Not only is Billy Isle, as he wants to point out, the youngest headliner in Glastonbury history, she is the first mainstream pop star – as the pop star that teenage girls shout about – the title of Glastonbury. A few years ago, announcing an artist like the one filling the main Friday night on the Pyramid stage would probably have caused some controversy. Some drummer would file a petition for this. But in 2022, the appearance of Billy Ailish’s name at the top of the bill passed without comment.
An interesting question is whether this is proof that Glastonbury’s audience is younger, or that Glastonbury is becoming more pop in the artists he ranks, or that Ailish is considered a slightly different line from her peers. Watching her bounce from the industrial electro pop of You Should See Me in a Crown, to the kitschy styles in Billie’s Bossanova salon, to the Beatles-y Getting Older, to the influences of Dr Dre All the Good Girls Goto Hell, one is struck by the feeling that she is certainly more musically eclectic than most of her peers. And if you’re left with the impression that festivals aren’t necessarily her natural habitat – “you guys are corpses, with your tents and shit,” she thinks at one point – from the moment she appears, she looks at home.
While many of the artists who appear on the Pyramid stage on Friday seem to admire the size of the crowd they have attracted and the loudness of their response – at one point Sam Fender seems so stunned by the moment he can starts crying – Ailish looks like everything else, but no. There is something authoritative in her performance: everything feels attractively confident. The set is essentially an abridged version of the show she’s been touring the arenas in recent months, and comes complete with the show’s main elements in the pop arena, including dividing the audience and making them happy in turn, lots of empowerment talks and self-love, and videos of the artist as a toddler playing on the big screens. But he loses nothing in translation of a festival atmosphere. If she asks the audience to squat and jump, they are happy to commit. She’s heavy on slow-moving ballads, which is theoretically risky, but she never seems to lose the crowd.
Photo: David Levon / The Guardian
Maybe it’s because Ailish is an extremely engaging performer. Besides, she seems to be having a lot of fun, as opposed to her bloated gothic image and the many songs on her latest album, Happily Ever After, which made you a teenage pop sensation when you were just out of your teens, sounding pretty miserable. business. Her enthusiasm is contagious, her biggest hits – Burya Friend, Bad Guy – have a huge bass, and the ballad Your Power, introduced by mentioning the rollover of Roe Vs Wade as a “dark day for women”, has an enchanting, eerie fragility. While she finished with the slow-moving title track of Happier Than Ever – his furiously angry crescendo, given an extra layer of theatricality by the huge amount of pyrotechnics exploding above the stage – her performance seemed not just a musical change for Glastonbury, but a triumph.
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