FEATURE:
Guts and Glory
IN THIS PHOTO: Olivia Rodrigo headlined the Pyramid Stage at the Glastonbury Festival on Sunday, 29th June/PHOTO CREDIT: Samir Hussein
The Exciting New Breed of Female Headliners
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EVEN though I am basing this off…
IN THIS PHOTO: Self Esteem (Rebecca Lucy Taylor) played the Park Stage at Glastonbury on Friday, 27th June/PHOTO CREDIT: Dereck Bremner for NME
of one major festival, Glastonbury, it is clear that there was a mix of revelations and missed opportunities. There were so many standouts sets through the festival. Many that got five-star praise. Whilst there is a lot to talk about Glastonbury is terms of its politics and how important it was for artists to speak out in support of Palestine, the music itself was among the best it has been for years. There was something for everyone, and artists really rose to the challenge (and the heat!). Even though headliner Neil Young was superb and won huge reviews, I feel it was evident that there were plenty of women through the bill that could have been headliners this year. The sole female headliner on the Pyramid Stage, Olivia Rodrigo, was outstanding. I want to bring in reviews from The Guardian of five amazing women who are headliners. Self Esteem released A Complicated Woman on 25th April. An amazing artist from one of our best artists, I do wonder why she was not considered as a headliner. She played the Park Stage on Friday night. It is clear that her Glastonbury set was a highlight:
“Tonight Taylor is back with another album under her belt, A Complicated Woman. She’s an imposing presence on stage, wearing the Amish-style robes and headdress and flanked by a crew of backing dancers dressed the same, and singing I Do and I Don’t Care with its arresting refrain: “If I am so empowered, why I am such a coward?”
The show is relatively high-concept and tightly choreographed, as fans will have come to expect of Taylor, but with a darker aspect than Prioritise Pleasure. Through Lies, a drone flying above the crowd adds to the implied menace. Taylor corners the camera and contorts her grin, mocking the pliant, less complicated woman the world would supposedly prefer her to be. When she concludes the song, crouched on the stage, she looks briefly a bit knackered, then drops the stony-faced act. “Thank you,” she says cheerily. “This is a song called 69.”
The song, about Taylor’s lack of enthusiasm for that particular sex act and consideration of its relative merits against others, is greeted by childish oooohs from the crowd and even laughs. I admit it’s an instant skip for me when I’ve listened to the album at home, but live, Taylor’s deadpan delivery is entertaining and a welcome lift through the otherwise frequently straightfaced setlist.
In another seamless transition, with call and response with her dancers, Taylor is helped out of her robes revealing all of them to be wearing rugby jerseys. (Her number is of course 69.) As with the Prioritise Pleasure tour, there’s a real cleverness to the staging. Through You Forever, the first full-throated singalong of the set with its rallying chorus of “you need to be braver”, Taylor runs drills with the rest of her team.
The highlight from A Complicated Woman, tonight as on the album, is The Curse, which finds Taylor relatively alone on the stage with a guitar, cursing, in another stirring outro, the depressing predictability of a relationship past its best: “I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t fucking work.”
But it is undeniably the songs from 2021’s Prioritise Pleasure, notably the title track and Fucking Wizardry, that draw the most enthusiasm from the crowd. Many of them know every word – and these are very wordy songs – and really seem to get something out of shouting them to the sky. It’s stirring, serious-minded yet still upbeat”.
Someone who I think is ready now to headline is CMAT. She played thew Pyramid Stage on Friday and was tremendous. With her album, Euro-Country, out in August, this is an artist embarking on a new chapter. Someone who I feel could easily have been a headliner. It does seem amazing that an artist who seems so natural on the Pyramid Stage was not given a bigger opportunity. For a festival that has constantly struggled to include women on the Pyramid Stage in the headline slots, there is a ready and waiting option with CMAT:
“What does is that CMAT is a fantastic pop star. It’s not merely that she’s smart, funny, gobbily outspoken, and looks fantastic – today she’s clad in huge earrings in the shape of the euro symboland blue plastic dress that she removes to reveal a matching blue leotard, while mocking the fat-shaming comments posted about her on social media. It’s not just that she is blessed with both a potent, octave-leaping voice and a surfeit of superb, hook-laden songs that split the difference between country mid-70s Fleetwood Mac and come equipped with sharp, witty lyrics. It’s that she’s a quite spectacularly brilliant live performer. She alternates between stage moves that very much hail from the Dance Like No One’s Watching school of abandon, and choreographed routines with her band members: at the climax of one, she rips off her male band members’ skirts in a manner reminiscent of Bucks Fizz’s famous Eurovision moment. She announces herself as possessed of “middle child syndrome, an amazing arse and the best Irish country rock’n’roll band in the world” and beckons for applause whenever she mentions her own name – when the crowd start chanting her name of their own accord, she responds by bending over and wiggling her bum at them. When she successfully encourages the audience to engage in synchronised dance moves to I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!, she looks quite startled at what a crowd this size enthusiastically dancing in unison looks like.
