This is the Prodigy’s fourth appearance at Glastonbury, but as Maxim says in a brief respite from the pummelling blast beats of Voodoo People, it should be their fifth. On the eve of their 2019 booking Keith Flint was found dead at his home in Essex. “Six years ago we lost our brother. This is his night,” Maxim declares.

Flint looms large at this year’s festival – head over to Joe Rush’s Carhenge and you’ll see his menacing grin adorning the bonnet of an upturned muscle car. But in tonight’s set he is positioned as a very visible absence: a silhouette, instantly recognisable by the two devilish points above the temples, is pinned to the giant screens by green lasers. On a reimagined Firestarter his vocals are winnowed down to a single repeated “I’m a firestarter”, Flint haunting the track rather than dominating it as he once did. And on Breathe his vocals in the chorus are omitted, with the crowd stepping in instead.

Flint’s absence is counterbalanced by a whole lot more Maxim, here playing the role of MC, compere and chief cajoler, shepherding crowds through the different eras of the band’s 35 year career, from the saucer-eyed hardcore techno of Jilted Generation to the rocky EDM of Invaders Must Die.

A word for the Other stage. It has received a glow up this year, with giant hi-def screens added, as well as a new lighting rig. It now is probably the best place to watch music at Glastonbury: every performance I’ve seen here has felt immersive and massive. That’s particularly true for the Prodigy and their retina-singing light show, with meandering lasers and walls of glitching graphics.

The spectacle seems to filter down to the audiences too, who have seemed up for it – bordering on unhinged – all weekend. There’s a sprit of the bacchanal tonight. Weed fug and pyro smoke hovers above the crowd of, as Maxim calls them “Prodigy warriors”: loud, unruly, boozy (and the rest). As the crowd skanks and sways to the boinging central refrain from Out of Space, Maxim surveys the scene and declares: “I think Mr Flint would have have been proud of you.”

Woodsies
Jorja Smith is welcomed on with an orchestral flourish – rhythmic percussion and escalating strings as the visuals conjure a stage on fire. Last month, the singer began her first UK tour since 2018. Back then she was 21, and riding high off her debut album’s Brit awards gong, Mercury nomination and Grammy nomination for best new artist. But she has switched down the gears towards a slower pace of life, moving from London back to her birthplace Walsall in 2023. Here, at one of the last sets of Glastonbury, she can flex how she’s developed and progressed away from the flashing lights.

Smith has won fans for a smoky, honeyed voice that has remained agile, elegant and restrained – though sometimes that restraint is to a fault. On the opening number, Try Me, she is drowned out by her band and, with a vocal style that is often legato, it can be hard to hear what she’s saying. There is a fine line, after all, between vocal elegance and repression.

Yet this issue quickly melts away, particularly when the familiar hits come out – Blue Lights and Addicted are such phenomenal tracks, sexy and subtle and bringing out gorgeous moments of vocal layering with her backing singer which provide more lyrical clarity and a fitting sense of ensemble. Her male backing singer comes out for a duet on Feelings – Smith is so adoring of him and they sound fantastic together, but it also feels like a humble and mature embrace of how introducing different, distinct vocal tones can accentuate a performance.

Initially, you do wonder if this set might become dull, and how she can maintain the audience for an hour and 15 minutes of slower, mellow tones that might not be the vibe for a Sunday late-night billing. Yet Smith is adaptable. Go Go Go reaches for Afropop, while Popcaan collaboration Come Over embraces dancehall. This scope is complemented by her band who are truly fantastic – her bassist can provide mellow moments of cool R&B, but equally they can ascend into rollicking crescendos and grundy indie rock type segments.

This set really reaches its peak during the more fun, funky and decidedly unrelaxed segments. She brings out AJ Tracey for both a cover of his hit Ladbroke Grove and their recent collaboration, Crush. I have to say, Tracey performs much better here than he had just two hours ago on the same stage. Perhaps this is because there is no backing track to rely on, and there is a wonderful, almost sibling-like fondness between the two artists.

But it’s when the basslines and syncopated rhythms of UK garage emerge that you really see Smith as a national darling, one equally capable of jumping on new sounds while resurrecting past genres with finesse; of course, funky electronic garage track Little Things, which reintroduced Smith to the world in 2023, plays that part. But there is also The Way I Love You and Preditah collaboration On My Mind, which feel more befitting of the dark Woodsies stage and the late-night billing. You could imagine it going off at Glastonbury’s various nightlife venues; hopefully I’ll hear some of this set, the pitch faders mixing up the arrangement at Block9 later.

