EXCLUSIVE Amount Charli XCX was paid to perform at Glastonbury is revealed - after fans blasted 'autotuned' set and 'horrendous' dancing
The singer, who had the headline slot at The Other Stage last Saturday night, drew a crowd of thousands of people and the stage had to be closed.
According to an industry insider, Charli XCX is one of the few acts to make money from the Somerset Festival while others are paid very little, or with free tickets.
The confirmation of Charli's enormous paycheck comes after fans criticised the singer for her use of autotune throughout her set.
One wrote online: 'This Glastonbury set by Charli XCX is one of the worst things I've ever seen in my life.
'Barely singing, autotune in the rare moments she does sing a bit and horrendous dancing. Be fuming if you spent ages getting into that crowd only to see that.'
A row between the popstar and her critics then erupted with Charli responding to the vitriol on social media.
'Really enjoying these boomer vibe comments on my Glastonbury performance. It's super fascinating to me,' she wrote.
'Like the idea that singing with deliberate autotune makes you a fraud or that not having a traditional band suddenly means you must not be a 'real artist' is like, the most boring take ever. yawn sorry just fell asleep xx
'But to be honest… I enjoy the discourse. [In my opinion] the best art is divisive and confrontational and often evolves into truly interesting culture rather than being like kind of ok, easily understood and sort of forgettable.'
The singer has often been known to use pitch correction and autotune in her music and declared on Saturday Night Live that it 'makes everything sound better'.
The star also admitted on the Tape Notes Podcast last year that she constantly uses autotune while performing.
She said: '[In my] early work, I could sing in tune, but now I think I've gotten so lazy because I sing with autotune all the time.
'I never [go], 'I'm not singing with autotune'. Unless I'm doing karaoke, which I actively don't do, for this reason. I'm pretty out [of pitch] because my ear is so used to leaning in.'
Meanwhile, fellow headliner Rod Stewart has said he is making a loss to play at Worthy Farm.
The 80-year-old singer told the Radio Times that he was paid £120,000 and spent £300,000 to put on his show.
During Charli's slot, the Scissors Sisters were performing on the Woodsies stage - and the also venue had to be closed as there were too many people there.
Charli XCX rose to fame with the viral album Brat which was released in 2024 and sparked a cultural phenomenon.
US presidential candidate Kamala Harris referenced the album in her election campaign in 2024 against Donald Trump.
It won the singer two Grammys including Best Dance/Electronic Album and the BRIT award for British Album of the Year in 2025.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
an hour ago
- Times
The brothers from Bolton who've made £120m dressing pop stars
I know I have arrived at the right industrial estate near Bolton when I clock the cars. They are parked next to each other, a humdinger of a Roller and an even larger Bentley, with matching his 'n' his personalised number plates. The letters on those plates make it clear that the cars belong to the Heaton brothers, Mike and George, who founded their clothing brand Represent 14 years ago in their parents' old garden shed a few minutes up the road. The shed (and house) where it all began is now owned by a 'massive Represent fan', George says. 'I think he hopes that if his sons work in that shed they will have the same luck we did.' Mike is now 34, George is now 32 and Represent is now a phenomenon. You may not have heard of it but every teenage and twentysomething male I have spoken to has. In May the pair appeared at No 31 in The Sunday Times's 40 Under 40 Rich List with a combined fortune of £122 million. Celebrity fans include Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa and Kim Kardashian, plus a gentleman who goes by the name of Bad Bunny. The brand only just missed its stated ambition of a £100 million turnover in the last financial year by a squeak. They are fine with that, they claim. 'It was a very lofty ambition,' George says. 'We pushed and we pushed. Our aim now is to get to £250 million in the next three to five years.' Mike nods. 'If we can crack America the market's seven times the size of the UK.' Represent opened boutiques in Los Angeles and Manchester (in that order) last year, and will open in London on July 12. A sweatshirt starts at £130, though the more expensive items — many of which feature the kind of line drawings Mike was doing while studying graphic design at the University of Salford when the pair decided to launch their own brand — can be more pricey. Still, theirs is, George insists, 'An attainable price point. Not cheap, but not too expensive for the everyday lad.' Or indeed lass. They branched out into womenswear in February. As you can probably tell, George is the Heaton who has more to say for himself. Yet even he — for someone whose look-at-me Los Angeles house and car collection, plus even more look-at-me musculature, is all over Instagram — is surprisingly softly spoken. Neither of them come across as a C-suite cliché. 'That's not for us,' George says. 