The Weekend: Glastonbury stands in for the football

This weekend was largely football free, so here's Elton instead

For a few days I had it wedged it in my head that I would be all over thee European under-21s, but this turned out not to happen. England are doing very well, already through to the next round with a game to spare. Their final group match is against Germany, who lost to Czechia yesterday afternoon, as England were beating Israel 2-0. Morgan Gibbs-White and Emile Smith-Rowe have excelled, from what I can gather. But last weekend was all about Glastonbury really, wasn’t it? So here’s a rare expedition for me into music, with some thoughts on Elton, and the rest of the weekend.

Elton understood the assignment. Whereas the Arctic Monkeys seemed to have upset some of those for whom music became preserved in aspic in 2005, Elton—the entertainer—kept things simple. Focus on what you can control rather than what you can’t. If you have a spectacular back catalogue of songs stretching back over half a century, pull out the best of that, the songs that everybody knows, and you’ll keep the majority of people happy.

It had been a sunny weekend of near-relentless optimism. Dave Grohl went from being the secret guest who everybody knew it was going to be to ubiquitous in substantially less than 24 hours. Rick Astley was the hit of the Saturday, with two sets which seemed to confirm that he was living his absolutely best life. Lizzo was, as ever, magnificent, a human conduit for all the love in the room, and Carly Rae Jepsen seemed to be having the absolute time of her life on her lunchtime set. And of course Debbie Harry was glorious, wearing wraparound shades which contrived to make her look as though she was from the future even though she’s now 77 years old.

And on Sunday night Elton, himself 76 years old took to the stage in a gold lamé suit—and, of course, matching shoes—to rattle through the back catalogue. He’s retained a degree of that strange ‘club singer’ affection that he appears to have picked up in recent years, but his piano playing is as fluid as you’d expect from someone who’s been doing it for as long as he has, and while the special guests that he’s invited on might not have been the big names that many of those watching might have wanted, well, Elton has famously long been an active and genuine supporter of new musical talent. Why shouldn’t he push a last few names out there during his last show?

There was a hint of underlying sadness about the entire evening, in particular at the point that he dedicated Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me to George Michael, whose 60th birthday it would have been as he performed the song. And this might have been accentuated by the fact that Elton himself had admitted at the start of the set that this may be the last time that he performs in England. Of course, when a lot of stars say this sort of thing it’s tempting to assume that they’ll be back again in a few months’ time, but when the star concerned is 76 years old such a comment takes a deal greater resonance. After a version of Rocketman which no-one on either on the stage or in the audience seemed to actually want to end, the musicians assembled at the front of the stage to take an actual bow.

But the dominating feeling of Glastonbury 2023 was one of kindness. It was there in the fierce online reaction to Proper Music Men complaining about her playing to a recorded backing rather than having a live band. Such was the strength of this reaction that her excellent—and yes, new to me, among many thousands of others—work is getting the attention it clearly deserves. And most pointedly, it was there in the audience reaction to Lewis Capaldi.

Capaldi lives with Tourette’s syndrome and his condition has been worsening of late, to a point at which he had already said that this would probably be his last show for a while. When it flared up during his Glastonbury performance, the audience seemed to understand immediately what was happening as his voice broke up during Someone You Loved and carried him all the way to the end of the song. It was one of the genuinely great Glastonbury moments, a timely reminder in a world that so often feels as though it’s spiralling out of control at the behest of very bad men of the enormous amounts of love of which we’re also capable. Protect Lewis at all costs, and protect that reminder that we can always do better.