Glastonbury: Coldplay Go Pyro; Crowe, Cruise And McQuarrie “Dad

Led by an ebullient Chris Martin (full disclosure: no relation), Coldplay put on a balls-to-the-wall show on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage Saturday night, including raft upon raft of hits and vast pyrotechnical displays at literally every crescendo. Coldplay are, in effect, “Glasto” in the British hivemind, this being their fifth time to headline the festival, the first in 2000, so the band clearly decided to kick out the jams.

Attending for Coldplay were the stalwart central makers of the Mission Impossible franchise, death-defying director Christopher McQuarrie and two of his stars, death-defying Tom Cruise and sidekick Simon Pegg. A rare and jaunty family outing, we could say, and one that fits perfectly in Cruise’s increasing move toward England and his general permanent anglification. Pictured below, Pegg and Cruise keep a close watch on the stage setups while big daddy McQuarrie, left, unworried that anything might go wrong since those two are paying attention, studiously attends to his phone.

Glastonbury — or “Glasto” in the excellently dry British street paralance — is by definition a gathering of the various Anglo-Saxon tribes, youthful and not, who convene at or within spitting distance of the summer solstice. The solstice is an old custom in Britain. At any such latter-day British gathering, there will be a few ancient working metaphors framing the doings on the ground. Foremost among them are the Eros/Thanatos madness of Shakespeare’s eternal A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and providing the underlying prehistoric fundament for that are the Druids’ own marking of the center of the planting season’s longest day, as at, and by, Stonehenge.

One of Glastonbury’s founder Sir Michael Eavis’ longstanding themes has been to have the festival serve the notion of environmental awareness. Pictured above, then, those traditions give rise to the performer as Green Man, and to the scene pictured below, of festival-goers lounging in the late afternoon sun on Worthy Farm under the energetically ironic art installation entitled Carhenge.

Pictured below, on June 28 on the headliner’s Pyramid Stage, Dua Lipa leads her backup dance troupe through the obligatory-legs-akimbo choreographic vocabulary signifying maximum empowerment.

Glastonbury doesn’t just have musicians and dancers on parade, filmmakers of all stripes show up on Worthy Farm. This year, bringing along a screening and discussion of her new film, the hotly-awaited Dune: Part 2, white-hot British actress Florence Pugh dropped through on June 28 with what the British milliners would call a “fascinator” of a blue and pink floral garland. That screening will be followed at the “Pilton Palais” — the intentionally hyperbolic name for the film tent on Worthy Farm hard by one of the acoustic stage — by an illustrious crew of actors and directors staging other screenings. On Sunday, Cate Blanchett will bring her Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There to the film tent, and Tilda Swinton, who at the festively spectral hour just past midnight Saturday, will introduce Only Lovers Left Alive.

To lend us a sense of Glastonbury’s scale and rank (for the moment) as Britian’s 7th largest city, as well as the extreme British-countryside beauty offered by Worthy Farm, let’s take a second to soak in what the organizers have dubbed the “tipi field” — or, transliterated into American English, the teepee field. Looking for all the world like a medieval encampment for a great tournament, or, alternatively, an encampment limned from the Lord of the Rings.

And in the thousand-year leaps that the Worthy Farm/Glastonbury time machine is so effortlessly capable of performing, let’s fast forward out of Tolkein to Route 66 and the Dharma Bum captain Jack Kerouac, via the “San Remo Motel and Bar” tent, where festival-goers needing a break can channel their inner road dog with a few shots of whatever poison they think Kerouac actually might have drunk.

Arguably, the globally branded and most lovable British eccentricity is exercised in many different ways across the UK several times a year — the British Open, the Chelsea Garden Show, the Westminster Dog Show, almost anything any member of the Royal Family says or does. In performance, Glastonbury is certainly among the top exercises, thus the booking of the all-female Indonesian heavy metal band “Voice of Baceprot,” pictured below, seems right in line.

Farmers’ daughters all, the ladies are from West Java, where metal is thin on the ground. According to dispatches, Baceprot, who sing in Sundanese and in English, now have a single culled from their album, called Retas, and will be shortly touring the States. The single is entitled “God Allow Me (Please) To Play Music,” culled from their harsh experience forming the band, and simply existing as educated women, in the west Javan farm country, and is both gentle, elegaic and most heartfelt. Their appearance is emblematic of Glastonbury at its most experimental and inclusive.

To great acclaim, Russell Crowe took his basso profundo and his band to the Acoustic Stage on Saturday, June 29, and proceeded to impress the house — who were, it must be said, well-predisposed — with his patented mix of storytelling, singing, and dad-rocking. As a practice, dad-rocking is a thing in the UK that isn’t quite as pitiful as it might (instantly) be in the US, Prince William just having engaged in a modicum of dad-dancing high up in the royal box at Wembley at one of Taylor Swift’s gigs with his children. The entire stadium was delighted — the British, and not least, the British Swifties — being a forgiving lot when it comes to William. To his credit, Crowe and his basso profundo can actually embrace and enhance a song, and his band is practiced, so the element of active — albeit dad-ly — musical engagement on the stage removes even more of the deadly dad-stigma.