'We have always been like this. I think it would be exhausting to try to be any other way.' Mike — who seems verging on shy — tells me he doesn't use his upstairs office much 'as I don't like to have to make people come up here'. Theirs is an unusual combination of something that is akin to reticence with so much inner fire you can almost smell it. They both use the word 'grafting' several times during our conversation. The Heatons may be the second-most famous brothers to have come out of Greater Manchester but they couldn't be more different from the first, those ever-sparring Gallaghers. With whom, as it so happens, Represent is collaborating, producing merchandise for this summer's Oasis reunion. But I still have to ask: who is Noel and who is Liam in their relationship? Their answer says it all. Mike: 'Ha! That's a good question.' George: 'Even though Liam was the frontman, I think Noel was more of the …' Mike: '… He was the brains, weren't he?' George: 'Yeah, yeah.' Mike: 'Maybe I am Noel and you are Liam!' George: 'I'll have either!' They both chortle. There's clearly no power struggle here. Represent sells a slightly Californian take on streetwear that was first inspired by the Heatons' teenage love of skateboarding and vintage band T-shirts. Growing up in the Noughties, they were anomalies in their area with their long hair, baggy jeans and the wooden skate ramp their dad — who ran a business converting minibuses for disabled users and also chauffeured vintage Rolls-Royces at weddings — built for them in the back garden. 'We always looked to the States,' Mike says. 'We just didn't fit in around here,' George says. 'We started out simply creating clothes that we wanted to wear.' • Stars out for Max Mara show that offers light touch in the heat 'You were either a mosher or a chav,' Mike says. A mosher? 'You had long hair and skated, and were maybe a bit greasy and a bit of a weirdo.' Their brand's broad appeal today tracks a wider shift: the transformation of skateboarding — and the sartorial bagginess, not to mention grunginess, that went with it — from mosher to mainstream, from counterculture to what dads do with their daughters at the weekend. Just one of the things Represent does well is create faux vintage gear that somehow looks just the right amount of knackered and also as if it smells of fabric softener. Today both brothers are sporting faded black sweatshirts that are — if you are the sort of person who is into faded black sweatshirts, and lots of people are — nothing less than perfect. In this their success tracks a second cultural shift. Not only has mere 'second-hand' become 'vintage', but 'vintage' — the right sort of vintage — is now such a status symbol as to be faked. Mike tells me they think nothing of spending $2,000 on an original tee from one of Los Angeles' bouji vintage stores to use as inspiration. What on earth makes a second-hand T-shirt worth that much money? 'The way it's been worn, the distressing,' he says. • Brad's midlife crisis wardrobe 'We're the best in the world at creating new versions of vintage products,' George says. 'I've never come across another brand that's been able to replicate a vintage tee like we do.' Business really started to fly when the brothers started sharing their lives on social media. 'It took us three years to put one YouTube video out,' George says with a laugh. 'Just because, like, filming yourself, you think, 'What will other other people perceive me as? Am I cool enough to match how cool the brand is?' But people just started loving it and it became a thing and, yeah, we like to do it.' What's become important to them, George continues, is 'that we kind of position ourselves as motivational rather than just, you know, like a rapper would. They just show off everything they do and buy. Whereas our position is, we get up, we train, we work, we sleep.' • 40 richest people under 40 in the UK Not that they are, as discussed, entirely without the rapper accoutrements. They are both wearing a gold and diamond Rolex the size of a sundial today, for example, though they tell me they were inherited from their father and grandfather respectively. (There's clearly more money in minibuses than one might think.) They also concede, laughing, that the further back one delves into their social media, the more rapper it gets — the more 'chunky chains' there are, for example. 'Mike was wearing a chain once and went into the sun and then the pattern was burnt into his neck,' George says. 'Yeah,' Mike says with a chuckle, delighted. 'Yeah.' Given how relentlessly on-brand their social media profiles are, what do they have in their lives that isn't? 'I always wanted an English bull terrier,' George says, 'and we've always used them in shoots. I always had this vision of driving around LA in a vintage Rolls with the top down and an English bull terrier hanging out. Instead I ended up with a goldendoodle.' He does, needless to say, have the vintage Rolls over in LA, where he now lives for much of the year, as well as the new one in the car park outside. There is also a Range Rover in California 'for everyday'. Aside from the clothes themselves, it's the Heatons' take on 21st bro-dom that is a big part of their appeal. What goes down in the weights room seems to have become more important than what goes down at the skate park in the world of Represent, which now includes a fitness-focused line called 247. At their HQ the gym takes up almost as much space as the office. When I visit mid-afternoon there are just a couple of people in there — one of them Mike's girlfriend — pumping impressive amounts of iron. They run classes every morning, the women's at 6am, the men's at 7am, as well as at lunchtime. It seems a bit unfair that the women have to get up earlier if they want to do the morning class, I say. 