Anohni & The Johnsons
Park Stage, Friday, June 27, 2025
Draped in white, with a peroxide-white mane, Anohni floats onto the stage. Behind her plays luminous video of tropical fish and stunted coral, with a group of musicians in the shadows – strings, reeds, guitars, bass, percussion. It’s like they’re all suspended in an aquarium.
There follows one of the most extraordinary examples of live popular music it’s been MOJO’s privilege to witness, certainly at Glastonbury. Anohni’s current tour is entitled Mourning The Great Barrier Reef and is intended to flag the loss to the planet of coral die-off as climate change does its worst. The set includes some of her more eco-focused material and other tunes in her back catalogue; the arrangements are exquisite, juggling subtlety and power; her voice, keening as ever, is the epitome of control – there’s no melodrama, in spite of the stakes as Anohni perceives them. The impact is glorious, harrowing and beautiful in equal measure.
Another World, from 2009’s The Crying Light; You Are My Sister, from her revelatory second album, 2005’s I Am A Bird Now; Why Am I Alive Now and Scapegoat from 2023’s My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross; Cut The World from 2012 – each song is riveting. The crowd, a select one for a Glastonbury headliner, is transfixed. In Why Am I Alive Now, Anohni hymns the “aching colour of the world” – the lighting, bathing her in pure white, blue, or red, is its deft shorthand .
Perhaps most extraordinary are the songs from 2016’ Hopelessness album – the title track, 4 Degrees and Drone Bomb Me. In their original form, these were framed in the electronica of Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never. Pretty great in that context, they are radically elevated in these arrangements. On that tour Anohni appeared in a burka-type covering – she was in a phase of wishing to conceal herself from the world and you couldn’t see her face as she sang. At Glastonbury she faces the audience fixedly, an unignorable empath for the harms done to the planet.
As a vocalist, Anohni is a one-off – an operatic counter-tenor in the guise of a pop singer. But it’s the humanity of the communication that stuns – the transparency of the thoughts and feelings running through her words. Sometimes she doesn’t seem to quite know where to put herself. This is a performance but also not: a matter of life and death.
Glastonbury headliners now come burdened with expectations to mach schau, to deliver guest spots and fireworks. This was the opposite of that. And, one suspects, unforgettable.
Anohni & The Johnsons Glastonbury 2025 Setlist:
Why Am I Alive Now?
4 Degrees
Manta Ray
Hopelessness
Everglade
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
You Are My Sister
It Must Change
Scapegoat
Cut the World
Another World
Drone Bomb Me / Crisis
Follow all of MOJO’s Glastonbury 2025’s coverage HERE!
Photo: BBC