Corbyn's Glastonbury performance left the crowd wanting more
Jeremy’s debut on the Pyramid Stage featured classics from the 1980s – but the crowd roared with enthusiasm at his new material
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Your support makes all the difference.Jeremy Corbyn’s appearance at Glastonbury enthralled his fans, who have long awaited a chance to glimpse their favourite act in person. After weeks of holding small events across the country, he addressed a huge crowd on the Pyramid Stage – all eager to hear his classic numbers, mixed with some newer material from his latest album, For the Many, Not the Few.
It was a short set, in which he linked his performances with his catchphrase, “Do you know what?” He opened with his 2015 hit “The commentariat and the elites got it wrong”, followed this up with, “Brought a lot of people back into politics”, and then threw in one of his more recent improvised numbers, “The politics that got out of the box isn’t going back in any box”.
Purists might think it still needs a bit of work, but the crowd in the sunny field cheered nonetheless.
He performed a cover of “Build bridges not walls”, from one of America’s greatest female solo acts, Hillary Clinton, and in some of the less familiar tunes, such as “Peace is possible”, he paid tribute to one of his favourite artists, John Lennon.
Corbyn’s stage persona came across well: the old man alternately angry on behalf of the misunderstood youth – “fed up with being denigrated and told you don’t matter” – and filled with the loving zen of human kindness: “we should adopt the maxim that we can learn from everyone we meet in life”.
He came on stage with a sheaf of lyrics in his hand, but wisely decided to ad lib most of the time. Two-thirds of the way through the set he made the common mistake of artists not used to playing the biggest venues, and was in danger of becoming too serious. There was a self-indulgent, rather pointless ballad about being taken as a child by his mum and dad up a “magical and special” Glastonbury Tor, and a reflective number about why old people shouldn’t be embarrassed by young people writing poetry.
A short punk attack on Donald Trump – “not even he believes there’s another planet somewhere” – left the audience pretty cold. But then he was into the safety of the last few numbers, with another Lennon-inspired one, “Surely we can as intelligent human beings do things better?”
And of course the final number was just one long indulgent, improvised solo, loosely based on “Another world is possible”, but with a bit of the Beatles’ “Come Together” thrown in. But he was able to bring it to some sort of conclusion and to leave the crowd wanting more.
Verdict: 4 stars
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