led by an ebullient Chris Martin (full disclosure: no relation), Coldplay put on a balls-to-the-wall show on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage Saturday night, including raft upon raft of hits and vast pyrotechnical displays at literally every crescendo. Coldplay are, in effect, “Glasto” in the British hivemind, this being their fifth time to headline the festival, the first in 2000, so the band clearly decided to kick out the jams.
Attending for Coldplay were the stalwart central makers of the Mission Impossible franchise, death-defying director Christopher McQuarrie and two of his stars, death-defying Tom Cruise and sidekick Simon Pegg. A rare and jaunty family outing, we could say, and one that fits perfectly in Cruise’s increasing move toward England and his general permanent anglification. Pictured below, Pegg and Cruise keep a close watch on the stage setups while big daddy McQuarrie, left, unworried that anything might go wrong since those two are paying attention, studiously attends to his phone.
GLASTONBURY, ENGLAND – JUNE 29: Tom Cruise (second from left) and Simon Pegg (R) ahead of Coldplay … [+] performing during day four of Glastonbury Festival 2024 at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 29, 2024 in Glastonbury, England. Founded by Michael Eavis in 1970, Glastonbury Festival features around 3,000 performances across over 80 stages. Renowned for its vibrant atmosphere and iconic Pyramid Stage, the festival offers a diverse lineup of music and arts, embodying a spirit of community, creativity, and environmental consciousness. (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage)
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Glastonbury — or “Glasto” in the excellently dry British street paralance — is by definition a gathering of the various Anglo-Saxon tribes, youthful and not, who convene at or within spitting distance of the summer solstice. The solstice is an old custom in Britain. At any such latter-day British gathering, there will be a few ancient working metaphors framing the doings on the ground. Foremost among them are the Eros/Thanatos madness of Shakespeare’s eternal A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and providing the underlying prehistoric fundament for that are the Druids’ own marking of the center of the planting season’s longest day, as at, and by, Stonehenge.
If He Looks Like He’s Out Of Shakespeare, It’s Because He Is: A performer in Green Man costume … [+] entertains festival-goers during day two of Glastonbury Festival 2024 at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 27. Founded by Michael Eavis in 1970, Glastonbury Festival features around 3,000 performances across over 80 stages. Renowned for its vibrant atmosphere and iconic Pyramid Stage, the festival offers a diverse lineup of music and arts, embodying a spirit of community, creativity, and environmental consciousness. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
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One of Glastonbury’s founder Sir Michael Eavis’ longstanding themes has been to have the festival serve the notion of environmental awareness. Pictured above, then, those traditions give rise to the performer as Green Man, and to the scene pictured below, of festival-goers lounging in the late afternoon sun on Worthy Farm under the energetically ironic art installation entitled Carhenge.
TOPSHOT – Festivalgoers rest by the Carhenge art installation on the opening day of the Glastonbury … [+] festival at Worthy Farm in the village of Pilton in Somerset, southwest England, on June 26, 2024. The festival takes place from June 26 to June 30. (Photo by Oli SCARFF / AFP) (Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)
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Pictured below, on June 28 on the headliner’s Pyramid Stage, Dua Lipa leads her backup dance troupe through the obligatory-legs-akimbo choreographic vocabulary signifying maximum empowerment.
GLASTONBURY, ENGLAND – JUNE 28: Dua Lipa during day three of Glastonbury Festival 2024 at Worthy … [+] Farm, Pilton on June 28, 2024 in Glastonbury, England. Founded by Michael Eavis in 1970, Glastonbury Festival features around 3,000 performances across over 80 stages. Renowned for its vibrant atmosphere and iconic Pyramid Stage, the festival offers a diverse lineup of music and arts, embodying a spirit of community, creativity, and environmental consciousness. (Photo by Joe Maher/Getty Images)
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Glastonbury doesn’t just have musicians and dancers on parade, filmmakers of all stripes show up on Worthy Farm. This year, bringing along a screening and discussion of her new film, the hotly-awaited Dune: Part 2, white-hot British actress Florence Pugh dropped through on June 28 with what the British milliners would call a “fascinator” of a blue and pink floral garland. That screening will be followed at the “Pilton Palais” — the intentionally hyperbolic name for the film tent on Worthy Farm hard by one of the acoustic stage — by an illustrious crew of actors and directors staging other screenings. On Sunday, Cate Blanchett will bring her Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There to the film tent, and Tilda Swinton, who at the festively spectral hour just past midnight Saturday, will introduce Only Lovers Left Alive.