At one point, the Maccabees had a generation of people in a chokehold. The London indie band were so prolific they can’t even remember exactly how many times they’ve played at Glastonbury before. But after 14 years and four albums, they announced their hiatus in 2016, with a farewell tour the following year.

Back in October, they teased their comeback; tonight’s show is one of their first public performances in eight years. It’s a high-energy, emotion-heavy experience on both sides of the barrier as they shuttle back through time via all of their best hits. At one point, the band acknowledge that they – and likely most of tonight’s audience – are now a decade older, so they ask them to jump along, but only if they want to. Of course, they do. The boisterous excitement from the crowd of thirtysomethings doesn’t waver, through the urgent, full-bodied end of their discography (Latchmere, X-Ray, Marks to Prove It, etc) to the more quaint moments, like the sweetheart ditty Toothpaste Kisses, which is met with a rapturous singalong.

As with any reunion, it’s a shamelessly indulgent trip down memory lane – to the band’s heyday, yes, but also to a significant time in British indie music more generally. Special guest Florence Welch joins them on stage for Love You Better and a rowdy performance of Dog Days Are Over. After closing with the punchy fan favourite Pelican, the band hug one another on stage. When they say that this show means the world to them, you can tell they mean it.

The special guests are coming out. With the Maccabees up on the Park – which I’m basically ignoring because life is too short – it’s Florence Welch. AJ Tracey has come back out to join Jorja Smith. And with Olivia Rodrigo, it’s Robert Smith from the Cure.

“He is perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England, he is a Glastonbury legend and a personal hero of mine,” she says. They launch into a sweet-natured and extra-melancholy duet of Friday I’m in Love, trading lines back and forth. Then they join together in a wonderful pairing for the climactic chorus, their voices so totally different and yet chiming together. “The dads chaperoning 13 year old daughters properly doing their nut near us hahahaha”, Alexis Petridis texts to me.

Robert sticks around for another one: Just Like Heaven, in which he takes the lead on verse one, with Olivia taking verse two – she’s more doleful and wary than the more romantic and caution-throwing Robert. The way they bring out new and different shades to these songs is one of the greatest treats of this year’s festival.

Here comes another set to almost certainly prove the comment-section, forum-dwelling whiners wrong. It’s become a national pasttime: complaining about Glasto headliners for not having enough songs, or not being starry enough, or not being the exact kind of person that armchair pundits like. Hopefully Olivia Rodrigo, a bolt of pure messy vitality, will shut them up. She kicks off with Obsessed, and while there are slight Swift-isms – despite their history – to the conspiratorial, mock-hysterical style of singing, Swift wouldn’t know how to work her away around grunge guitars like these.

Other stage
Wolf Alice’s habit of releasing albums between leisurely four-year gaps can mean they disappear off the map a little: each time they return they seem to have to re-establish their position as one of Britain’s biggest rock bands. So a scintilla of doubt creeps in walking over to the Other stage for their pre-headliner slot: will anyone be there? Has everyone forgotten who they are?

Thankfully the crowd at the Other stage is huge, stretching all the way to the extremely unwisely pitched and surely frequently trampled upon tents at the back of the field. People’s memories are longer than I feared and there’s an understanding between everyone here: that Wolf Alice are a proper, top tier rock band.

Much of that has to do with Ellie Rowsell. Once a quiet, slightly peripheral presence onstage, she who now counts among the most magnetic frontpeople going, capable of going from a beautiful, tender, acoustic Safe From Heartbreak to a throat lacerating Yuk Foo in an instant. She prowls along the stage with latent menace, at one point grabbing a water bottle she had been sipping from and tipping it over her head and shaking herself dry in one fluid motion.

Rowsell’s unpredictable presence suits the rest of Wolf Alice, one of the most versatile groups going. There are punk stompers, finger-picked ballads and, in the case of the outstanding Don’t Delete the Kisses, something approaching post rock. And a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams too, topped with Roswell’s impressive upper register.

Despite bassist Theo Ellis taking on the role of compere (with an obligatory “Glasto is a special place”) this is Roswell’s show and you can sense she knows it – as early as the third track she seemed to be gently sobbing, overcome by the magnitude of the moment. Welcome back to the top table – and come back sooner next time.

