I had an inkling Stormzy might be quite good at Glastonbury this year. Down with the kids, innit? But much of the festival on telly was a bit dull. Please don’t tell me you had to have been there. I have been there, which is why I will never go back. Nonetheless, loads of people have a brilliant time, and good luck to them. And every year someone astonishes me.
This year it was Billie Eilish, who seems to have been alive for less time than the set the Cure played to end the festival.
She is a dark star. In control, but slightly out of it. Scarily good at tapping into the angsty teenage girl in all of us. The one who sets fire to things for fun. The one who puts spiders in her mouth. The one who wonders a lot about being dead.
She wears baggy clothes because she does not want to be sexualised, but, at 17, she already is. This is the territory she is having to negotiate. She also says she doesn’t want others to slut-shame girls who do show their bodies and are comfortable in their own skin. “It’s like: what do you want from us?” she has said, summarising in one sentence what it is to be a young woman in the public eye.
What I want is for her to keep writing and to feel free, if ever she wants to, to change from being the creepy girl into whatever she wants to be. I want her to have the room to evolve, that priceless thing few artists are allowed.
I don’t know where she goes when she is asleep – as the title of her debut album asks – but watching someone so young, with so much talent, I thought of Kate Bush, who only managed that artistic freedom by disappearing. Let Eilish escape that fate.
•Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist
