Coldplay

Complain all you like but Glastonbury has delivered the goods again

There’s yet to be a Glastonbury line-up that hasn’t provoked a chorus of naysaying. Refrains like ‘looks rubbish. I wouldn’t go’ and ‘not like it used to be’ are de rigueur. Dismissing the headliners as ‘crap this year’ rivals football as the nation’s favourite sport. Yet there’s something to be said for trusting the Glastonbury bookers: check out, say, the lower-tier bands on the 1994 poster and see how many greats they discovered before they were famous – Radiohead, Pulp, Oasis... Nowhere else in the world could hand written signs for toilets induce a Proustian yearning to return Glastonbury’s prestige and legendary ‘vibe’ are now such that the festival is bigger than any of the artists playing there.

Does it matter how posh pop stars are?

‘A working class hero is something to be.’ Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer must have missed the conflicted, sardonic edge to John Lennon’s lyric, from his 1970 song ‘Working Class Hero’, given their rush to scrub away the whiff of privilege in the crudest manner imaginable. Sunak, desperately, by means of bemoaning a childhood forever blighted by lack of access to satellite TV; Starmer by dully hammering home that he is the son of a toolmaker. A country pile, a double-barrelled girlfriend and a mock-regal drawl were valued plunder in 1960s pop As in politics, so in music. In both fields, class anxiety has become inverted. The fear now is to appear too privileged. It wasn’t always thus.

Curb Your Enthusiasm’s finale was a mission statement for the show

From our US edition

And so, after twelve seasons and twenty-four years, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm has finally come to an end. Opinion online has been divided as to the effectiveness of the ending, in which, spoilers, Larry is placed on trial in Atlanta for inadvertently breaking the Electoral Integrity Act by offering a voter a bottle of water in the line; a rare act of kindness he suffers for. It was an intentionally low-key ending that can nonetheless allow for callbacks to early episodes and brief returning cameos from the guest stars who have somehow been maligned, offended or otherwise dismayed by Larry’s antisocial antics in the previous quarter-century.

curb your enthusiasm