SZA’s striking set failed to set Glastonbury alight
After Dua Lipa and Coldplay’s sleek and efficient sets, Glastonbury’s Sunday night headliner had a tough act to follow.
After a rumoured appearance by pop queen Madonna fell through, the slot eventually went to US R&B star SZA.
One of the most-streamed artists in the world, she’s a vibrant, confident performer, whose complex, messy dissections of modern relationships have endeared her to millennial fans.
But their passion failed to ignite any magic on the Pyramid Stage.
The star drew the smallest audience I’ve ever seen for a Glastonbury headliner, in more than 20 years of coming to the festival.
It didn’t help that, for at least the first half an hour, her microphone was both distorted and muffled – an issue for an artist whose appeal lies in the precision of her lyrics and the beauty of their jazzy vocal runs.
The 33-year-old also committed the festival sin of failing to address the crowd. Her only interaction in the show’s first act was to ask if any of her “day one” fans were present.
“You know I need you, right?” she said, perhaps acknowledging that this was not her natural audience.
By the time she got to her biggest hit – the darkly comic murder fantasy Kill Bill (1.9 billion Spotify streams) – people had already drifted away to watch sets from The National, James Blake and London Grammar elsewhere on the site.
That’s not to say that SZA put on a bad performance, or that the thousands who stayed to the end of her set were disappointed.
She has spectacular vocal command, projecting to the back of the field without sacrificing intimacy.
Towards the middle of her set, she played Nobody Gets Me – a devastating ballad about her struggle to let go after breaking up with her fiancé. It was by some distance the most vulnerable, moving performance I saw from a Pyramid Stage headliner all weekend.
Young fans in the audience clasped their hands to their chest and mouthed along silently.
‘So nervous’
Other highlights included the brittle, rock-infused F2F and the 80s-infused pop smash Kiss Me More – which she fused with Prince’s Kiss.
It was a visual feast, too, divided into three distinct sections that mapped out the process of getting over a broken heart.
She started in a dingy cave, the metaphorical fortress of her own solitude, surrounded by stalactites and performing Drew Barrymore while perched on a giant ant.
For the second section, dubbed “robot world”, she struggled with conflicting emotions, simultaneously pining for her ex and wishing pain upon him, in songs like Snooze, Kill Bill and I Hate U.
The final segment was titled “Coming Home”. SZA, sprouted wings, climbed a tree, and played some of her more liberated, feel-good songs – including Saturn (about escaping the earth for a better life) and the self-explanatory Good Days.
Her final song was 20 Something, a declaration of solidarity for anyone else going through the turmoil of their third decade and she climbed down from her elaborate set and sang in communion with her fans in the front row.
“Glastonbury, I was so nervous about today,” she said. “I’m so grateful. You have my deepest love and my deepest respect. God bless you and please get home safely.”
With sinuous choregraphy and a compelling stage presence, SZA’s set was a sublime show in the wrong venue – a problem that has repeatedly blighted this year’s Glastonbury.
Beloved acts like Sugababes, Fred Again and Avril Lavigne were booked into areas too small to handle their fans; while the Pyramid Stage struggled to attract sufficient numbers for compelling, muscular sets by PJ Harvey and Janelle Monae.
In the end, it’s a shame that those performances, like SZA’s will go down in history for the wrong reasons.
After the set, the singer posted a message that seemed to acknowledge the negative response.
“The bravery required to be alive in public is remarkable,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
“S/O [shout out to] everybody doing that.”
Setlist
PSA
Love Galore
Broken Clocks
All the Stars
Prom
Garden (Say It Like Dat)
Drew Barrymore
F2F
Forgiveless
Ghost in the Machine
Blind
Shirt
Kiss Me More
I Hate U
Snooze
Kill Bill
Low
Supermodel / Special
Open Arms
Nobody Gets Me
Normal Girl
Saturn
Rich Baby Daddy (Drake cover)
The Weekend
Good Days
20 Something
