Glastonbury 2019: Saturday with the Killers, Janet Jackson and Liam Gallagher – as it happened (2024)

I’m signing off now. There’s a bacon sandwich with my name written on it. In bacon. I’ll be back tomorrow at 7pm, for the final night of Glastonbury 2019, with the Cure and so much more. Tomorrow night I will be drinking beer. It’s going to get messy. Even messier. So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye-ee!
Night all. It’s still sweltering here. I envy you the chill.

Five stars for Brandon Flowers and his Vegas showmen – plus guest spots from the Pet Shop Boys and Johnny Marr.

In one of the most face-palm clashes of Glasto so far, Hot Chip are up against Chemical Brothers as Saturday night’s dance headliner, but no matter: they’re already winning summer with flying colours. Their latest album, A Bath Full of Ecstasy, is a kaleidoscopic pastel dive into house music and the halcyon days of rave, and earned them praise as “Britain’s best pop band of the last 10 years” by this paper, made even more bittersweet, tragically, with the sudden death of its co-producer, Philippe Zdar, two days prior.

One word that may have not yet been associated with Hot Chip is epic, but their latest stage show, bathed in pastel light, feels like step up. It’s perhaps easy to forget how many massive tracks they have, even if they don’t have the top 10 singles to show for it – One Life Stand and Night + Day are by now anthemic, as much as Over and Over and Ready for the Floor, their breakthrough hits, which sound refreshed here on the Park stage.

Their new music, however, adds a new, more galvanising dimension to their sound. They bring out their Domino label-mate Georgia for the effervescently catchy Hungry Child while Spell - originally written for Katy Perry - is a spacious, sultry banger. Melody of Love is perhaps their songwriting at its best, about finding solace in joy.

There are echoes of the band’s old quirks when they’re joined by Morris dancers for the shiny techno chomper Flutes and by their old school friend Four Tet to play guitar on their slaying version of Beastie Boys’ Sabotage – but this is a Hot Chip reborn, slicker, far slicker than your average.

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Two and a half decades in the game, Wu-Tang have undergone changes that would have probably seen off other groups. Deaths, falling outs and other assorted departures have winnowed down its original lineup, and their West Holts set is hampered further by the absences of Method Man and Inspectah Decks. Still sometimes compactness can be a virtue.

Certainly this a more spirited effort than their last appearance here in 2011, where Method Man’s decision to turn up in his dressing gown spoke to the drowsy, half-interested nature of the performance. Here, despite the absences, RZA, Ghostface etc al are in a more crowd-pleasing mode, leading call-and-responses with the audience.

Deference is paid both to the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard, with his son (stage name: you guessed it, Young Dirty Bastard) tearing through Shimmy Shimmy Ya in his stead, and, inexplicably, Kurt Cobain, with a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

The real highlights though come when they dip into their debut and – still – greatest album, Enter the Wu (36 Chambers), which somehow celebrated its 25th anniversary last year. Shame on a nigg* and Protect Ya Neck sounds as great as they did a quarter-century ago.

So, a triumph for Stormzy on Friday, and the Killers managed to win me over tonight. What are the Cure going to pull out tomorrow? Part of me hopes Robert Smith – a QPR supporter, it is always worth remembering – goes full misery guts and does something like play p*rnography in full, twice in a row. But the odds have to be on a setlist packed full of 80s hits, don’t they?

Hot Chip slip in some Jonathan Richman! It only makes me love them more that they put a snippet of I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar into Night and Day.

BBC Two is now showing Hot Chip. I’ll be off to bed soon – well, strictly, I’ll be off to have my tea, very late. But I know what you’re wondering: “For every major act this evening – except the Killers – this man has produced, as if by magic, an interview with that act. Can he do the same with Hot Chip?” Damn right I can, courtesy of Jude Rogers.

Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearne, AKA Sleaford Mods, seem to embody the radical politics of Glastonbury. Making their name with 2013’s Austerity Dogs for Williamson’s stream of consciousness rant-raps set to Fearne’s sparse, lo-fi beats, they have since developed their own knack for criticising the minutiae of daily life in Britain with cutting precision and skewed humour.

The fact that they are playing on Shangri-La’s Truth stage seems particularly fitting then – caustic honesty being Williamson’s lyrical speciality. The duo take to the stage with typical swagger and nonchalance, Fearne stood behind a lone laptop sipping a beer and Williamson hunched over the adjacent mic, spewing out lines like: “Graham Coxon looks like a leftwing Boris Johnson.” The crowd is sparse but hanging off of Williamson’s every word, jumping around to rave-led tracks from this year’s Eton Alive album like Flipside and Kebab Spiders.

This shouty soothsaying definitely won’t be to everyone’s taste, its minimalism too unvarnished to digest. Yet, Williamson is mesmerising, hip-swaying like Mick Jagger, high-kicking like a can can dancer and spitting venom like Keith Flint – his is a voice that certainly deserves to be heard.

And Johnny Marr stays on stage with the Killers for the song everyone has been waiting for. And yes, I do like this one. Actual goosebumps. I wasn’t mad about most of this set, but the Killers are finishing with half an hour of intensely focused crowd-pleasing. This is brilliant on the telly, but it must be overwhelming in the crowd. Brilliant choice of guests – aside from Jimmy Carr, which was just a bit odd – and perfect songs for them to play. Great, too, to keep them on for a Killers song afterwards.