Review: Glastonbury 2016, Saturday

Saturday starts sloshing in mud in the gutter. Better than it might sound actually. The Wow stage, run by Bristol’s hardest working events company Team Love, have got their Brizzle buddies Gutterfunk to do a party outside the tent. We arrive for Chimpo who, like the rest of the tightly packed DJ booth, looks like he’s having a really good time. He’s playing Skeng, the Bug’s menacing, grimy dub bone shaker, as we arrive, working his way through to Baby Ds euphoric I Need Your Love via Dark Soldier and Youngstar’s Pulse X. It’s the wide mix of styles that keeps Gutterfunk sets always busting with energy and surprises. Die and the rest of the crew are over excited. Chimpo’s generally got someone’s arm round him or across him to pull up one of his tunes or he’s being barged, pushed and prodded from all sides. 

Die jumps on for a bit. Crazy to think how long he’s been going. Since his time as one of the early pioneers in Bristol’s drum & bass scene in the 90s with Full Cycle Records, Breakbeat Era and Reprazent, he’s continued to reinvent his music, collaborate and go in different directions – as long as they always lead to great fucking party music. His Diemantle collaboration with Digital Soundboy’s Dismantle (a young Brighton producer less than half his age) shows his desire to stay fresh and keep moving forward. When he drops their grime/footwork Sex Machine bootleg My Thing the booth descends into another frenzy. 

Addison Groove can hardly contain his enthusiasm as he works his way through some early jungle classics. It’s great. The music and the excitement in the booth is infectious but we need to tear ourselves away.

Heading up to The Park stage has become a bit of a challenge, especially now with a heavily pregnant missus in tow. A small crowd of people stand around a particularly bad patch where someone has gone down and are cheering each time a good Samaritan steps in to help but inevitably get pulled into the bog. There are four down in it by the time we’ve passed. 

Ernest Ranglin, one of the godfathers of reggae, rock steady and ska is 83 and still going strong, leading his band of collected virtuoso musicians from around the globe on the Park Stage blending jazz, reggae and blues into a rhythmic head nodding jam.

He’s followed by Floating Points. Twelve people are on stage: strings and wind at the back, drummer up front driving the rhythm alongside Sam Shepherd behind his rack of hardware. It’s a blend of electronica, techno, prog-rock, jazz and orchestral arrangements which perhaps shouldn’t work but it does. It’s a hypnotising, cinematic journey as a perfect rainbow appears behind us.

New Order’s set at the Other Stage starts with black and white archive footage of Olympic divers (I’m later informed it’s a film made by one of Hitler’s key propagandist – an odd decision given the controversy around the band’s name and the possibly Nazi sympathies it implies). Bernard Sumner doesn’t look too great as he flounces dad-like across the stage and, whilst the band are on point, they plough through the early part of the set with a certain dogged seriousness. There’s not a lot in the way of energy, and it doesn’t help that the mud has become thick and claggy, seeming to set like cement if you stand too long in one place. There are some die-hard fans who are clearly enjoying themselves but the biggest cheer of the early section comes when one of these sets off a flare not far in front of us. What most of the crowd are waiting for are the ones we all know: Blue Monday, Temptation and finally a curtain call for a teary eyed sing along to Love Will Tear Us Apart, Joy Division’s haunting, timeless classic.

We’re tempted back up to the Park area for Philip Glass’ homage to Bowie’s Heroes album, performed here by Army of Generals orchestra, conducted by Charles Hazlewood and backed by a spectacular laser display from light artist Chris Levine. It’s pretty damn trippy.

Opposite, in the Stonebridge bar,  Four Tet, Ben UFO and Floating Points are playing what has been billed as a jungle set but is anything but for the first few hours – a rather underwhelming disco house and techno session, disappointing for a selection of such interesting producers. But we were sat on a bench outside, resting weary legs so we stick it out. Just as we think we’ve been done by a classic bait and switch it gets interesting and we get some rolling amen breaks to see us through to the end.

Read more: Review, Glastonbury 2016, Friday