Alanis Morissette
The Pyramid Stage, Friday June 27, 2025
On a weekend featuring key appearances by Supergrass, Shed Seven, and (heavily rumoured to the point of near-certainty) Pulp, it’s as well to be reminded that there were things happening in 1995 that weren’t Britpop.
One of these was a phenomenon. Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill album, released this month 30 years ago, hit Number 1 in the UK and has sold over 2.7 million copies over here. Worldwide, it is judged the biggest-selling debut album of all time at 33 (count ’em) million.
That scale of penetration was impossible to sustain, but the idea that Morissette ‘went away’ is not borne out by subsequently regular and comparatively successful albums, all focused on her blunderbuss of a singing voice – capable of savage ululations – and her hippyish philosophical mélange of eco and gender justice, mental health awareness and what the unkind might term psychobabble.
Morissette’s Glastonbury set begins with a video montage flashing through her career highlights and later personal milestones. It’s a handy catch-up (maybe other bands should try it), if slightly needy. The montage is replaced by a rising moon and Jagged Little Pill’s One Hand In My Pocket fires up, Morissette on growly harmonica, then undiminished pipes, to a reception that you might term unexpectedly frenzied (then again: 2.7 million copies). A slogan on the screens advocates “Wholeness Over Wellness” – answers on a postcard please.
Jagged Little Pill was well-timed. Morissette had emerged from a pre-career in her native Canada as a teenage dance pop prodigy, ill-used, she would later intimate, by her charges – experiences that would inform the catharsis of her new songs. Its post-grunge sound, coloured with psychedelic cadences, is perhaps over-politely delivered tonight – Morissette’s band in 1995 and ’96 featured the late Taylor Hawkins on drums: a first look at an explosive talent – but it can sting when it needs to. Her Glasto band deftly render the raga tonalities of Right Through You, as messaging on the gender pay gap and sexual violence flash up. All I Really Want acknowledges its debt to the wonky, oestrogen-charged punk-jazz of Throwing Muses with a pic of Muses singer Kristin Hersh on the vid screens.
At several points, Morissette segues into an operatic segment of near-vocalese. ‘The instrument’, now 51 years old, has worn well. And she can still hare about the stage in the guileless, foal-like manner she always had, and spin, hair flying, in a move she must have half-inched off 10,000 Maniacs’ Natalie Merchant. At the end of Smiling, from her 2020 album, Such Pretty Forks In The Road, she collapses to her knees, foetally, to better exemplify the psychodrama.
Many in this supportive, ecstatic crowd will be second or third generation fans of Jagged Little Pill. The intervening years, it seems, has conferred on Morrissette a measure of iconhood that would once have seemed unlikely, when her extreme earnestness was something of a cold shower in the devil-may-care mid-’90s. She does not end on You Oughta Know, but it’s the set’s lodestone. The line “Is she perverted like me? / Would she go down on you in a theatre?” always drew attention. Tonight, the mum of three looks and sounds less certain as she revisits these verses, so full of hurt, but she belts the chorus like it’s 1995 once more.
The standard joke about Alanis Morrissette in the ’90s was that the things listed in JLP’s Ironic (eg. “rain on your wedding day”), are not technically ironic, merely unfortunate. But who’s laughing now?
Alanis Morissette At Glastonbury 2025 Setlist:
Hand in My Pocket
Right Through You
A Man (Shortened; segue)
Hands Clean
Head Over Feet
Everything (Shortened; segue)
You Learn
Would Not Come (Shortened; segue)
Smiling
I Remain (Shortened; segue)
Ironic
Are You Still Mad (Shortened; segue)
All I Really Want
You Oughta Know
Uninvited
Thank U
Follow all of MOJO’s Glastonbury 2025’s coverage HERE!
Alanis Morissette at Estereo Picnic, Bogota, March 27, 2025. (Credit: Alejandro Gonzalez / AFP)