The 1975
The Pyramid Stage, Friday, June 27, 2025
Soon after the 1975’s last Glastonbury appearance, a pre-sunset slot on The Other Stage back in 2016, frontman Matty Healy announced that the band wouldn’t return to Worthy Farm unless it was as a headliner. While 2023 tabloid reports claimed the group were nailed on for last year’s festival, nine years after that ultimatum, the singer’s braggadocio has been borne out.
That 2016 slot found a white-suited Healy emerging as one of the more charismatic, and certainly more interesting, frontmen of recent years, and his group have spent the intervening near-decade steadily scaling up their ambitions.
The 1975’s last album, 2022’s Being Funny In A Foreign Language, might have largely toned down their more indulgent, maximalist pop-art pop excesses – a comparatively restrained eleven-track set, it drew upon Arthur Russell, The Blue Nile, and John Cale and Brian Eno’s Wrong Way Up to create a more mellow backdrop for the singer’s millennial ponderings.
The stage set for the accompanying world tour, however, consisted of a two-storey house inside the rooms of which Healy ate raw meat, performed press-ups, and simulated masturbation as part of a commentary on modern-day masculinity. Titled The 1975 At Their Very Best, it underlined that Healy and his group don’t really do low-key, and it was reported yesterday that the band have spent *four times* their appearance fee on the production for tonight’s show.
When Healy and his bandmates – drummer George Daniel, guitarist Adam Hann, and bassist Ross MacDonald – walk onstage tonight to a twinkling of bright lights, you might wonder where said money was spent.
Bar prices at the festival might nudge towards the eye-watering, but unless the pint of Guinness Healy is holding in his left hand was astronomically dear, the group’s set up – LED lights illuminating individual risers and each member’s first name lit up on-screen behind them – is unlikely to give their bank manager sleepless nights.
A pop star who evidently believes part of the job description is to say things that grab the attention, Healy’s proclamations over the years have run the gamut from provocative to prattish, problematic to outright offensive (a running self-referential on-stage gag on their last tour featured the rest of the band cutting him off before he could say something cancellable between songs).
Yet as the twitching, glossy pop of Happiness slides into a Tears For Fears-like If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know) and an irresistible Love Me, it isn’t until the fourth track, She’s American, that Healy actually says anything at all, thanking the audience for coming to see them then before promising that he’ll get back to being a rock star once he stops being so nervous.
That isn’t to say that this is a headline slot devoid of showmanship and spectacle. Far from it. The stage flashes and strobes like Studio 54 during a power surge, as Healy moonwalks along a moving travelator front of stage. During a melancholic Somebody Else he appears singing from the back seat of a car (and smoking too, think of his Uber rating!)
Indeed, not many artists would have confidence to have their lyrics projected across their performance in real time. Yet Healy’s occasionally verbose state-of-a-generation musings flashing up on screen are a central part of tonight’s show. During Part Of The Band, they deliberately get more and more inaccurate as the song progresses.
It’s typical of the self-deprecating humour that constantly pricks Healy’s tendency for pretension throughout, making the singer come across more like a loveable goofball than highfalutin’ buffoon. Even before he clarifies it, it’s clear that his description of himself as “the best songwriter of my generation” and “a poet” is a self-skewering joke, and also a nod to former paramour Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department – a record that did a rather good job of poking fun at the 1975 frontman.
Healy declares that tonight’s performance will be free from any politics, and that the evening’s message is instead one of love. But the Adam Curtis-like montage of images that then stutter across the screens during Love It If We Made It – Harvey Weinstein, 9/11, Kanye West, drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi – speak more than any between-song soundbite could.
Dua Lipa’s triumph on this very spot last year suggested that the shock and awe spectacle that characterises pop with a capital P concerts in the mid-2020s will be a fixture at the top reaches of Glastonbury’s bill for a long time to come.
Yet for all the post-modernist touches, meta references, slick production values and synth pop sheen (more grizzled Glastonbury veterans might be puzzled why a band who at times sound not dissimilar to Blancmange and INXS are topping a festival initially headlined by Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex), as the set comes to a powerful crescendo with a surging About You, it drives the point home that ultimately, the 1975 have hit the crest of this wave chiefly on the strength of their music
The 1975 Glastonbury 2025 Setlist:
Happiness
If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)
Love Me
She’s American
Part Of The Band
Chocolate
Paris
Robbers
Somebody Else
Fallingforyou
People
Be My Mistake
It’s Not Living (If It’s Not With You)
I Couldn’t Be More In Love
I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)
Love It If We Made It
Sex
Give Yourself A Try
The Sound
About You
Photo: Oli Scarff/ AFP/Getty Images