Pyramid stage
Everything that defines the folk singer-songwriter Noah Kahan is profoundly capital-A American. The nasal drawl that recalls open mic night folk by way of Jimmy Eat World; the lyrics, which are always painfully earnest, whether expounding on Kahan’s own faults, dishing out wife-guy platitudes, or empoweringly telling someone that “you’re gonna go far”; and, perhaps most of all, Kahan’s cheesy between-song sense of humour, which recalls the glib observational humour of 2010s American comedy. “I want to apologise, I thought it was pronounced the THAY-ms river,” he says at one point, apropos of nothing; at other times, he cracks about his “swamp ass” and yells “let’s get fuckin’ stinky!” before launching into his hit Stick Season.

Kahan has a truly exceptional band, capable of conjuring warm hoedowns or becoming muscular and a little edgy on the fantastic Homesick, a highlight of the otherwise samey set. It doesn’t help that Kahan brings out Laufey and Brandi Carlisle as special guests, given that they, too, suffer from an excess of earnestness and a deficit of banging tunes and great taste. The crowd, at the very least, seems to love it. It’s classic Pyramid singalong fare: uncomplicated, emotional and just fast enough to hold your attention.

The Park stage
Future Islands are one of those bands that have developed a sound so solid you know almost exactly what you’re getting every time: desperate love songs built around incandescent synths and raspy, sometimes guttural, growls. And if you’ve seen that iconic Letterman performance from 2014 – likely, considering its ubiquity at the time – you know to expect a real show from frontman Samuel T Herring too.

Sure enough, the Baltimore band deliver an impassioned performance. As Herring contemplates love, loss, insecurity, the passing of time, he bounds around the stage with acrobatic agility. He jumps, squats and even treats us to a few high kicks, before switching the tone and gyrating his body later on. The crowd whoop and wail in support. Herring’s voice is now even huskier than before, and when they soar into the timeless fan favourite Seasons (Waiting on You), much to the delight of the crowd, it reaches doom metal depths.

Future Islands’ most recent album, 2024’s People Who Aren’t There Anymore, is perhaps their most personal work yet, exploring Herring’s breakup with a long-term partner. His agony is palpable as they play tracks such as The Tower and Peach: he pounds his chest and stares into the middle distance. It’s a brilliant, moving performance which matches the sweet melancholy feeling that comes with the last day of a festival.

Woodsies stage
It was in those hallowed days of the mid-2010s when West London grime rapper AJ Tracey was being extolled as part of a new generation of artists who were representing the future sound of Britain. Tracey’s eponymous debut album was long-awaited, his cheeky rascal persona and arsenal of jokes, puns and tacky luxury imagery endearing him even to grime sceptics. After the release earlier this month of his third album, Don’t Die Before You’re Dead, now he’s no longer a “one to watch” but a staple of Black British music, you hope for a glance of how this figure has endured.

The Woodsies tent is packed out, and younger audience members, with their bucket hats and crossbody bags, are evidently ready to mosh and groove. I’m not sure that this set gave me much confidence in Tracey’s direction of travel though. There is a constant overreliance on the backing track, which overpowers him; it’s never a good sign when your Shazam app picks up the track within two seconds. At moments it’s unclear if he’s forgotten the lyrics or if he’s just phoning it in with a “yeah… yeah…” as he throws it over to the crowd to fill in the gaps.

This can be forgivable in a rap set if the delivery when he is on the mic is precise and thrilling enough. But it never really is. He says that he’s out of breath at points – contrast that to Skepta yesterday, a decade his elder, who had the stamina of a pentathlete and spat on the mic with clarity and precision.

He promises bangers and sure, they’re here – Ladbroke Grove, Thiago Silva, and Kiss and Tell get the crowd moving, and you’re reminded of the impressively cocky lyrics which made him popular: “I get the yattie love like a pop star / And when I’m in my ends I’m a block star”.

It’s still a perfectly enjoyable set - there is moshing a-plenty and he provides instructions to “watch out for the gyaldem” and only involve those who want to be involved. He has a clear gift for connecting with the crowd, who love him. Special guest Aitch brings some welcome hype and has incredible chemistry with Tracey (though at another point he sets up as though he’s bringing out someone popular like Dave or Headie One just for it to be Master Peace for new track, Red Wine, which is kind of grating). Anxious is pretty good and though you can’t hear him well over the backing track, he’s definitely trying his best during Seoul.

Less forgivable is the presence of Big Zuu, supposedly as his DJ (in reality more like a mascot), who only really serves to provide distracting ad libs and gesticulations. Come off the stage, man.