It’s all incredibly engaging and preposterously good fun, and it reaches a climax with Stay for Something She runs to the barrier at the front stage, climbs on top of it, hugs a fan, strikes a series of coquettish poses, then – to the visible horror of the security guard accompanying her – motions for the crowd to part, runs into their centre and delivers the final chorus in the middle of the audience. Back on stage, she leads a chant of “free Palestine” and she’s gone – it really doesn’t seem inconceivable that she could be headlining the next time she returns”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Yui Mok/PA
There are two more women who were not headliners on the Pyramid Stage who easily could have been. Doechii is one of the brightest and most respected names in Rap right now. Her mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal, was released last year. She is a GRAMMY-winning sensation who is a natural-born headliner. Playing the West Holts stage on Saturday, she delivered this live masterclass. I know all of these reviews are from The Guardian, but they are not biased or unreliable. It is clear their words reflected what was actually witnessed and went down. Doechii was at the top of her game:
“The show’s pace is so relentless, the choreography so precise and the Doechii’s flow so airtight that all the crowd can do is hold on and hope for dear life to be carried along. With her freestyle over America Has a Problem, from Beyoncé’s Renaissance, Doechii challenges anyone who dares fancy themselves her competition to step up: “I see a lotta bitches, I don’t see a lotta stars / I hear a lot of rappers, I don’t hear a lot of bars.”
The follow-up nod, in that song, to the Barbz – Nicki Minaj’s famously fanatical fanbase – makes Doechii’s most obvious comparison explicit, but not only does she match Nicki’s impeccable flow, she also bests her stage presence. Nicki’s never been known as much of a performer, whereas Doechii runs the length of the stage in heels and throws her body around like it’s another special effect at her disposal. Through Alter Ego, she’s flirtatious, casting coy glances over her shoulder, then antagonistic, spitting fire from a low squat position. Doechii’s association with alligators, appearing on the cover of her album Alligator Bites Never Heal, is apt: they share the same implacable ferocity, bared teeth and glint to the eye.
PHOTO CREDIT: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
A dance break involving umbrellas adds to the spectacle, but slightly obscures the school of hip-hop through-line. The show restores equilibrium with Persuasive, Doechii’s track with SZA – obviously performed tonight without her, but with such force that you don’t feel the absence. Doechii’s back and forth with her DJ/hype woman Miss Milan adds to the party atmosphere; by the time she launches into Nosebleeds from atop of a giant pair of speakers with her dance troupe way below, the crowd is hanging on her every word.
From that apparent peak, the highs only continue with an X-rated performance of Crazy and a rendition of her hit Anxiety that blasts the sample, Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know, with heavy distortion. For all her immense technical ability and precision, there’s actually something quite metal about Doechii in her commitment to spectacle. On top of all that, she has a strong, clear voice, capable of acrobatics but not inclined to launch into them just for show. On GTFO, she spars with her dancers, then the camera; for Catfish, she shows off her vocal timbre, descending into a guttural, bristling growl.
It is brilliant, but unrelenting; a reprieve from all that intensity arrives with Denial is a River – Doechii’s Salt-N-Pepa-esque, gossipy hit about a cheating partner and the narrator’s own self-deception. It’s presented within the educational framework of tonight’s set as an exemplar of “the art of storytelling”, and more than delivers on that promise: Doechii is relaxed, self-deprecating and conversational with Miss Milan. You could happily watch her riff in this register for hours.
As it is, Doechii concludes her “school of hip-hop” with a rousing rendition of Boom Bap, then skips off stage. It might seem anticlimactic – West Holts seems to be left slightly reverberating by her sudden absence – but it’s in fact one last lesson: a true master knows to always leave the crowd wanting more”.
Among the other highlight performances was Wet Leg. They were really amazing! It does seem criminal that Charli xcx was not booked to headline the Pyramid Stage. Not only could we have had two women headline for a second year running – SZA and Dua Lipa headlined last year -, but there would have been competition for it to be an all-female headline triple. I have mentioned women who were not there who could have been headliners – Kylie Minogue was a name that instantly sprung to mind – and I do hope that many of the women who shone at Glastonbury this year are considered in 2027 for headline status. Charli xcx showed why she should have been headlining the Pyramid Stage. One of the biggest omissions in recent festival history, she was predictably on fire! Even if the set was minimal and there was not a lot of on-stage chat and cameos were not a big part of her performance, it allowed people to focus on the music. The heart and soul of things. Rolling Stone UK also gave Charli xcx a five-star review. If her Other Stage set was tantalising and celebrated, you wonder just what she could have created and pulled off if she played on the Pyramid Stage! It was clear her Saturday performance was a Pyramid Stage-worthy revelation:
“With the release of last year’s Brat, an album that became a cultural moment without ever diluting Charli’s ingenuity, mainstream culture finally caught up to Charli. So it’s fitting that she’s here at Worthy Farm headlining, by some metrics, the biggest music festival in the world. Of course, she’s not really headlining – Charli’s Saturday night set closing the Other stage is, on a purely technical level, second billed to Neil Young, who is headlining the Pyramid at the same time. But ask anyone here, and the headliner of the entire weekend is Charli.
