A reggae mash-up of Here Comes The Sun, segueing into Come Together set to the Ring The Alarm/ Stalag 17 dancehall rhythm? It’s Thursday night at the TRUTH stage in Glastonbury’s Shangri-La zone, and The Beatles Dub Club DJs are delivering rootsical re-rubs of Fabs favourites. What seemed at first like a daft laugh is providing laudable sentiments for getting in amongst the Mother Of All Festival’s thirty-eighth edition since 1970.
It being Thursday, the music doesn’t officially start until tomorrow, but there’s still loads on. After the irie Beatles on the TRUTH stage, it’s Cardiff’s Panic Shack, who provide an early peak with their Ramones/ B-52’s dayglo trash aggro. An all-woman outfit apart from the drummer – it was good enough for The Slits - the OTT punk presence that is vocalist Sarah ‘Hardbeats’ Harvey brooks no resistance. One song sounds like Spinal Tap’s Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight, via The Fall’s Athlete Cured, and they finish with a righteous blast through the Electric Six’s drunkenness anthem Gay Bar. An early candidate for band of the festival.
Other highlights from what are normally Glastonbury’s distant stages but are the main event on the Thursday... The venerable Guns Of Navarone on the Rocket Lounge stage bring not just classic ska covers but a stew of adjacent uptempo styles, in super-tight configurations – with violin bringing a Celtic tang to their skank. Among multifarious grime offerings, Peng Deli rose above, with multiple, multi-ethnic MCs riding rude, sometimes surprisingly avant beats. Not only do they delight in cross-talk like the best rap teams, but prove adept at improvising, while stoking a wide-eyed crowd into paroxysms of leaping and finger-pointing.
Eleven pm is when the boshing starts. And from half-midnight in the Glade it was Daniel Avery and Death In Vegas’s Richard Fearless carrying the flag. Deep, dark, relentless, psychedelic, their mix of personalities and (mostly) techno was strong medicine. Too intense for some if the drifting crowd was anything to go by. Manna for those who like it in the rabbit-hole.
To finish, there’s a late-night screening of the Flowered Up film I Am Weekender with a Q&A with director WIZ. The mini-movie’s still trenchant evocation of taking an extreme break from reality seems like good sense to us, and if the comedown’s coming, it’s not here yet. Other mutterings abroad include the arrival of a giant mirror ball onsite, which suggests that the Arctic Monkeys will play after all, Pulp playing a secret set and, as The Times reports, people tunnelling under the fence to get in.
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.
Picture: Anna Barclay