Glastonbury line-up 2024: our critic’s verdict on this year’s headliners
Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA are top of the festival bill — and it’s all because of Taylor Swift.
It is difficult with female artists because there aren’t enough headliners,” said the Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis in October 2023, a couple of months after the world’s greatest and most right-on festival offered up the male and somewhat stale trio of Arctic Monkeys, Guns N’ Roses and Elton John at the top of the bill. “I feel like the pool is going to be bigger soon,” Eavis continued. “Who knows? Next year, we might get two …”
And here we are. The Glastonbury line-up for 2024 has been announced, with Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA headlining. That is the two women Eavis wanted, Lipa and SZA, with Shania Twain filling the key legend’s slot too.
Three of the top four slots have been nabbed by women, then, but that is only half the story. It is hard to book Glastonbury these days when upstart rival festivals are throwing the cash about and you’ve made promises about securing more female headliners. However, the decision-making behind this year’s edition has been so convoluted that you can trace its origins back five years ago to — as with most things these days — Taylor Swift.
In 2019 it was announced that Swift would headline in 2020 alongside Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lamar. As wild as it sounds, Swift was just another pop star back then. This was before Folklore, Evermore and Midnights, when her reputation had never been worse and she needed the festival to bolster her career. The problem? Something called Covid, which meant that Glastonbury was scrapped for two years — two years in which Swift became the biggest pop star on the planet since Michael Jackson and so didn’t need the festival after all.
Still, a pre-pandemic deal is still a deal and last year Swift was finally due to perform in Somerset. It would have been a triumph. Shake that mud off! But then she apparently pulled out when her Eras tour became a billion-dollar behemoth.
Scheduling issues for Swift and a mess for Eavis, who, in a bind, found an ageing Guns N’ Roses down the back of a stage to headline at short notice. Axl Rose, 61 at the time of the festival, ran a lot, but he simply cannot sing now and when their odd performance turned into something that was half gig, half the sound of a drowning cat, Eavis clearly knew she could not opt for a bunch of old man rockers again.
“I’ve always been very passionate about gender split on line-ups,” Eavis said. “And, actually, our problem was that I’d been so outspoken about it that having a year where there wasn’t a female sent people a bit mad. But everyone knows that it’s top of my list.”
Hence Lipa, hence SZA. But the saga does not end there. Lipa is a sure-fire thing, a British pop star on an inexorable rise with a third album, Radical Optimism, recently out. SZA, for some, is more surprising. There are 72 million reasons why the American R & B star SZA is headlining — that is the number of monthly Spotify listeners the singer has, which is more than Adele and hundreds of other stars that the SZA naysayers have heard of. She has also won a Brit and two Grammys this year — if you’ve not heard of her, you simply haven’t been listening.
But even SZA was, like Guns N’ Roses, a back-up. The third headliner was long rumoured to have been Madonna before, allegedly, rows over money — Glastonbury pays considerably less than its competitors — kiboshed any performance by the Material Girl.
Back in a bind but knowing that she definitely could not call on, say, a last-minute Green Day, Eavis opted for SZA to close out the festival on the Sunday with her slick, stoned, bassy grooves, soothing punters who are by that point already half asleep anyway.
She will pull a big crowd. And if you want a bunch of men hammering away at traditional rock instruments, the National will be on the Other Stage at the same time. As always, Glastonbury offers something for everybody, but this year already looks quite different, even esoteric. Festivals are booming in this country, with dozens of sizeable weekenders filling up the summer. However, look at the sort of headliners they opt for — Liam Gallagher! Kylie! Pet Shop Boys! — and the draw to sell tickets is based largely on anthems. Essentially, if you are never far from a singalong, that is £200 well spent.
Glastonbury, though, is different — it sells out many months before a line-up is announced, so the organisers can pretty much fill the slots with whomever they want. It is more about the vibes, man, and this year those vibes are younger and cooler than they have been for years. Below the headliners, you have prominent space for Little Simz, Janelle Monáe, Disclosure, Anne-Marie, the Last Dinner Party, Jungle, Jessie Ware, Sampha and Fontaines DC — barely a Radio 2-friendly chorus among them, but that is not the point.
Eavis has spoken about creating headliners of the future rather than relying on the same old bangers from the Sixties or, at the very latest, the Nineties. This year is testament to that. It may have taken her half a decade of cancellations and some big act disappointments, but we finally have the line-up she has wanted.
The Times
