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Another early morning start and this time it’s the hottest day of the year. A call home confirms it’s the hottest weather since 1929 and it seems even the highest known powers are helping with the 40th birthday celebrations – like statistics coming from a war zone, we’re being bombarded with numbers. Over 1,000 treated for heatstroke and the newly christened Glastonbury vest is being sported by more and more – you know the deal, totally white where your t hsirt or vest have been and a kind of salmon pink with a hint of blister everyhwere else.

An internal pep talk mentioning that the campaign was nearly over and we had to stick with it was ringing round my head with the first litre of water and a tentative half a cider. A sortee is made over to The Park stage where our old friends I Am Kloot were kicking off procedings. Always the bridemaid to the varying brides of Elbow and Cherry Ghost, it seems Johnnie Bramwell’s time may have come – a huge crowd that hung on his every word and a recently playlisted Radio 2 single means they might finally be allowed in instead of just pressing their faces against the window for so long. Field Music take the blissed out feeling even further and Goldhawks are the last band of the day we catch that we’ve not seen before.

Aftert that it’s possibly the oddest list of live treats you could imagine. While England showed their true colours in the football we were shown Slash’s true colours on the main stage – those being that it was he rather than Axl Rose who was the talent in Guns N Roses – easier to replace the singer than the guitarist, we got the double headed behemoth of Paradise City and Welcome to The Jungle that contained riffs that went unrecognised by absolutely nobody within earshot. Slash looked like he’d signed some pact with the devil as he hadn’t changed a single bit from the heyday of the band. It’s maybe not that difficult when your distinguishing features are a top hat, cigarette and a fright wig but it’s still some feat.
MGMT have come in for a mauling after delivering their second album and the jury is out – they’ll still always be judged on how catchy their stuff is compared to the keyboard intro to Time To Pretend but when their answer to the critics is a prog wig out then they’ve still got us on their side. As much as Faithless are probably the band I dislike most in the world, it’s hard not to be impressed by the crowd they pill and the reaction they get. Their sound is summed up most simply by the fact their new album is only available in Tesco. Supermarket House, they invented it themselves so need no further kicking from us. For people who think Simply Red is soul.
After a slight hiccup it’s back to the decent stuff – Ash have oddly been around for years and have seen the coming and going of so many different styles but just stick to their own. Only just 30 but having clocked up 25 hit singles since the age of 16 Tim Wheeler seems to have the secret to eternal youth. That secret seems to consist mainly of songs yor still singing an hour later and playing with the gusto of a band that had been gigging for mere months.
At the end of their creative process, according to main man James Murphy at least, are LCD Soundsystem – they umported their take on New York cool and put in the performance of the day. Two unbelievable albums and one that is merely great makes for the perfect festival slot – the difference between songs like New York I Love You and Losing My Edge is enough to make you realise how sorely missed this lot will be.
So to the final band. We, shamefully, walked past Stevie Winder’s set as he played Michael Jackson’s Human Nature on harmonica and under any other circumstances deserved to be castigated for missing a set by such a legend. But for us this wasn’t about a massive name like Stevie Wonder taking in Glastonbury as part of a world tour, this was about the bands who’s belief had built it into what it is today. Surely non can wear that mantle as comfortably as the Hartnoll brothers in the guise of Orbital. Their 1994 set being a benchmark in live music and their presence previous to that helping Glastonbury stay relevant by moving towards dance from their diet of pure rock. Anyhow Stevie Wonder wasn’t going to be breaking out the lasers and no way would he do the Doctor Who theme. The whole of Glastonbury’s 40th year could have been encapsulated in the moment the current Doctor, Matt Smith, strode onto the stage – ever changing,
travelling
through space and time, sometimes there and sometimes not. Somewhere between fact and fiction.