Her audience at the Other stage is dizzyingly huge, surely at least 60,000 people – a surreal sight for the many gay men who saw her perform in 200-capacity clubs as recently as 2019. And from the very first moments of her set, when she intones, gravely, “Glastonbury, don’t fucking play with me”, it’s clear that she is at the height of her powers, totally capable of holding the attention of a stadium’s worth of people. After all – who else could warrant a general expanding of the Other stage and the addition of more screens and speakers? Even if Charli wasn’t first billed, everyone at Glastonbury knew she was headlining.
This was made clear with an intense, totally uncompromising set in which Charli performed totally alone, not even with collaborators such as Lorde, who was also at Glastonbury. The Brat tour is at its most effective when the viewer has to submit to Charli’s world, and this show, loud and bawdy and sometimes very unnerving in its intensity, was practically Charli-led hostile takeover.
Her skill is in welding sophistication on to brute force – consider a song like Club Classics, which deftly stitches together at least four different styles of dance music in barely four minutes, but also brandishes a chorus of simply “me, me, me, me” – and even when she breaks script, you see that skill in action. “I’m known to have a heart of stone,” she tells the crowd, “But this is very fucking emotional.” She should save her tears – with an audition so memorable, so fun, so spectacular, the Pyramid has to be next“.
IN THIS PHOTO: Charli xcx/PHOTO CREDIT: Aaron Parsons for Rolling Stone UK
Before wrapping up, it is worth mentioning the only female headliner on the Pyramid Stage. Olivia Rodrigo was responsible for one of the best sets of the festival. More than worthy of a headline slot, she was among those who got a five-star thumbs-up. Not only was Olivia Rodrigo electrifying and completely commending. She also performed an unexpected collaboration with The Cure’s Robert Smith. The Guardian declared how Rodrigo stole the festival. Her set. It was that good:
“Securing the presence of the Cure’s frontman is, as young people are wont to say, a massive flex. For one thing, as the sharp WTF? intake of breath that greets his appearance indicates, it’s the one “secret” appearance of the entire festival that genuinely seems to have been kept a secret. It’s also a smart way of drawing in a crowd substantially more varied than you suspect ordinarily attends Rodrigo’s gigs: she made her name with songs that sounded like teenage diary entries set to music that balanced piano balladry with zippy pop-punk.
But in truth, Rodrigo doesn’t really need an alt-rock legend to win over the crowd – it’s already happened before Smith arrives. Clad in a pair of 18-hole Doc Martens, she’s a really engaging performer, cravenly playing up to the crowd by hymning Britain’s pubs – “where no one judges you for having a pint at lunchtime” – and M&S confectionery legend Colin the Caterpillar, changing into a pair of union jack hot pants midway through the set, and demanding her fans “think about something or someone that really fucking pisses you off” and scream mid-song.
PHOTO CREDIT: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
Theoretically her sound exists at two distinct polarities that shouldn’t really mesh together – the soft rock adjacent ballads and the pop-punk, the latter sounding noticeably heftier live than on record, the guitar solos surprisingly gnarly. But they’re united both by the fact that the songs are uniformly well-written – Get Him Back! has a timelessly snotty chorus that glam titans Chinn and Chapman would have been proud to give Suzi Quatro; All-American Bitch is sharp and funny; Vampire’s swell from downcast introspection to bile-spitting theatricality is brilliantly done – and that their tone is invariably lovelorn and accusatory. If the noisier tracks are more immediate live, giving her backing band more chance to demonstrate their potency, the set is perfectly balanced. Even if you don’t count yourself among the Rodrigo stans lined up against the front barrier – the big screens show them both passionately screaming along and looking faintly baffled when Robert Smith’s moment in the spotlight arrives – it never lags.
It also feels like more of an event than any other big set this year: as it ends with fireworks, you get the distinct feeling that, at 22, a teen pop star might have unexpectedly, but deservedly, stolen the show”.
Glastonbury was remarkable and its line up was incredible. I love how artists like Kneecap and Nadine Shah spoke up for Palestine. There was a real sense of anger and protest in the air. Even if Glastonbury’s organisers had to issue an insane apology because of Bob Vylan’s call for the death of the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) – they are fine with Israel committing genocide but when someone calls out those responsible for it then it is hate speech and deplorable! -, it cannot take away from the impact of the performances. So many highlights. I do hope 2027 is a year when the festival commits to two or three female headliners on the Pyramid Stage and it becomes a regular thing. Even if you liked Neil Young and The 1975, you cannot deny everyone from CMAT to Doechii to Charli xcx and Self Esteem could have headlined. There were so many others too. Women not even invited to play. These women hailed as headline-worthy but, when we flip forward two years, will they be overlooked again? Probably so! A major festival like Glastonbury needs to put these queens…
WHERE they belong.