Key events
Shania feels the pain of anyone who’s had their third wet-wipe bath of the weekend. “I find moments like this very lifechanging. When you’re in a community setting like this, you’re faced with a lot of very unusual things, like where am I going to shower? How do you make it to pee when you’ve been standing out there? Basic things, human things! I think we all relate to each other very much when we congregate over something we really love … we put all the bullshit aside”. Literally so, in the case of the farmers on Worthy Farm.
I was pondering the magnificently buoyant Shania album title of Up!, and hadn’t realised quite how in love with an exclamation mark she is. Elmore Leonard once said: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Shania sometimes allows herself two in a single song title.
To whit:
Man! I Feel Like a Woman!, Nah!, Ka-Ching!, I’m Gonna Getcha Good!, Rock This Country!, (Wanna Get To Know You) That Good!, Waiter! Bring Me Water!, I’m Not in the Mood (To Say No)!, What a Way To Wanna Be!, (If You’re Not In It For Love) I’m Outta Here!, Whatever You Do! Don’t! … I could probably go on but I should probably carry on! Liveblogging! For you all!
It’s really interesting – at least for a nerd like me – to see Shania returning to strut across pop turf that she laid down herself. A song like Any Man of Mine would only ever have reached a very small quotient of hardcore British country music fans, most of them probably US expats, when it came out in 1995. Now it sounds like the sort of thing that would be a huge hit if it was released for the first time today – country has become one of the core influences in today’s pop, with big chart success for pop-country splicers such as Dasha, Shaboozey and, of course, Beyoncé with her Cowboy Carter album.
Alexis Petridis explored the phenomenon here:
Mdou Moctar reviewed
Laura Snapes
Park stage, 3.15pm
It’s a tall order, going up against Shania in the legends slot on the main stage, but if your vibe is more desert rock than cowgirl, Mdou Moctar’s set is the place to be.
The Tuareg guitarist and his band come out to a stomach-rumbling low vocal drone punctuated with ominous bird caws and cricket scratch, on to a stage promisingly laden with Orange amps, hinting at the volume to come. At first, the khaki-clad Moctar looks cool and unruffled as he plays a fleet-fingered, cantering riff, while his band – all dressed in purple, quite likely in a nod to his remake of the film Purple Rain, entitled Rain the Colour of Blue with a Little Red in It – supply a brilliantly krautrocky groove.
But he’s just warming up – literally. “I was so cold, then I saw some people with no shirt here!” he remarks. Moctar comes from Niger: “In my hometown this is like winter. Earlier I couldn’t come outside because it’s cold for me, but it’s summer for you!”
From that point on, he begins to loosen up. Jumping up and down, kicking his leg and running on the spot, he unleashes fantastic, staticky, strangled riffs that could whip the Glastonbury dust into an even greater frenzy, and suggest hurtling down a highway at phenomenal speed. A few looser, groovier moments add richness, but Moctar’s relentless lightning-strike playing and Souleymane Ibrahim’s merciless drumming are consistently captivating. By the end, a now perpetually grinning Mdou comes down to play in the front row, prompting a sudden influx to the barrier to greet this shyly sublime showman. My favourite set of the festival.
Some shots of Shania so far:
Shania sounds a little choked up at regarding the vastness of the crowd here: “It’s so moving.” These legends slots generate some of the biggest singalongs of the weekend, and a Pyramid crowd is always admirably melodious and forceful. She invites them to back her up for You’re Still the One – at the top table of late-90s power ballads along with Don’t Want To Miss a Thing – with Shania backing herself on acoustic guitar.
Shania says she’s been “milling my way through the tents” over the last day or so. Presumably not with a bag of wine in hand but still, watch out for those guy ropes hun. “This really is a city; it’s a community. And I do feel the privilege of being here … I really will treasure this for ever.”
Next up is a nicely hard-rocking rendition of I’m Gonna Getcha Good. Twain’s star power was such at the turn of the century that I don’t remember this song at all and yet it reached the UK Top 5. Two others from her Up! album went Top 10, and the high-on-punctuation Thank You Baby! (For Makin’ Someday Come So Soon) reached No 11.
“This is amazing, because I can see everything, everyone, every flag. I can see the whole city of Glastonbury from here,” she says. “And it’s really, really special. It’s such an honour to be invited.” She admires some Shania mask-wearing punters, and introduces Up! thus: “Every shitty day you have, reel back to this moment at Glastonbury and pick yourself up to feel better.”
Shania’s doing You Win My Love, which, written and produced by then husband Mutt Lange, was a kind of bridge between her earliest country stuff and the blockbuster twanging pop-rock of 1997’s Come On Over. It’s easy to forget how absolutely massive that album was: 20 times platinum in the US, it is the biggest selling album of all time by a solo female artist.
Shania Twain’s set begins
Chaps? Check. Hat? Check. Rhinestones? Check. Taste for country being spliced with pop in the most kitsch manner imaginable? CHECK. The Pyramid audience is packed as far that big tree at the back, the benchmark of pan-festival popularity.
A parade of drag queens, surely from Glasto queer club NYC Downlow, bring Shania in flanked by giant hobby horses as That Don’t Impress Me Much kicks like a mule. Shania looks fabulous in a giant pink floral ensemble and – of course – cowboy hat. Coolest touch, though, is her own line dance instructor out front, acting rather like the sign language interpreters for deaf fans, but for drunk people trying to co-ordinate themselves. The security detail out front are all dancing in unison and even though her voice is still warming up a bit – and her mic levels are a bit wonky – this is terrifically good fun already.
Our Tim Burrows has been chatting to some South Korean fans who are taking in their country’s representatives at this wonderfully diverse festival.
“After Balming Tiger’s joyous delirium of a set, I met Min and Seung Yeon from South Korea. Min, who lives in London, said she felt ‘really proud’ of the two Korean bands at the festival – Seventeen and Balming Tiger – and loved how different they are. The friends stood at the front for both gigs. ‘To see Seventeen in South Korea, you have to queue for two days. I wasn’t a big fan of K-pop when I was still living there, but I was quite impressed with yesterday’s performance.’”
There are also wild guitar theatrics on the Woodsies stage, as Blondshell opens with her song Veronica Mars and her band whip up some seething alt-rock noise. If you’re not familiar with her oeuvre, bone up via Laura’s longform review of her self-titled 2023 debut album:
