So that was it. For the full experience you now need to get Zane Lowe on to smirk that he didn’t see Beyoncé as he was watching “real music” (Queens of the Stone Age) on the Other stage. See you on Sunday for Bowie – over and out!
For all of you watching Beyoncé, let’s take a moment to remember what a total dickhead Zane Lowe was about it https://t.co/mKDKQ6qoWG
— Julian Stockton (@julianstockton) June 26, 2020
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Is this right? Blimey. Well it was a tremendous performance and set her on the path to even more brilliant things. I absolutely loved her command of the festival, her pipes, her openness to the crowd ... if anything it’s better than I remember it.
So she finishes with Halo, communing with the front row. Readers of the New Yorker writer John Seabrook’s great book The Song Machine will know that Ryan Tedder got in hot water when Kelly Clarkson noticed that the song he’d given her, Already Gone, was uncomfortably close to the one he’d done with Beyoncé – Halo. But Yoncé obviously wasn’t fazed – or maybe it was in the future – as she closed this legendary set with it.
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'This is history for me'
“A girl, a woman, a young lady has not headlined in 20 years so this is history for me.” Wow.
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She’s doing Run the World (Girls), quite a radical sounding record which definitely pointed towards such sonically adventuresome treats like Partition (and if you haven’t heard that on big speakers, you haven’t lived). It’s the crown of a killer performance.
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Some more fair thoughts BTL
Absoutely brilliant set so far, she’s got a fair set of lungs on her, just an amazing voice. She smashed the opening with that crazy in love/single ladies double. The cover of sex on fire was ace. And irreplaceable is,well irresistible. Though on balance I’d say her Coachella performance is still better
OK, so Yoncé is now performing Etta James’s At Last, which the year before had been my sister’s first dance at her and my brother-in-law’s wedding. Coincidence? It’s a political moment as the film across the back shows footage from the civil rights movement, culminating in the election of Barack Obama. Back then we didn’t forsee ... well, you know.
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I can’t remember that much about anything Rodney said, but I can remember hearing his Toni Braxton masterpiece He Wasn’t Man Enough for the first time in Tower Records in New York ... I actually think I shed a tear.
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She’s doing Say My Name, from the incredible golden moment of late 90s/early 00s R&B. This is written and produced by the genius Rodney Jerkins, who I also interviewed at his studio Darkchild back in the day.
I think there was probably some anticipation that Gaga would come on with Beyoncé given that they’d duetted on the lairy Telephone ... but it was not to be.
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Bug-a-Boo, absolute jam.
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Bootylicious, another banger.
Independent Women, 20 years on still a total banger.
'I've never played in front of 175,000 people'
“I’ve done a lot of things in my life but I have never played in front of 175,000 people,” Beyoncé says. I wonder whether that’s still the case?
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OK, so the crowd are singing the whole of Irreplaceable. Quite ballsy of Beyoncé to risk the embarrassment of no one knowing it at all, though the rapturous response this show received revealed that the Glastonbury demographic was changing – something to which Glasto booker and boss Emily Eavis has always been very attuned.
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“To the left, to the left” – can still remember this call and response moment nine years on.
Irreplaceable: singalong of the night
“I’ve been singing my heart out,” Beyoncé tells the crowd – she’s not wrong either. Now she’s singing Irreplaceable, the singalong of the night.
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It’s 1+1 and we’ve hit a bit of a longueur, though Yoncé looks spectacular kneeling atop a piano. But the noodly guitar solo underlines the fact that it’s a bit self-indulgent. At this point I imagine I probably went to the bar.
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"...What I'd give to be in a crowd like that now. It's poignant to see people loving the fact that they're jammed together, sweating all over each other and having a big old communal moment..."
You're in luck, 'Spoons re-opens next Saturday...
This dates it – the fact that she’s doing Kings of Leon’s Sex on Fire. This song was bloody everywhere at the time, but has it stood the test of time? Discuss.
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I’d forgotten that Beyoncé covered Prince’s The Beautiful Ones – in spectacular style at that, beating the floor and wrapping her incredible larynx around its swooping melody. The fact that he only had another five years left to live after this performance brings a lump to the throat.
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Well, it doesn’t get much better than Love Hangover, although this is a sad reminder that we now won’t be seeing Diana Ross doing her thing on Sunday afternoon this year.
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The kitchen sink got thrown at a slightly dull song there, although the crowd is enormous and ecstatic. What I’d give to be in a crowd like that now – it’s poignant to see people loving the fact that they’re jammed together, sweating all over each other and having a big old communal moment.
Well, right on cue here comes Why Don’t You Love Me, which isn’t exactly one of her more celebrated numbers – it reached the dizzy heights of No 51 in the UK.
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At the time, I remember some sceptical friend of mine doubting that Beyoncé had enough songs to fill a headline set, but we’re 40 minutes in and she’s done nothing but singles – the latest being Sweet Dreams, which she’s medleyed with a thrilling version of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics.
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Ah right, it was a medley! I’d forgotten that, nine years on ...
If I Were a Boy is, after all these years, a really good song, and Beyoncé’s performance of it is obviously deeply felt, plus she struck a great pose in the first verse. And now we get a cover version of You Oughta Know by Alanis Morissette ... though she declines to sing the profanity in the line “And were you thinking of me when you fuck her?”
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Hard to argue with this assessment below the line:
This was a masterclass in how to put on a show. The huge stage is Parliament/Funkadelic, the attitude is Tina Turner, the funk revue stylings are James Brown, the vocals are Gladys Knight and the ad Lib/call and response bits are Freddie Mercury. She makes the audience feel like they’re joining her on the dance floor. She really is the best pop star of the century so far. Cringed myself inside out at the Tricky bit though.
Several songs in and Beyoncé’s vocals are impeccable, despite the fact she’s danced her socks off for most of the set. And the first part concludes with fireworks.
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Beyoncé gives an earth-shaking performance of End of Time, from her then-current album I Am ... Sasha Fierce. Men have invaded the stage! Men in leather waistcoats and knee-pads!
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According to our liveblog back in 2011, our Adam Gabbatt assessed Beyoncé thus: “She must be as strong as an ox. She’s averaging 30 squat thrusts per track.”
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Beyoncé goes on to perform Best Thing I Never Had, which was her single at the time. It’s mainly notable for the hilarious line, “You showed your ass, and I saw the real you.”
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Tricky's dodgy mic moment
Tricky later said about his dodgy performance:
I went on. The smoke, the dancers … and then my mic didn’t work. When my mic didn’t work, I just started watching everything. And she’s so professional – when she saw my mic didn’t work, she came over and started winding down on me. It was professional, but it was sexy. And I’m not that kind of guy, I’m a bit shy. So she’s winding down on me, and I look at the front – and Jay-Z is right in front of me. It’s just weird. I got a cousin, he’s a Jamaican guy in London, and him and his friends were watching it. And he and his friends, they were talking to me, they said ‘Go on Tricky! Wind it! Wind it!’ But I couldn’t do it. There’s no way I can grab Beyoncé around the waist and start doing that stuff.
So that, er, explains it.
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So the sun’s gone down, a white grand piano has appeared from somewhere, and Beyoncé is singing happy birthday to someone called Steve. OK.
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Keeping up the run of singles, Beyoncé, introduces Tricky to the stage to do Baby Boy. At the time Tricky claimed that his microphone didn’t work, but from seeing it on the TV it seems clear that he just didn’t actually do much, and in fact looked pretty overwhelmed. And with the leotard and sequins extravaganza taking place right in his face, no wonder.
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So then she does Naughty Girl in a slightly jazz revue style. The choreography is magnificent, the band are tight as a gnat’s nether regions – this is class.
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“So ladies, put your hand in his face ...” and wave it about demanding that he “put a ring on it”. I wonder whether anyone did get married as a result of this performance?
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This is a pin-sharp Single Ladies. What a dance routine, and to do it in those heels ... blimey. As Beyoncé said at the top, on this night she was living out her dreams of being a rock star.
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Years before Beyoncé headlined, Crazy in Love was a big Glastonbury tune for me. It came out in the summer of 2003. That year I was working at NME (and editing the Glastonbury issue in the pre-internet days when we had to courier disks up and down the motorway) and we played Crazy in Love 10 times in a row in our tourbus on the way into the festival, then made our triumphal introduction blasting it out of the window, with new bands editor Imran Ahmed sitting on the roof through the sunroof (until the steward made him get down). We parked in the backstage area next to Primal Scream and Kate Moss’s Winnebago – who regarded us with nothing less than abject horror.
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Jay-Z is on tape, and was watching from the front of the stage, but didn’t make a guest appearance. He’d headlined himself in 2008, which caused the rock bores to blow a gasket, but won over the crowds and, as Emily Eavis says in our interview today, put Glastonbury on the map globally. Ironically, if Jay-Z hadn’t have headlined, Bruce Springsteen might not have done the following year.
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Yoncé emerges from the stage in silhouette to kick off with one of her undisputed classics, Crazy in Love. She had an all-female band who look cool af.
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So it’s Beyoncé time! And as you can see it was a gorgeous Sunday night at the Pyramid stage.
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At the moment the Rolling Stones are coming at us from 2013, but we’ll be time-travelling two years earlier to Beyoncé’s Sunday night set at 10pm. Please tweet me @alexneedham74, add your thoughts in the comments or even email me, if you feel that strongly – alex.needham@theguardian.com.
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Welcome to Not Glastonbury
The sun has been baking down all day, it’s a gorgeous evening, and we should be in a field somewhere in Somerset ... but instead we’re in front of the TV, watching BBC2 and trying to capture a bit of the Glastonbury magic.
The festival itself has – of course – been cancelled due to coronavirus, but the BBC have dug into their archive to broadcast a selection of performances from over the years. Earlier I watched Oasis play the Other Stage in 1994 ... and what do you know, they sounded bloody great with original drummer Tony McCarroll and bucketfuls of snarl and attitude from Liam Gallagher.
We’re not liveblogging the entire thing – that would be insanity – but we are liveblogging the three headliners, as chosen by the BBC. I’m kicking off tonight with Beyoncé’s 2011 headline set; Guardian music editor Ben Beaumont-Thomas will be here tomorrow to liveblog Adele; and then I’ll be back on Sunday night to liveblog David Bowie’s epochal 2000 set.
I saw both the shows I’m liveblogging from the field itself, so it will be interesting to revisit them. I’ve also got another distinction, if you can call it that, when it comes to Beyoncé – I’ve interviewed her, and not once, but twice, both as a member of Destiny’s Child (her not me).
The first time was when I was working at the pop magazine Smash Hits and Destiny’s Child were promoting their magnificent single Bills, Bills, Bills. I asked them whether it was a bit antifeminist to make a song asking a bloke to pay their bills, so they kindly but firmly broke down the lyrics to me – that it was about a man who’d run up a bunch of debts on their credit card, and that the song was asking him to pay them back: “That’s a responsibility!” Yoncé (or it may have been Kelly Rowland – the details are a bit fuzzy 21 years on) impressed upon me.
The second time was a couple of years later. I was at NME by then, Destiny’s Child had booted out two members and replaced them with Michelle Williams, and they were promoting their album Survivor which, while great, was not quite as fabulous as the previous one, The Writing’s on the Wall. Nonetheless we put them on the NME cover – controversially – and I interviewed them in the penthouse of the Metropolitan Hotel in London. I can’t remember that much about the interview other than the fact that Beyoncé – possibly out of sheer boredom – crawled across a banquette to stroke Kelly Rowland’s hair and, amid much hilarity, fell off.
Ten years later and Beyoncé was a Glastonbury-headlining superstar, though still very much developing as an artist. The triumphs of her fifth “visual” album and Lemonade were ahead of her, along with the political awakening which brought about such stunning moments as her Black Power-infused performance of Formation at the 2016 Super Bowl. Yet she still had songs as great as Crazy in Love in her arsenal. I remember the show being front-loaded with hits, boiling hot, and a true Glastonbury moment. Let’s revisit it together and see how it holds up.
By the way, you can read he original liveblog here, a blow-by-blow account so old it’s in the old Guardian website iteration we all called “R2”.
Don't forget she did all this whilst pregnant.