Glastonbury Performers Promise Special Weekend


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As thousands of festival-goers settle in for the start of Glastonbury’s 40th anniversary tomorrow, a clutch of this year’s performers have been speaking of their plans, with special guests promised for two of the acts.

Friday’s stand-in headliners Gorillaz have confirmed they will be joined by many of the guests who played with them at their recent gig at London’s Roundhouse venue, and leader Damon Albarn, who played a memorable show with Blur at last year’s event, has also said he hopes legendary songwriter Lou Reed will be in attendance. “Lou Reed’s arriving and, fingers crossed, coming straight to rehearsal. And then we watch the game,” he told Radio 4’s Front Row. “This morning I woke up and the first thing I felt a wave of anxiety about – is an audience that size going to respond to our songs? I don’t know.”

Others set to perform on the Pyramid Stage on Friday night with Gorillaz are The Fall’s enigmatic frontman Mark E. Smith, while rapper Snoop Dog could also link up with the group after he plays his own show earlier in the evening.

Kylie Minogue could also be set to make her bow at the festival, with reports in today’s edition of The Sun newspaper claiming she will perform with the Scissor Sisters when they play the Pyramid Stage on Sunday. The singer had to pull out of a scheduled headline spot in 2005 after being diagnosed with cancer.

Florence & The Machine

Florence & The Machine




Meanwhile, Florence & The Machine singer Florence Welch has spoken of her desire for a memorable performance when they play the Other Stage tomorrow after revealing she doesn’t expect to return to the festival next year. “We’ve been planning it for a while now, because it was always the one where we were asking, ‘Did we want to bring the choir, the strings?’ The whole thing has got so much bigger since the last time I played,” she told the NME. “We probably won’t play Glastonbury the year after this, so we really want to go out with a bang!”

This year’s event, headlined by Gorillaz, Muse and Stevie Wonder is the biggest in the festival’s long history, with over 175,000 people set to have descended on Worthy Farm by tomorrow morning. As the event celebrates it’s 40th anniversary, the figures illustrate the massive evolution since it’s incarnation; in 1970, around 1,500 people travelled to Somerset, paying £1 for the privilege.

The weather forecast for the weekend is still one of the most promising in recent years, though the Met Office’s Helen Chivers haswarned of the possibility of rain by Sunday. “Although the weather looks fine – dry and sunny for most of the weekend – there is a possibility of t hundery showers on Sunday in Somerset,” she said. “It’s pot luck as to whether this will reach the festival itself.”


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