GLASTONBURY, ENGLAND – JUNE 28: Florence Pugh attends a Q&A session at the Pilton Palace during day … [+] three of Glastonbury Festival 2024 at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 28, 2024 in Glastonbury, England. Founded by Michael Eavis in 1970, Glastonbury Festival features around 3,000 performances across over 80 stages. Renowned for its vibrant atmosphere and iconic Pyramid Stage, the festival offers a diverse lineup of music and arts, embodying a spirit of community, creativity, and environmental consciousness. (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage)
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To lend us a sense of Glastonbury’s scale and rank (for the moment) as Britian’s 7th largest city, as well as the extreme British-countryside beauty offered by Worthy Farm, let’s take a second to soak in what the organizers have dubbed the “tipi field” — or, transliterated into American English, the teepee field. Looking for all the world like a medieval encampment for a great tournament, or, alternatively, an encampment limned from the Lord of the Rings.
GLASTONBURY, ENGLAND – JUNE 27: A general view of the tipi field during day two of Glastonbury … [+] Festival 2024 at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 27, 2024 in Glastonbury, England. Founded by Michael Eavis in 1970, Glastonbury Festival features around 3,000 performances across over 80 stages. Renowned for its vibrant atmosphere and iconic Pyramid Stage, the festival offers a diverse lineup of music and arts, embodying a spirit of community, creativity, and environmental consciousness. (Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage)
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And in the thousand-year leaps that the Worthy Farm/Glastonbury time machine is so effortlessly capable of performing, let’s fast forward out of Tolkein to Route 66 and the Dharma Bum captain Jack Kerouac, via the “San Remo Motel and Bar” tent, where festival-goers needing a break can channel their inner road dog with a few shots of whatever poison they think Kerouac actually might have drunk.
People relax at the San Remo area on the opening day of the Glastonbury festival at Worthy Farm in … [+] the village of Pilton in Somerset, southwest England, on June 26, 2024. The festival takes place from June 26 to June 30. (Photo by Oli SCARFF / AFP) (Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images)
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Arguably, the globally branded and most lovable British eccentricity is exercised in many different ways across the UK several times a year — the British Open, the Chelsea Garden Show, the Westminster Dog Show, almost anything any member of the Royal Family says or does. In performance, Glastonbury is certainly among the top exercises, thus the booking of the all-female Indonesian heavy metal band “Voice of Baceprot,” pictured below, seems right in line.
GLASTONBURY, ENGLAND – JUNE 28: Drummer Euis “Siti” Aisyah (L), guitarist Firda “Marsya” Kurnia (C) … [+] and bassist Widi Rahmawati (R) of Indonesian heavy metal band “Voice of Baceprot” perform onstage during day three of Glastonbury Festival 2024 at Worthy Farm, Pilton on June 28, 2024 in Glastonbury, England. Founded by Michael Eavis in 1970, Glastonbury Festival features around 3,000 performances across over 80 stages. Renowned for its vibrant atmosphere and iconic Pyramid Stage, the festival offers a diverse lineup of music and arts, embodying a spirit of community, creativity, and environmental consciousness. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
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Farmers’ daughters all, the ladies are from West Java, where metal is thin on the ground. According to dispatches, Baceprot, who sing in Sundanese and in English, now have a single culled from their album, called Retas, and will be shortly touring the States. The single is entitled “God Allow Me (Please) To Play Music,” culled from their harsh experience forming the band, and simply existing as educated women, in the west Javan farm country, and is both gentle, elegaic and most heartfelt. Their appearance is emblematic of Glastonbury at its most experimental and inclusive.
Russell Crowe’s Indoor Garden Party on the Acoustic Stage at the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm … [+] in Somerset. Picture date: Saturday June 29, 2024. (Photo by Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images)
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To great acclaim, Russell Crowe took his basso profundo and his band to the Acoustic Stage on Saturday, June 29, and proceeded to impress the house — who were, it must be said, well-predisposed — with his patented mix of storytelling, singing, and dad-rocking. As a practice, dad-rocking is a thing in the UK that isn’t quite as pitiful as it might (instantly) be in the US, Prince William just having engaged in a modicum of dad-dancing high up in the royal box at Wembley at one of Taylor Swift’s gigs with his children. The entire stadium was delighted — the British, and not least, the British Swifties — being a forgiving lot when it comes to William. To his credit, Crowe and his basso profundo can actually embrace and enhance a song, and his band is practiced, so the element of active — albeit dad-ly — musical engagement on the stage removes even more of the deadly dad-stigma.
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