'It was the result of a vote,' George says. 'The women wanted more time to get ready after.' George is the most impressive in the gym, volunteers the ever-generous Mike. 'He has got the best bench press in the office.' Mike's forte is apparently 'the GHD'. The GHD? 'The glutes and hamstring developer. Though I did manage to get myself a hernia off it.' So more of a glutes and hernia developer, then? They guffaw. • We surfed the West Coast wave when our designs hit the streets George moved to Los Angeles just before they opened their store there, the better to, as he puts it, 'bring people on the journey with us, the Brit in LA'. This has become an established path among youth-targeting British brands. Conna Walker of the bodycon-fuelled House of CB is another thirtysomething founder who spends part of her year there and makes sure to post regularly to tell us about it. It seems remarkable that Represent, a business that had its foundations in selling a particular take on the American dream — a grungy, long-haired take — to the British, should now be selling it back to America. Forget coals to Newcastle, think hoodies to West Hollywood. But what's even more remarkable is that two brothers with no backers and no connections have gained such ground in an arena that should theoretically be locked down by the vast marketing spends and real estate — whether concrete or digital — of established brands such as Nike and Adidas. Not that Represent is entirely anomalous. Castore, founded by two more brothers, Tom and Phil Beahon, aged 35 and 32 respectively, from just down the road in Liverpool, are at No 14 on the 40 Under 40 rich list, with a combined fortune of £350 million. Social media has been one enabler but so too has the fact that Represent — and the two men behind it — seems real, authentic and at times downright quirky, what with those tattoo-adjacent graphics of Mike's, plus that love they inherited from their father of all things Rolls. This manifests not only in George's car collection (not to mention, he tells me, in his tattoo collection) but also in one of their most popular logos. 'It's called Represent Owners' Club,' Mike says, 'and it was inspired by the Rolls-Royce owners' club. Our dad would get the magazine when we were growing up. It made you feel a part of something.' 'We have used a lot of what Rolls does as inspiration,' George says. 'The way they built that brand, we're obsessed. How they talk about the cars is how we talk about the clothes.' Next stop £250 million. I'd put money on it.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Paul Simon, 83, reveals major health update after 'chronic and intense pain'
Legendary singer Paul Simon offered a major health update on Thursday, just days after he canceled several concerts due to his condition. The 83-year-old singer revealed last week that he had to cancel two performances in Philadelphia, due to, ' chronic and intense back pain.' He shared a new update through a statement on his Instagram page, where he revealed the surgery he underwent was successful. 'As previously reported, Paul Simon underwent a surgical procedure this week to alleviate severe back pain that he has been experiencing for some time,' the statement began. 'Thanks to a great team of doctors, the surgery went well, as expected,' the statement added, before revealing he'll need more rest. 'However, it has become clear that he will need one additional day of rest and recuperation to ensure he is able to perform at the top of his ability in Long Beach,' the statement continued. 'As previously reported, Paul Simon underwent a surgical procedure this week to alleviate severe back pain that he has been experiencing for some time,' the statement began. 'Therefore, out of an abundance of caution, we have made the decision to move the previously scheduled show on Monday, July 7 at the The Terrace Theater in Long Beach, to Tuesday, July 8,' the statement added. 'We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, but Paul is looking forward to seeing everyone in Long Beach on Tuesday,' the singer's team continued. The statement added that all tickets purchased for Monday will be honored for the Tuesday show. 'For those unable to revise their plans, refunds are available at point of purchase,' the statement concluded. Last week, Simon shared a similar statement, just hours before his performance in Philadelphia. 'Paul has been struggling with chronic and intense back pain,' the statement read. 'Today it became unmanageable and demands immediate attention. Unfortunately, we have to cancel these shows at this time, as we don't have the ability to reschedule them,' the statement continued. 'However, we are hopeful after this minor surgical procedure which has been scheduled in the next few days, Paul will be able to complete the tour as well as look into returning to make up these dates,' the statement explained. 'We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, but Paul is looking forward to seeing everyone in Long Beach on Tuesday,' the singer's team continued. 