Woodsies, 5pm
One of the best things about Glastonbury is its counter-programming: don’t want to see Rod Stewart bringing on Mick Hucknall on the Pyramid? There’s always Turnstile, swirling up an almighty mosh pit on the Other stage instead. Or not one but two bands of masked oddballs in Goat (West Holts) and Snapped Ankles (Lonely Hearts). Or at Woodsies there’s Black Country New Road, whose artfully wonky chamber pop is about as far from Rod’s output as it’s possible to be.

The last time BCNR were here in 2023 it wasn’t long after a musical pivot brought about by the departure of original vocalist Isaac Wood. Two years later and it’s hard not to see this current incarnation as the definitive one, just as musically adventurous but more coherent and engaging, led by the gossamer vocals of Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery and May Kershaw.

Today’s set is largely trained on their recent album Forever Howlong, an offbeat folk-prog opus full of handbrake turn chord changes and audacious harmonising from Hyde, Ellery and Kershaw. On Mary their voices dovetail gorgeously, seemingly goading each other on to reach ever higher pitches. Hyde is the star of the show, with her swooping Kate Bush delivery and ability to swap between instruments with ease (there can’t be too many other bass recordists in attendance at this year’s festival).

Clad in a Palestine football kit, she makes sure the cause stays front and centre throughout, periodically starting chants of Free Palestine. “Please don’t stop talking about the people of Gaza. The worst thing you can do is stay silent”, she implores. “We’ve got to support people like Palestine Action, who are far from terrorists”.

The gravity of that message contrasts with the lightness and playfulness of BCNR’s performance. The vaudeville bounce of The Big Spin and Happy Birthday’s almost camp prog operatics underline that, for from their impenetrable art school band reputation, they’re actually a lot of fun. Fun enough to jettison Rod for, certainly.

Look, the Guardian loves Glastonbury. It’s the greatest music festival in the world. We’ve proudly been the media partner for years and years. But sometimes amid the nostalgia acts, landfill indie and earnest discussions about chiropody with someone in medieval sackcloth, you think: this needs a kick up the arse.

Here to administer said arse-kicking in the most constructive, uplifting manner imaginable is Baltimore hardcore punk band Turnstile, who are the genre’s definitive breakouts stars at the top of a buoyant scene also featuring the likes of Speed, Scowl, Drug Church and many more. Soaring opener Never Enough is paired with some footage of a gull picked out by the cameraman, and the fact I find this profoundly moving is testament to the fact we’re now 72 sleep-deprived hours into the festival. But Turnstile really do tap into a hopeful, universal energy, carrying us on the wings of love, positivity and fuckin’ gnarly vibes.

The riff of I Care, from their new album also called Never Enough, could have been written by Johnny Marr but it’s paired with hard-pounding, ultra-exact drumming from Daniel Fang – who is so buff he looks like an anatomical diagram in a medical textbook, and the cameraman lingers on his ripped abdominals considerable drumming technique for some time. Someone has brought along a rotary telephone to hold aloft for the line “waiting for the call”, which shows admirable dedication to the cause.

Some of the subsequent songs devolve a little into unfinessed chunks of pit fodder, but Fly Again has an almighty crunching groove and Seein’ Stars is fully danceable. The festival’s cutest moment happens when a child of about four, on a parent’s shoulders, is picked out on the big screen and does Baby Shark hands – soon half the crowd is Baby Sharking along.

The pleasure centres keep getting hit over and over: Look Out for Me’s raunchy cro-magnon riff, the moshpit explosion at the peak of Holiday. Throughout, frontman Brendan Yates commands the crowd with a holler that is so penetrating it must have thrown off whoever was playing two stages over. Glastonbury organisers could keep him on a stipend for the whole weekend to deliver public service announcements to reach the whole site: “STAY HYDRATED!”; “KEITH AND LISA, YOUR LOST SON IS WAITING BY THE DOSA STAND!”

After Deftones had to cancel yesterday, this released a lot of pent-up mosh energy, and is a reminder to Glasto organisers that there is huge appetite for acts like this even if they’re not quintessentially Glasto – people aren’t siloed off into individual genre tastes any more, and the super diverse crowd here is testament to Turnstile’s unifying power.

