London,

The Who soldier on - but Iggy steals the show

By Richard Godwin, Evening Standard  25.06.07

Under a gentle drizzle which, after four days of rain, felt like a goodbye kiss from an old friend, The Who played out Glastonbury to the usual mix of euphoria, melancholy and relief.

The sound problems that had dampened sets by Arctic Monkeys and The Killers on the Pyramid Stage the night before appeared to have been remedied. The Sixties survivors (minus Keith Moon and John Entwistle) were suitably noisy. Pete Townshend did his windmill guitar thing. The crowd, which inevitably drew Glastonbury's more august revellers, bellowed along to My Generation.

Click here to see our gallery of this year's Glastonbury festival

Bassey brush with death in helicopter emergency

But as Roger Daltrey, 63, reaffirmed his four-decade-old hope not to die before he got old, I sensed more genuinely youthful thrills were kicking off elsewhere - as a trip to the Other Stage for the Chemical Brothers show proved.

The dance veterans made the most of a difficult slot with a performance of hallucinatory intensity. Meanwhile the John Peel Stage shuddered to an incendiary set from Beth Ditto and Gossip which finished with the 15-stone singer throwing herself onto the crowd.

The last day of music over, the hardiest headed for the Stone Circle to buy laughing gas and talk garbage until the sun rose again on normal existence, and worries about the location of tents, cars and minds began to surface.

It had been a more arduous festival than usual. There were no washed-away tents, thanks to a new £750,000 drainage system. But mud - of which there were at least as many kinds as Inuits have words for snow - takes its toll. It's less the dirtiness, more the difficulty of squelching from one stage to another.

Not helping matters, the 30,000 extra fans allowed in this year swelled the crowds to uncomfortable levels. Whole sections - such as the beguiling Lost Vagueness field - had occasionally to be roped off.

Even 71-year old Michael Eavis CBE stopped short of his annual pronouncement that it was the best Glastonbury ever, though he was correct in pointing out that the spirit of the thing overrides the weather. A wet Glastonbury still has a magic that no branded, regimented festival can touch. The schadenfreude of the media seems absurd from the inside.

For the bands - many playing their first Glastonbury after the year off in 2006 - this is where reputations are made or squandered. Editors were an unexpected triumph, striking just the right chord of anguish at dusk on Saturday. Frontman Tom Smith visibly gained presence throughout.

Arctic Monkeys struggled to fill the Pyramid Stage on Friday night: too surly. A sneering cover of Diamonds Are Forever, in tribute to Shirley Bassey (who played a festive set on Sunday), was about as fun as they got. Pete Doherty's Babyshambles will not have won many friends with their weedy set, inevitably graced by Kate Moss. A rumoured Libertines reunion never happened.

Elsewhere, a spirit of fun went a long way: Gipsy punks Gogol Bordello were brilliant as ever; Lily Allen - "I've been looking forward to this all my life!" - was charming; Brazilian electro sextet CSS were totally bonkers, singer Lovefoxxx sporting two preposterous catsuits and stagediving on their very first song.

I'm not sure how Glastonbury is the sentiment "My idea of fun/Is killing everyone", but it was Iggy Pop who produced the most extraordinary performance of the weekend. Headlining the Other Stage on Saturday night with the rather revolting-looking Stooges, he writhed like a shaman and barked like some primeval dog, channelling the crowd's desire for abandon. "I am you", he bellowed, after an anarchic, 200-strong stage invasion.

No truer words were said all weekend: worth any amount of trenchfoot.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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