Glastonbury Festival, Sunday review — from Mdou Moctar’s sizzling desert rock to SZA’s damp squib

It was another mercifully dry day at Glastonbury, but it wasn’t Mdou Moctar’s idea of summer. In Niger, he told the Park stage audience, glancing dubiously at the grey clouds above, the Somerset summer would qualify as winter. Very well: his electric guitar would have to do the scorching.

Moctar (real name Mahamadou Souleymane) is nicknamed the “Hendrix of the Sahara”. He is a member of the semi-nomadic Tuareg people, known for a type of guitar music called desert blues. Jimi Hendrix is an influence, transmitted via cassette tapes that first circulated in Tuareg refugee camps in Libya in the 1970s. Like him, Moctar plays left-handed and favours a Fender Stratocaster.

At the Park stage, he led the three members of his band in a fierce set of psychedelic rock, sung in the Tuareg language Tamashek. The rhythms drove forward hard, the drummer playing fast triplets. Meanwhile, Moctar used his long fingers, without a pick, to conjure incendiary riffs and solos. At one point, he waved the digits of his right hand in the air while his left hand produced squealing waves of sound on the neck of the instrument, like a magician from the Cabaret field. 

Platitudes abound at Glastonbury, uttered by beaming performers shilling for cheers with tributes to beautiful people in a special place, and so on. But I didn’t expect to hear one from Kim Gordon; and nor perhaps did she, judging from the embarrassed-sounding laugh she gave as she muttered, “I hope you’re all having a great Glastonbury experience.”

Gordon came to fame in the anti-Glastonbury milieu of New York’s noise-rock scene of the 1980s, a hard-boiled zone of downtown experimentalism where she was a member of Sonic Youth. Her set in the Woodsies tent, with a backing trio, was topped and tailed by the same track, “Bye Bye”, a satirically laconic account of holiday packing set to a heavy industrial beat. But her coolly impassive demeanour gave way to a wilder style during the show, as with the cry she unleashed at one point while leaning back, microphone in hand. Glastonbury can do that to people.

My highlight of the day was Nia Archives’ early evening appearance at the West Holts stage. Real name Dehaney Nia Lishahn Hunt, the London-based producer and DJ stood at her decks high up on a shiny bulbous structure. Old-school jungle, rave and drum-and-bass were played in the first part of her set. Then she descended to the front of the stage to sing songs from her fine debut album, Silence Is Loud. Lightly conversational vocals were backed by a fast patter of beats, a winning contrast. The bass was turned back up for a storming last section of junglist revivalism, with Nia back up at her decks, hollering into her mic.

The night’s main headliner was SZA, closing the Pyramid stage after Coldplay and Dua Lipa the previous nights. The American singer, aka Solána Rowe, is among the biggest names in pop: she was fresh from playing an outdoor gig for 60,000 in London the night before. Some had questioned the suitability of her deceptively breezy R&B songs for a Glastonbury headline show. Such concerns actually provide the rationale for booking her. The festival risks irrelevance if it sticks to the tried and tested.

But her show didn’t really take off. The problem wasn’t with the songs, mostly drawn from her 2017 album, Ctrl, and its 2022 follow-up, SOS. Rearranged for a live band, they had more of an old-fashioned soul and R&B feel than the recorded versions. Although initially hampered by a dodgy-sounding microphone, SZA sang well too, in a finely ornamented rather than splashy way. 

There were costume changes, backing dancers and an elaborate stage set that variously made the Pyramid stage resemble a cave, a futuristic world and a forest. At times, the props fitted the music, as when she brandished two swords before the song “Kill Bill”, a reference to the Quentin Tarantino film of the same name. But other aspects of the staging appeared random.

It also suffered from a static quality. SZA’s habit of delivering songs while seated or standing in one place were understandable from the point of view of concentrating on singing. But the lack of motion gave the show the park-and-bark look of old-school opera. Professing to be nervous, she said almost nothing between songs, which made her seem increasingly remote. She was a bold choice of headliner — but this was a damp squib of a show.

glastonburyfestivals.co.uk