When Black Uhuru last performed at Glastonbury in 1989, the frontman was Junior Reid who had replaced singer Michael Rose as lead vocalist in the mid-1980s. Black Uhuru would undergo several reincarnations between then and now, evidenced by the fact that it’s Andrew Bees who swaggers on to the West Holts stage today as lead vocalist, alongside Kaye Starh and Derrick “Duckie” Simpson. Neither Bees nor Starh were present when Black Uhuru won the first ever Grammy award for best reggae album in 1985, but they put on a set which spans five decades; their personnel might have shifted, but their sound has remained constant. And they look impossibly cool. Something I’ve noticed about Glastonbury is that it’s the older international Black acts who are able to project the fresh, snazzy and authoritative aura that other acts, legacy or otherwise, could only dream of.

It’s a classic smooth roots reggae set from Black Uhuru, featuring the deep basslines, long guitar riffs and layered vocals that are integral to the genre, as well as the consistent messages of peace, love and freedom (Uhuru is “freedom” in Swahili). They open with I Love King Selassie, a definitive Rastafarian track honouring the religion’s deep roots in Ethiopia, which is considered the promised land or Zion.

The set could easily thrive on the most vintage instincts of reggae – indeed, Plastic Smile and What Is Life? follow this model – but there are twists. Covers of Ray Charles’s Hit the Road Jack and Damian Marley’s Welcome to Jamrock are welcome moments of fun and familiarity, but they are heightened by the band, which doesn’t stick only to the mellower grooves of reggae: there are skank rhythms, driving basslines, staccato guitar chords and crashing percussion, leading to echos and reverbs which boomerang through the crowd. It is intolerably hot as the sun has broken through the clouds, but that does nothing to slow the audience who happily two step, bogle and rock, moving with riddim (some more on beat than others).

The band’s messages around love and social justice are certainly foundational to Glastonbury. Over the weekend, there have been questions about Glastonbury’s complicated political loyalties and how it negotiates being a hub of left-wing ideology and intellectualism, as well as having such institutional status that it airs on the state broadcaster. So there’s something about a band returning after four decades with a pacifying vision of unity that feels like a return to order and a call for calm: on Solidarity they sing that “everybody wants the same thing don’t they?… They want to see the game on Saturday.” Well, I don’t watch football, but I’m certainly longing to live in less divided times, and Black Uhuru’s music is a manifesto for the kind of world you’d want to inhabit – maybe I’ll start to look for it in Addis Ababa.

There are few easier wins for acts at a music festival than smuggling a cover of a massive song into your set. No matter how shruggingly received the rest of your songs are, chuck in a quick burst of Love Shack and you’ll have the crowd eating out of your hand.

Royel Otis then have not one but two Exocet missiles in their arsenal as they arrive at the Park stage, having already released a pair of well-received covers (Murder on the Dancefloor and the Cranberries’ Linger). The Australian duo is rewarded here with a huge crowd stretching all the way to the hill at the back of the stage.

What’s more, that crowd isn’t just there for the covers: Royel Otis’s original songs go down a treat too. To my ear their frictionless indie chart pop seems more beige than hummus, but it’s undeniably well-designed to court audience singalongs. Sofa King, with its yelped chorus of “you’re so fucking gorgeous” gets a huge reaction here.

So do the covers, though it’s unclear why they have proved so popular. Murder on the Dancefloor is loyal to the original to the point of being unremarkable, and a stripped back Linger is pleasant but dull. No matter: both go down a storm with a crowd ready to cut loose on their final day at the festival.

A total generational schism here: while the boomers are doing that finger-pointing dance they do over at Rod Stewart, the Other stage has barely anyone over the age of 35, with a decent quotient of the festival’s gen Zs and millennials here to see 26-year-old south London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes, showcasing what are some seriously good new songs from forthcoming album Juniper.

Dressed in colourful floating panels of fabric, she is serenely chic stood out front of her eight-piece band. Like a few artists on this Glasto bill – Jorja Smith, Celeste – and others outside it such as Yazmin Lacey and Pip Millet, Crookes is part of a generation of young British women spreading their songcraft right across pop, jazz, hip-hop and beyond. Crookes even has a touch of slacker indie, playing a Mac DeMarco-ish guitar solo at one point, while Cut Like a Diamond has a UK garage shuffle and When You Were Mine has a reggaeton rhythm underpinning it.

Sometimes there are touches that sound a little overfamiliar: the tripping piano rhythm of Carmen is pretty reminiscent of the one in Frank Ocean’s Super Rich Kids, and while everyone is in raptures for Feet Don’t Fail Me Now, I find its sturdy chorus line to lack real originality and magic.

