American indie rock kings The Killers rounded off the second day of the Glastonbury festival with a storming one-and-a-half hour set that left the main stage audience cheering for more.
”Glastonbury, we are all yours!” front man Brandon Flowers in gold lamé shouted as the Las Vegas group lit up the art and music festival where heavy rain ensured the traditional mud bath.
Against a pyrotechnic display The Killers on Saturday played some of their biggest hits, like All These Things That I’ve Done and Smile Like You Mean It as well as their version of the 1960s classic Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.
With attendance at a record, persistent downpours have turned farmer and festival organiser Michael Eavis’s pastures into a sea of churned dirt, but festival goers were unperturbed and frolicked in the mud in rubber Wellington boots and bright ponchos.
”It’s nothing like 2005 when camping areas flooded,” said one festival organiser, referring to the washout year after which Eavis installed an elaborate drainage system. ”We’re hoping this is the last day of heavy rain.”
Almost 180 000 people are thought to have headed to Eavis’s farm to revel in the music, dance, poetry, politics and alternative therapies at the festival that started in the 1970s as a hippy haven for music and flower power in the rural hills of south-=west England.
As well as The Killers, British singer Lilly Allen was a highlight of Saturday’s line-up, with rock legends Iggy and the Stooges, music inspiration Paul Weller, The Guillemots and the Klaxons.
An afternoon gig by indie rock band The Bees left the crowd buzzing, with tracks including, appropriately, ”Wash in the Rain” with the audience dancing as the heavens opened. Some daubed their faces with mud like war paint.
Babyshambles
Bad boy rocker Pete Doherty and his band Babyshambles, dressed as 1930s gangsters, took advantage of a brief appearance of the sun and played a popular set, with Doherty’s partner supermodel Kate Moss joining in on backing vocals.
Dirty Pretty Things, featuring Doherty’s former Libertines band mate Carl Barat, made their debut Glastonbury performance to riotous applause singing tracks including Bang Bang You’re Dead and Gin and Milk. Barat told the saturated afternoon crowd: ”This is for everyone who stayed up or got up to see us.”
Scottish rockers Biffy Clyro belted out favourites Saturday Spiderhouse and Living is a Problem Because Everyone Dies.
During the weekend, non-musical activities abounded.
If graffiti artist Banksy’s mock Stonehenge made of mobile toilets, or aromatherapy treatments failed to attract, Mutoid Waste Company offered Trash City ”an intergalactic red-light district where space pirates, bootleggers, illegal aliens and all the scum of the universe can come to party the night away”.
”The Big Kiss” aimed to break the Guinness World Record for mass kissing, trying to encourage 45,000 couples to kiss at the same time, while organisers hoped to get 100,000 festival goers to sign up to the ”I Count” campaign against climate change.
More than 1 200 people suffered sprains and bruises, mostly after losing their balance in the mud, with some needing hospital treatment. There were a few dozen arrests, mainly for drugs. One man was in critical condition after a suspected overdose. – Reuters