Where and when: Pyramid stage, 8pm, Friday.
Dress code: Sleeve-rolled plaid, unkempt beards, faces hardened from being beaten for over a decade against the indie coalface.
What happened: The string section take their places, the horns strike up a colliery tone and the stage is set for the soundtrack to sunset. Guy Garvey, the man with a docker’s face, a whisky poet’s soul and the voice of a smelting kiln, greets Glastonbury open-armed and beaming – full knowing, in an hour, he’ll own the day. Before One Day Like This arrives, though, Elbow spend an hour trying to prove that their signature song isn’t the natural peak and conclusion of their musical development and that, rather than merely hoping to recast the same anthemic majesty a couple more times, they have somewhere else to go.
For half an hour they sound like great northern sedaters, festival hold music, the sound of waiting for the headliners. The Bones of You and Charge are dense soul and afrobeat tunes pebble-dashed with Manc disaffection and liberally doused in cheap red wine, and Fly Boy Blue gives the dark, earthy tones of early material such as Any Day Now a brassy makeover – quite lovely, slightly menacing, like an over-friendly drunk, but never actually moving. New York Morning, a stirring epic from latest album The Take Off and Landing of Everything, seems almost apologetic of its similarities to The Big One.
But when Garvey sings “looking back is for the birds” on The Birds and guitarist Mark Potter starts playing his guitar like a malfunctioning Mars probe, they transform into a far greater, less formulaic prospect. Garvey toasts the Glasto trolls back home, organises a “reverse Mexican wave” that reaches the very back of the field, takes to a drumkit to add crunch to the bourbon blues rock of Grounds for Divorce and gets the flags waving in unison to maudlin drinking anthem My Sad Captains.
High point: What do you think? One Day Like This is their Wake Up, a frankly sensational song that could upstage a World Cup win and give the stone circle goosebumps.
Low point: Guy mimicking the dancing of the front row like the most embarrassing vine of your dad imaginable.
In a tweet: Slowly, they’re building rockets.