But for the most part, she strips pop back to first principles in such a confident and classic way, such as the simple waltzing guitar figure and timeless vocal line on Don’t Let Me Down. Even better is a new song, Forever, dedicated by Crookes here to the people of Palestine (keffiyehs are also twined around the band’s mic stands). It’s a heartbreak ballad with a melody floating down and around like a falling sycamore leaf: “Remember that we traded love and that’s forever,” she sings, but there’s a fascinating uncertainty. Is she going to carry fond memories forward, or be haunted by them, or perhaps a bit of both? Crookes gets right to the heart of the contradictions and complexities of love.

Her innately melancholic voice is a little reminiscent of Amy Winehouse, both timbrally and in how she seems to very slightly wince at hurtful words or difficult feelings. And like Winehouse, you can imagine a very broad church of fans developing for her.

Loving the party? Living poorly in east London? Being a drunken layabout? These are all ideas that I relate to deeply, and based on the crowd gathered at the Pyramid stage to watch The Libertines on Sunday afternoon, it’s safe to assume that a lot of the festival crowd can relate too, especially after a few days of drinking warm beer and shrivelling in the sun.

There’s a truly multi-generational spread present in the audience: kids are being held on shoulders, and there’s a large contingent of teens and twentysomethings dressed in appropriately 2000s-y garb – studded belts, draped scarves, too much jewellery, too-large hats.

There’s an absolutely massive volume of Libertines nostalgia online – there was a point during Tumblr’s peak when you couldn’t scroll for 10 minutes without seeing a photo of Pete Doherty hanging out at the Dolphin, or slipping through mud at Glastonbury with Kate Moss, a nostalgia machine since taken up by Instagram accounts like @cigarettes – and you can definitely see that playing out in the set, both in terms of the audience present and the setlist: the bulk of the material played comes from Up the Bracket and The Libertines, and they play a few songs from the band’s most recent album All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, but nothing from the band’s underrated 2015 album Anthems for Doomed Youth. No matter: the group are in fine form throughout the set, even chucking a few bars of Do Ya Think I’m Sexy? during The Good Old Days. For the indie sleaze contingent in the audience, this is its own kind of Legends Slot.

Hi all! Shaad here, taking over for Elle for the afternoon. In terms of liveblog shifts, I definitely got the short straw – I wish I could go down to the Pyramid Stage and get Rodded with everyone else – but it’s a sacrifice I don’t mind making for you lovely readers at home. Maggie May is, without a doubt, my song of the summer – as it is every summer – and I’m willing to bet I’ll be able to hear the crowd screaming along from The Guardian’s sad, dank portacabin.

There’s definitely been the rumblings of opposition to Sir Rod’s set throughout the weekend – even before he expressed support for Nigel Farage the other day, I saw stickers around that featured his face and read “Not My Legend”. But you wouldn’t know that based on the crowd at the Pyramid right now – it looks absolutely enormous.

When the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis interviewed Shaboozey last year, the Virginia artist wanted to double check whether his breakout hit A Bar Song (Tipsy) was also big in the UK. “Big” might have even been an understatement: it broke into the Top 10 of the UK singles chart and became ubiquitous online.

A year on, the appeal holds, and not just for said song. A packed-out crowd have gathered at Glasto’s second-biggest stage sing and wave along for almost the entirety of his set.

As the self-styled “boot-cut kid”, Shaboozey’s music bridges country and hip-hop, with a touch of pop. He sings about four-wheel drives, “pretty ladies” and “getting faded” on whiskey, sometimes in his deep, auto-tune-accentuated drawl and other times via quick, punchy bars.

Today he shows off that range. Highway, Amen and Good News are straight-up Americana ballads, while tracks such as Drink Don’t Need No Mix have a trap-like swing. Midway through, he even performs a rousing cover of Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door before, naturally, closing on the fan favourite A Bar Song (Tipsy).

It’s a pretty cheesy affair. Most of Shaboozey’s material fits solidly in the category of “stomp clap hey!”; bro-y craft-beer songs with earnest sentiments and big chanty crescendos that recall bands like the Lumineers and Mumford and Sons. Meanwhile, the screens on the side of the stage are sepia-toned, AI-rendered desert landscapes (he shouts out the agriculture in the UK, as any textbook country star should).

Admittedly, though, this is a question of taste and preference: thousands of people here are visibly overjoyed. And indeed, whether the music is actually good or not, Shaboozey’s schtick is perfect for a Sunday afternoon festival slot: anthemic and uplifting.

