Glastonbury 2024 live: Coldplay on Pyramid Stage, Chris Martin net worth and how many people in audience

The ‘Gladiator’ star and former busker charged enthusastically through covers of Dire Straits and Johnny Cash, along with some original songs, on Glastonbury’s Acoustic Stage. Louis Chilton was charmed

Dua Lipa saw it coming. The fireworks and flags and pulsing purple lights, the teenagers on tiptoes scowling at strange adults as they fling their arms in the air like money. When she was a girl, the 28-year-old born to Albanian-Kosovan parents, tells us midway into her debut Glastonbury headline show, she wrote it down – “I will headline Glastonbury” – manifesting the sleeper hits and critical acclaim and now routine awards and No 1s that made this moment inevitable.

“I was really specific,” she adds after a shy laugh. “I said I wanted to headline the Pyramid Stage on a Friday night, because then I knew I could party for the next two days.” Her voice cracks as she describes the magic – “the power” – of commanding this seemingly infinite crowd. “Little me would just be beside herself right now.”

The growing Dua Lipa empire – now encompassing an acting career, a book club, a burgeoning media platform and a podcast featuring giants of high and low culture – shows no signs of slowing, particularly now she has bought back the rights to her music catalogue. Yet behind the cultural dominance, Dua Lipa is as enigmatic as she is ubiquitous. Her arrestingly vague persona (along, perhaps, with her admirable support for geopolitical causes) has stopped her transcending bankable fame to become a true nation’s sweetheart.

At the far end of the site from Dua, and also the musical performance spectrum, Fontaines DC creep onto the Park Stage bathed in murky green light and ushered by a poisoned baseline. Their opener, the title track of forthcoming album Romance, sounds like the most red flag love song ever, and the following “Jackie Down the Line” isn’t much more gallant: “I will wear you down in time,” sings be-skirted frontman Grian Chatten with a stalker’s intent. Recent releases have brought a melodic grunge side to their prickly, literate post rock, sometimes enhancing Chatten’s monotone poetry with a glowering depth, sometimes with a dirge-like drag. But at their best – “Televised Mind”, “A Hero’s Death”, a “Boys in a Better Land” that sounds like punk trashing the Cavern Club – they remain the most compulsive act of the new rock breed.