'In the meantime, please go to your point of purchase or local ticket provider for a full refund.' Simon performed at the venue on Thursday night—the first of what was meant to be a three-show run in Philadelphia as part of his A Quiet Celebration Tour. His next scheduled performance is set for July 7 at the Terrace Theater in the Long Beach Performing Arts Center in Long Beach, California. Simon announced the tour in February, marking his return to the stage after retiring from touring in 2018 due to hearing loss. The tour has been hitting smaller, intimate venues including Austin's Bass Concert Hall, Denver's Paramount Theatre and New York City's Beacon Theater in mini-residencies. After his stop in Long Beach, Simon is scheduled to continue the tour with stops in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver and Seattle, before wrapping in early August.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Food lovers, this one's for you! Snap up an exclusive 40% saving on National Geographic Traveller (UK) Food Festival tickets
Tired of scrolling past yet another soggy salad on your feed? Swap the doomscroll for a forkful of inspiration at this summer's National Geographic Traveller (UK) Food Festival, returning to London with its biggest line-up yet. And thanks to MailOnline's exclusive flash sale, you can taste the world for less — but only if you move fast. Save 40% — how to claim From 8am on Monday 7 July until 11.59pm on Wednesday 9 July, MailOnline readers can save 40% on general admission tickets. Simply head to the festival booking page and enter the code that matches your preferred day at checkout: Day: Full price Flash-sale code Your price* Saturday 19 July £25 NGTSAT40 £15 Sunday 20 July £25 NGTSUN40 £15 *Discount applies to standard adult admission only. Offer strictly available during the flash sale window. Tickets are limited and once they're gone, they're gone — so set a reminder, gather your fellow food lovers and lock in those savings before they're gone. Star chefs you won't want to miss The 2025 festival welcomes an impressive roster of culinary talents: • Yotam Ottolenghi makes his long-awaited festival debut on the Main Stage, promising vibrant Mediterranean flavours and plenty of crowd-pleasing tips. • Andi Oliver, TV presenter and champion of Caribbean cuisine, returns for her fourth appearance to headline Sunday's programme. Expect punchy spices, infectious energy and stories that will have you booking your next island escape. • Asma Khan, renowned for her authentic Indian cuisine and storytelling through food, showcases recipes from her newest cookbook, Monsoon. • Karan Gokani, founder of Hoppers, brings his unique blend of South Asian flavours inspired by India and Sri Lanka. • José Pizarro, the king of Spanish food in the UK, shares his passion for Iberian cuisine and storytelling. • Clodagh McKenna, Irish chef and TV favourite, brings seasonal recipes to life. • Dina Macki, cookbook author and chef, celebrates Omani flavours with dishes like salmon, tamarind and aubergine curry. • Jeremy Pang, wok master and crowd favourite from the School of Wok, offers a taste of Hong Kong with dishes like wonton braised noodles and dry-fried green beans with pork mince. They'll be joined by a who's who of global gastronomy, including cookbook authors, wine experts and travel insiders. More than a tasting ticket Two flavour-packed days at the Business Design Centre will bring you: • Live demos: Bag a front row seat as chefs plate up signature dishes, share trade secrets and take audience questions. • Tasting workshops: Hone your palate at expert-led sessions covering everything from British farmhouse cheese to Georgian qvevri wines and Caribbean cocktails. • Speakers' Corner: Hear food writers, photographers and adventurers unpack the culture behind each bite. • Marketplace & street food: Stock up on artisan goodies and graze your way around the globe without leaving N1. • Photo clinics & masterclasses: Learn to capture edible works of art (before devouring them). Whether you're a seasoned supper-clubber, budding chef or just love a good free sample, there's something to satisfy every appetite. Plan your visit • Venue: Business Design Centre, 52 Upper St, Islington — just a five-minute walk from Angel Tube. • Getting there: Victoria, Northern and Overground lines are all nearby; there are plenty of bus routes and cycle racks. • Accessibility: Step-free access throughout; companion tickets available on request. Why book now? Secure your slot during the 48-hour 40% discount window and you'll: • Save £10 on every ticket. • Beat the inevitable last-minute sell-out. • Free up cash for an extra session — truffle-tasting, anyone? How to redeem • Visit the official ticket portal (link below). • Enter NGTSAT40 or NGTSUN60 in the Promo Code box. • Choose General Admission for your chosen day. • Check out and start counting down the days until your food adventure. Book tickets here (codes valid 7-9 July only). MailOnline may earn commission on sales generated from this article, but this never influences our editorial independence. Prices and availability are correct at time of publication. Flash-sale discount applies to adult general-admission tickets purchased between 08:00 BST on 7 July 2025 and 23:59 BST on 9 July 2025. Tickets are sold subject to the festival's terms and conditions. For full FAQs, visit the National Geographic Traveller (UK) Food Festival website. Bags packed? Appetite primed? With a 40% saving, the hardest part will be waiting until the gates open on 19 July. See you at the Main Stage!