For South African cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe, the body is an instrument as much as the cello he has spent his life playing. He blends the throat singing and instinctive vocalisations of his Soweto heritage with a distinct approach to his cello, using it as a percussion instrument as much as a vehicle for deeply felt classical repertoire. Selaocoe’s Sunday afternoon set is a full-body barrage of enlivening sounds, rousing a bleary-eyed West Holts crowd to attention.

Backed by his 11-piece Bantu Ensemble, featuring an extensive strings section, vocalists and two drummers, Selaocoe launches into the guttural singing and vocal power of Qhawe, instructing his strings section into dynamic drops and builds while pacing across the stage.

There is plenty of audience participation as Selaocoe leads the crowd through a polyrhythmic clapping exercise and several singalongs, but it’s when he eventually turns back towards the Ensemble and finds an improvisational groove that the set truly excels. Moving through bowed romantic phrases to sharp bursts of throat singing, body percussion and string-plucking, Selaocoe’s technical ability mixed with the power of his emotive intent is joyous to behold.

Reaching a close with the balladry of Lerato, he leaves the audience in a moment of peaceful introspection. It’s a very Glastonbury Sunday moment – harem pant-wearing hungover groups lolling on the grass, both energised and also moved to buy a fresh pint and face the final day of festivities head on.

It is mercifully overcast at Worthy Farm today, without the heat that’s been oppressing festivalgoers so far this weekend. That makes for a pleasant setting at the Pyramid stage to see Mercury prize-nominated and Brit rising star award-winner Celeste. She is preparing to release her sophomore album Woman of Faces, nearly five years after her debut Not Your Muse instantly topped the UK album charts. She says that she did not expect it to take this long for her follow-up, but that“everything happens when it’s supposed to”.

With her brilliantly smoky, soulful vocals, Celeste invokes the likes of Billie Holiday, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, yet her distinctly English lilt provides a girl-next-door entry point to her magnificence. The emotion in her voice and in her songs is so overflowing that she repeatedly flaps her arms, as if shaking out the mood before it swallows her. On With the Show, a formidable, high-octane ballad, reaches big, orchestral moments of brilliance before Celeste transitions into more minimalist tracks with contemplative piano.

Celeste evidently draws from a well of pain for her music. Like her musical influences, she presents herself as a figure caught in that too-common collision between glamour and profound tragedy. It doesn’t require a deep mining of her personal life to imagine she has suffered trauma; her father died of lung cancer when she was 16, and in a recent Parliamentary session on misogyny in the music industry she spoke of feeling too afraid to report an undisclosed figure who she felt was a danger to her life. I think you can read this instinct towards self-protection in her stage styling too; she wears a padded jacket with a throat latch that looks claustrophobic, and her eye makeup is black, smeared and moody.

Celeste often leans into melancholy and uncertainty, singing on a new track: “It’s hard to say cause only time will tell… let’s keep it undecided until it reveals itself.” Mostly, though, heartbreak is her enduring theme. On Both Sides of the Moon, she sings of the pain of temperamental romances, and these references to romantic jeopardy resonate well with the audience.

But Celeste’s set is not just that classic mixture of escalating, big ballads and restrained, mournful quiet. She has worked with electronic producers such as Tieks and the late Avicii – that distinction frequently emergesand she’s not afraid to get weird with it. This Is Who I Am is a classic heavy ballad, and yet it features instances of idiosyncratic warping sounds. A new song, Could Be Machine, is a musing on technological singularity – will we all become robots? Could that insulate and free us from heartbreak, impulses and the burden of decision-making?

Who knows if that future will come; for now, Celeste provides a soundtrack for examining the wreckage that remains after devastation tears up our lives.

Sunday lunchtime at Glastonbury: heads are heavy, expressions are pained, gazes are set into the middle distance. Time to blow the cobwebs away, and what better way to do that than with some brain-dissolving prog-jazz from Geordie Greep and his band of musician savants? Makes a change from two paracetamol and a Berocca at least.

Greep’s new outfit manage to simultaneously be more accessible than his previous band Black Midi, dabbling in calypso, salsa and classic rock in place of Midi’s angular postpunk. They’re also far more loose and improvisational: this is a band that opens with a four-minute drum solo, without, seemingly, a set list to speak of. Familiar refrains and motifs wash in and out of focus; I’m not sure even the band know what they will play next. The Park stage audience are a forgiving, open-minded lot – but, it must be said, the general mood is of slight befuddlement.

