Charli xcx got herself into hot water earlier this year when she donned a “Miss Should Be Headliner” sash for Coachella. It didn’t sit well with a lot of people, who found it to be tasteless and self obsessed. That is except for actual headliner Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day, who appeared to find the whole thing very funny and even donned a “Brat” hat for his own performance.
Charli knows better than to pull a stunt like that again — as we’ve learned from her ever-changing Apple girls (this time Gracie Abrams) she doesn’t do repeats — but if she’d whipped that sash back out for Glastonbury 2025, it would have been totally warranted.
The 32-year-old singer, real name Charlotte Aitchison, has become the reigning queen of dance pop over the past two years with her mega Brat album rollout and the subsequent remix album, Brat and it’s completely different but also still Brat. “Brat summer”, the hedonistic season of messy fun inspired by the album, was referenced by everyone from Kamala Harris and Barack Obama to Gwyneth Paltrow, and it featured heavily in the 2024 US Presidential race.
For 2025, Charli brought the full Brat experience to Glastonbury. No guests, just pure Charli — good camera work, neggy crowd work that everyone loved, twerking in artificial rain. Even though much had been speculated over the potential of Lorde or Billie Eilish coming out, those speculations quickly died out as soon as their relevant tracks were played. Charli was good enough on her own.
Charli xcx was also present last year, but her DJ set was so vastly oversubscribed that many failed to access the stage and it even allegedly prompted an emergency meeting of senior Glasto bosses. This year she was bumped up to the Other Stage and strategically placed at the same time as Doechii (who has a similarly young, feral fan base) and Neil Young, the headliner, who had a depressingly small crowd for a Saturday night headliner.
But it wouldn’t have been out of the question to have bumped Charli all the way up to the Pyramid. It will be widely accepted that she should have replaced Olivia Rodrigo this year, and that Glastonbury *still* doesn’t quite get the pull of electronic music, as much as they keep trying,
Opening with 365, the tone was set from the outset. Eyes widened, jaws unhinged, arms raised, the crowd literally went wild. Aitchison then led the crowd through a number of other Brat hits such as 360, Club Classics and Apple — wise, considering that most of the people there probably became fans in 2024. But she played to the fans too — Charli Stan favourites like Unlock It and Vroom Vroom were peppered throughout.
Slower moments of the set were less saggy and more cathartic, like a breath of fresh air during a come up, with newly minted fan favourite Party 4 U taking fans from mad, feverish rapping to pure emotion in mere seconds. Track 10, which Aitchison has described as a rite of passage song that she must perform every single time she’s on stage, gave everyone a moment to catch their breath and count themselves lucky to be there.
Towards the end of the set, Charli once declared brat summer a “forever thing” not just a seasonal thing. And it was understood. It’s not a seasonal thing. It’s a Charli thing.It’s the kind of show people will brag about attending for years. It just should have been on the Pyramid stage.
