When I watch Glastonbury on the BBC, it isn’t necessarily the bands I’m missing that make me long to be there. It’s the sense that, just beyond the crowd you can see from the stage, just over that hill and beyond that tent, a different kind of adventure awaits.
It’s especially pervasive on the BBC’s Glastonbury Webcam, even as it maintains a critical distance from the visceral realities on the ground. Although I haven’t been, stupidly, in many years, I still carry an ideal of Glastonbury that the Webcam makes tangible: a sense of a vast community that only becomes visible to civilian eyes for a few days each year.
Occasionally on the BBC feeds, you can spot one of those community stalwarts: down the front dancing at the fantastic Tinariwen set, for instance, oblivious to the presence of cameras. The Touareg band have been mainstays of the festival circuit for a good two decades now, but the beatific intensity of their music and performance never fails to cut through, even on the TV. Great, too, to see Tinariwen’s de facto leader, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, back in the live ranks, calmly adding to the knot of guitar lines that make them a spectacular jam band, even as what they do isn’t really jamming at all.
The BBC’s excellent coverage means that you can scroll through entire days on entire stages, catching some of, say, Jockstrap’s compellingly weird fusion of folkish singer-songwriting and extreme post-Aphex sonics. A moment, too, for the utterly exhausting Shame, and their guitarist’s bleep-test-style sprints up and down the Woodsies stage, and a longer stay with the gleaming bass architecture of Leftfield.
But viewing options, in tandem with the platform of social media, can have consequences. A brief, baffled question about whether that’s an unexpected Izzy Stradlin doing the Ron Wood moves with Guns N’ Roses is swiftly and usefully dispatched: nope, it’s Richard Fortus. But the sedentary power of the remote, rather than a long hike with a purpose across the festival site, also means that the possibility of wasting your time watching something you don’t like – and of course making sure as many people as possible get to know you don’t like it – is rife.
Hence the grim misogynistic social media pile-on that accompanied Billy Nomates’ set on Friday, an attack so devastating that it nullified the evidently positive vibes at the actual show for the singer. In essence, it’s a communal watchalong activity – a toxic equivalent of those Twitter groups who chat through the Top Of The Pops reruns on BBC4. But this is what TV access brings for a generation of music fans brought up on the snark of the British music weeklies (a cruelty, we should say, wisely abandoned by most music journalists these days) and now given social media access to participate in that viciousness themselves. Hopefully, at least some of them might have realised, from the backlash, that casual abuse can have consequences.
There are, that said, more positive manifestations of the Glastonbury iPlayer/Twitter interface: the love for Lizzo and Sparks; the response to The Pretenders’ wonderful set, with Chrissie Hynde’s voice magically undimmed and Johnny Marr threading his guitar so elegantly into the matrix created by Hynde and James Walbourne. The pleasure, too, of spotting Paul McCartney at the side of the stage for The Pretenders, before Glastonbury’s press officer notices him on the ground. It’s small consolation for not being there, admittedly, but it’s something.
Our Friday Glastonbury 2023 reviews: the Arctic Monkeys is here. Foo Fighters is here. And our review of Friday at Glastonbury: Sparks, The Hives, Alabaster DePlume and Mozart Estate is here.
Our Saturday Glastonbury 2023 reviews: Lana Del Rey is here. Guns N' Roses is here. The Pretenders is here. Generation Sex is here.
Join us back here tomorrow for all the action from Sunday, including Elton John and much more.
And catch up with our expedition to the wilder corners of Glastonbury on Thursday here.