Until, that is, the arrival of Holy, Holy, Greep’s lascivious Latin pop opus and the closet he has to a bop – it even has a vaguely hummable chorus. As its opening gatling gun riff rattles out, the dead rise to their feet to dance, or at least shuffle limply. Greep’s methods are unorthodox, but he seems to have, in his own special way, salved a lot of hangovers this lunchtime.

Last year, Nadine Shah told fans she wouldn’t play Glastonbury because it didn’t make financial sense to do so: “I wasn’t offered a televised stage, so I declined. It’s too expensive a hit for me to take otherwise.”

She’s now been wooed back, perhaps by the prospect of playing the enormous Other stage – and perhaps by the potential it affords to truly reach people.

Shah has long been a proponent of Palestinian freedom – her 2017 album Holiday Destination featured an image (taken by Christian Stephens) of a young boy standing stoically in the ruins of a war-damaged building in Gaza. She has consistently been an articulate interrogator of the hypocrisies and moral failings in the broader refugee crisis.

Here, she plays against a nightmarish AI-generated backdrop featuring Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump enjoying cocktails on a Gazan beach. It’s a nod to Trump’s own offensive simulacrum of the same scene, but here with a savage extra detail: Keir Starmer is serving the drinks.

Wearing a Palestine flag pin, she delivers a statement by Artists for Palestine UK in support of Palestine Action, the activist group that – to widespread disgust – was targeted by the UK government last week, with home secretary Yvette Cooper saying she intends to proscribe them as a terror organisation. Pending the outcome of a vote in the House of Commons, it would become a crime to voice support for them, as Shah does here.

It’s a rather more grown-up mode of political action than we saw from Kneecap on the West Holts stage yesterday, but no less impactful – particularly because the music that surrounds it is gigantically powerful, a buttress for her message. Shah’s singing voice gets more dramatic and distinctive by the year, evolving into Diamanda Galás-style gothic diva stylings

The way her voice shakes with vibrato actually reminds me of Beth Gibbons last night, but where Gibbons’s voice is wind-battered and arid, Shah’s is rich and deep-hued. There are dark Interpol-type one-note riffs, bending slightly as if warped by the building heat; Greatest Dancer trots slowly on a glam-rock groove, Shah’s body twisting as if rent by gunshots, but there’s a goofiness to her stagecraft that stops it from feeling too sombre.

“I just don’t like seeing people being killed, you know?” she tells the crowd before her speech. British music would be richer if more artists were as clear-sighted and frank.

As Pauline Black announces, 2025 marks 45 years of the Selecter, the West Midlands band who used their punky, ska-inspired rhythms to address the sociopolitical issues of their time: racism, sexism, mass unemployment and the rising far right.

Bounding on to the Pyramid stage, sharply dressed in her signature double-breasted suit and trilby combo, she promises to “fly the flags of two-tone”, and it feels as pertinent as ever.

The next 45 minutes is an energetic romp through the heyday classics, plus a selection of their newer material. Their jaunty, swinging rhythms, laced with winding sax and whistling organ chords, prove to be the perfect boost for the start of the day.

Black is an excellent performer, consistently charismatic and occasionally cheeky. “I would come all the way down there,” she says pointing to the barrier, which is a rite of passage for many Pyramid performers. “But I’ll probably fall ass over tits, so I’m not going to.”

She also addresses some persistent political problems – in a relatively BBC-friendly yet still compelling way. Introducing the 2017 track Frontline, she shouts out the underpaid NHS workers in the crowd (she used to be one), and encourages those around them to pay their respect — they might be needing their support for “all those knees and all those hips in the not-so-distant future”.

Later, she brings on a sound technician whose T-shirt bears a not-so-subtle anagram of “fuck Trump”. “Until the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned everywhere, there will be war,” she announces, before crashing into the also-recent War War War.

In both song and conversation, Black’s punchy, echo-laden voice booms across the field. Only when she reaches for the punky falsetto in On My Radio does it falter (who can blame her, she’s 71), so she invites the crowd to help her deliver the high notes. Maybe it’s the day-four fatigue, but the moment is so heartwarming it brings a tear to my eye. Even after almost five decades, the spirit of two-tone lives on.

Good morning and welcome to the last day – of the Glastonbury live blog and, of course, the festival. I’ve just been out at the Other stage, catching a bit of Louis Dunford with my pal Chris and all the other Arsenal fans on site. North London Forever might have got the first arm-sway of the day going – personally, I’m saving my energy for Rod Stewart’s Sailing …

We’ve got lots to look forward to, and our reviewers are posted in the field, primed to deliver – thanks for following along.