Key events
According to Safi, “Idles have put a raft full of fake people in life jackets into the crowd to crowd surf.” Comment on the small-boats migrant crisis with the visual language of a vibey mosh pit? Feels very on-brand with their none-so-lumpen brand of politicking.
The Guardian’s David Levene has been documenting Dua Lipa’s performance. Apparently he saw a dressing room with the words Duran Duran on it backstage. Well well!
There was a little frostiness to the way Elton John performed his Lipa-featuring latterday No 1 single Cold Heart on this stage last year, briskly intimating that he’d asked her to perform it and she’d demurred. You can now understand why she didn’t turn up, as she kept her powder dry for this performance. Lipa gladhandles her fans as she makes her way back up to the main stage and the lighting modulates into soft Pride month-appropriate rainbows.
We’re enjoying this re-edited production for New Rules, turned into a prowling tech-house roller – complete with a Bicep-imitating synth rhythm line. Dua’s doing one of the biggest cliches in the pop playbook: getting everyone to crouch down then jump up. Did Slipknot do it first?
Then it’s into Electricity, her collab with Silk City, AKA Mark Ronson and Diplo. This could have been a deathly combo made for the most dead-eyed of LA parties, but it’s genuinely euphoric, even rather kindly in tone – thanks in part to Lipa’s easygoing sense of romance.
Laura has staked out ground at Levels in anticipation of Charli xcx’s Partygirl set of DJ’d bangers and crowd-goading. She says: “Kelly Lee Owens has just come on at Levels to noticeably more enthusiasm than ANOTR, whoever they were, arriving to Björk’s Big Time Sensuality and walking to the front of the stage for a triumphal pose. Lots of “avin’ it!” from the decks. It also instantly just got a lot busier; we lost about a foot of the space we had. Also, huge shoutout to the guy sitting on the floor at Charli playing Uno on his phone.”
Dua is meanwhile down on a catwalk B-stage for another sinewy club track, Hallucinate, wearing a Harley Quinn-ish ensemble like a 1970s New York street gang member who struts everywhere rather than getting the subway.
Over on the Other stage, our Safi says Idles have just brought out Danny Brown as a special guest. Good combo!
Another Future Nostalgia cut here, Pretty Please. Even though it’s not anthemically melodic, I love this song’s elegant, relatively spartan arrangement, done with so much space that you can hear the happily chattering crowd burst through the moments of silence.
Dua’s presumably having a change, so her dancers do some formidable choreo to the kind of heavy dubstep womp that some of the Guardian staff were enjoying at some length at the Glade Dome last night. Me, I was doing a house workout to Ivan Smagghe.
A strange wormhole opens in pop, allowing White Town’s peerlessly odd No 1 single Your Woman, from 1997, to emanate from the Pyramid stage. My cassette version is still much cherished. It’s sampled on Love Again, from Lipa’s blockbuster Future Nostalgia LP.
Falling Forever now, one of the better songs from the recent Radical Optimism album, even if there’s still something a little perfunctory about the songwriting. Again, Lipa lifts the material with her force of feeling, and she’s commanding the stage even without her phalanx of dancers.
