Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury 2025 review — stunning set steals the weekend
'I don't think I've ever seen so many people in life,' shrieks Olivia Rodrigo as the last Glastonbury headline slot for two years, before next year's fallow year, tears into the fastest start possible with fireworks, tossed guitars, shredding, some unprecedented writhing visuals through a pane of glass — encompassing everything about why so many had a nagging suspicion that Rodrigo would steal the weekend.
By the third song, Vampire, a rousing, high camp power ballad about 'blood suckers, fame fuckers', frankly she could have sold coals to Newcastle. This festival likes acts who think this place is special and in fairness, it looks like Rodrigo is having the best night of her life.
'This is a dream come true' she says, right on cue. 'This is the best festival in the world.' She also, she says, loves England — pints at noon, sweets from M&S, a costume change into some sparkling Union Jack hot pants. Rarely has a US superstar got us so spot on. And the gig is simply relentless — Driver's License was the song that broke her, during Covid, doing 80 million streams in seven days, and that comes straight after Vampire. The crowd — all dancing, some FaceTiming friends at home — breathe it in and sing it back.
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Can she keep it up? Of course she can! Despite her second album, Guts, being released two years with a lengthy tour slog following, Rodrigo still plays the songs like she has just come up with them. That is stardom, honed with a Disney Channel schooling, always taking your moment. What she may lack in hits compared with, say, last night's headliner Neil Young with his 786 albums, she more than makes for with sheer confident personality — and she's only 22.
Is playing Vampire and Driver's License so early a risk for a woman with only two albums? Turns out it's not, and that it's fine to top load a festival set when you have the devoted fans Rodrigo does, crying/singing/hugging every bar in the way pop fandom should be — as in, an obsession. And, also, Rodrigo has plans.
One of which is her terrific mega hit about terrible decisions, Bad Idea Right?. Her lyrics speak frankly, wittily to young women in a way that barely existed 30 years ago, while her music wouldn't sound out of place on the sort Guitar Anthems CD people used to buy at petrol stations. This blend is why she works here. Bad Idea Right? is a blast — Rodrigo thinks she possibly shouldn't sleep with that man but, whoops, there we go again, set to the pomp and jaunt of Blur at their liveliest, with some Jack White wig out squeals. It's a hell of a song — a rare cross-generational song in a era of increasingly polarised listening habits. The crowd is varied, from primary school kids to people on their umpteenth trip to the farm. She tells the crowd she saw Pulp the day before and this makes sense — Jarvis Cocker's conversations, witty lyrics are a template for the best of Rodrigo.
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Then, the guest. This week, on the tour, Rodrigo had already brought out Ed Sheeran in London and covered Fontaines DC. Tonight? To show just how firmly her finger is on the pulse of his place, Rodrigo brings on the Cure's Robert Smith. You can't focus group a choice like that — it's just ideal, as Smith and Rodrigo cover Friday I'm In Love and Just Like Heaven and a field unites.
For her finale, in a gig so steeped in peaks it sort of all feels like a finale, Rodrigo asks the field to scream — and they really do — and then releases an awful lot of balloons, to go with her earlier jets of fire, before her raucous pop punk first album hit Good 4 U. This is a template for how to do this sort of show — she will be back. As we will, in 2027.★★★★★
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