Follow the Sunday festivities with the Guardian’s photography team as Turnstile turned up the energy, Michael Rosen spun some stories and Olivia Rodrigo blew us away

Sunday at Glastonbury kicked off in wholesome fashion in the Kidzfield, with Michael Rosen speaking to a young audience, preceded by a children’s disco party.

Michael Rosen speaks to children about literature and language in the Kidzfield.

It’s not all about the headliners. Away from the big stages, feminist punks are singing songs about UTIs and Elvis has been reborn as Kurt Cobain

With 80 stages hosting more than 3,000 performers, there is a terrifying amount of things to see and do at Glastonbury. While the headline acts dominate the coverage, what of the lesser-known artists listed further down the bill? Is anyone stumbling to their strange shows?

From an Elvis-fronted Nirvana tribute act to a feminist punk group singing songs about UTIs, via a taxidermy mouse circus and a singalong performance of school-assembly hymns, we went in search of Glastonbury 2025’s most obscure acts.

Statement condemns comments made by London punk duo while police confirm investigation is under way

• Glastonbury 2025 – live

The organisers of Glastonbury have said they are “appalled” by comments made by Bob Vylan after the punk duo appeared to incite violence, something the festival said went against its ethos of “hope, unity, peace and love”.

At the West Holts stage on Saturday afternoon, the London group led a chant of “death, death to the IDF”, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.

Pyramid stage
While you might quibble that Chic’s set has become more reliable than revolutionary, you can’t argue with the effects of the greatest pop music ever made on the crowd

Sunday at 6pm is a point in the Glastonbury experience what you really need is something dependable. You are sunburnt. The heat is still brutal. You are exhausted. The state of the toilets is unspeakable, and you crave a certain straightforward reliability. And, despite his attempts to reboot the Chic brand with a new album a few years back and a handful of fresh production gigs, Nile Rodgers seems largely content to see out his days in the business of straightforward reliability, simply touring the world playing his old songs. In fairness, if you’d written the catalogue of material he has, you might be inclined to ensure people don’t forget about it.

The initial shock you may have felt at seeing a reconstituted version of the greatest disco band of all playing Glastonbury’s West Holts stage in 2013 has long disappeared – Chic have become a ubiquitous live presence in Britain in the ensuing years – but the meat of their set remains preserved in aspic, more or less the same as it was 12 years ago. That said, anyone who quibbles with the quality of said meat – Everybody Dance, I’m Coming Out, Upside Down, He’s the Greatest Dancer – is the kind of person who shouldn’t be allowed to express any opinions about music whatsoever: this is unequivocally some of the greatest pop ever made.

Pyramid stage
Returning to headline the Pyramid for the first time in 30 years, Jarvis Cocker and co are as dark, grubby and joyous as ever, instantly turning the audience to misty-eyed displays of devotion

“Sorry for people who were expecting Patchwork,” says Jarvis Cocker, in reference to the mysterious name that appeared on the Glastonbury bill in lieu of Pulp’s. “How did you know we were going to play?”

In fairness, Pulp did their best to conceal their appearance at the festival (as Cocker says, it’s 30 years and four days since they were parachuted into the Glastonbury headlining slot, a now-legendary performance that sealed their ascendancy). Keyboard player Candida Doyle even gave an interview to a local Somerset newspaper insisting that while they wanted to play, Glastonbury “weren’t interested”. But clearly no one was convinced – the Pyramid stage is headlining-set heaving.

The festival reaches its final day, featuring a crowd-pleasing afternoon of legends on the Pyramid stage, plus Prodigy, Wolf Alice and Kate Nash

It is mercifully overcast at Worthy Farm today, without the heat that’s been oppressing festivalgoers so far this weekend. That makes for a pleasant setting at the Pyramid stage to see Mercury prize-nominated and Brit rising star award-winner Celeste. She is preparing to release her sophomore album Woman of Faces, nearly five years after her debut Not Your Muse instantly topped the UK album charts. She says that she did not expect it to take this long for her follow-up, but that“everything happens when it’s supposed to”.

With her brilliantly smoky, soulful vocals, Celeste invokes the likes of Billie Holiday, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, yet her distinctly English lilt provides a girl-next-door entry point to her magnificence. The emotion in her voice and in her songs is so overflowing that she repeatedly flaps her arms, as if shaking out the mood before it swallows her. On With the Show, a formidable, high-octane ballad, reaches big, orchestral moments of brilliance before Celeste transitions into more minimalist tracks with contemplative piano.

Six years after declaring the festival his idea of hell, the columnist finally had his arm twisted. What unfolded was a weekend of shock, confusion, throbbing testicles – and unbridled joy

I thought I would never go to Glastonbury, and that was fine with me. Six years ago, I wrote about how it was my idea of hell, my event 101. Ever since then, for reasons known only to themselves, my Guardian handlers have been badgering me to come. They wore me down. They got me to Glastonbury.

What was my problem? Well, while I knew I would love a lot of the music, there are some creature comforts I won’t be without. Nothing fancy – my personal hygiene bar is rather low; going without a shower for a few days holds no fear for me. All I insist upon is a clean bog and a bed on which to sleep, neither of which are easy to find at Worthy Farm.

Raye wowed with her old-Hollywood glamour, Pulp did 90s nostalgia at its best and everyone tried to hide from the heat – see the best Guardian photography from a big Saturday

The sun hit hard on Saturday until late afternoon, and proved too much for some people.

Festivalgoers struggle in the heat by the Other stage. Photographs: Alicia Canter

West Holts stage
Theatrical, flirtatious and athletic, this debut UK festival performance from the US MC is unrelentingly brilliant

When Doechii takes the stage at West Holts on Saturday night, she is introduced to us as Doechii the don, the dean, the supreme. Before the hour is out, no one in the audience will be left in doubt as to the Grammy winner’s mastery of her craft, or how much work she has put in to achieve it. But at the same time as flaunting her natural ability, Doechii is also eager to show her working and the paths she used – and her debut UK festival appearance is all the more mesmerising for it. The 26-year-old performer’s schoolgirlish styling – giant lockers, rows of desks, Doechii’s long braids and exceedingly brief kilt – is immediately obvious as a feint: she may be a relative newcomer to the scene, but she is no rookie.

The videos playing either side of the stage bring the set’s concept into focus: Doechii (real name Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon) is leading us, step by step, through the steps necessary to become a hip-hop master – from how to distinguish between “good bars and GREAT bars”, to understanding “the aspect of flow” and the importance of genre.

The festival can feel like 24/7 sensory overload, but it does have a more tranquil side …

The quest for tranquility in the world’s least tranquil place can lead you to unexpected places. On a baking-hot Glastonbury day, I am sitting in a 90C sauna surrounded by 10 naked strangers.

My journey began on Friday. While Lorde is playing a crammed secret set at the Woodsies stage, I’m over at Humblewell – a somewhat smaller tent – with 50 people who couldn’t care less about the buzz. We lie on mats and parched grass, eyes closed, breathing deeply, legs moving in unison under the orders of the yoga teacher, Dina. A bassy soundtrack distracts from the many sounds outside competing for our attention. If it wasn’t for the bucket hats, you wouldn’t know you were at Glastonbury. I fold into a child’s pose and feel a deep sense of release.

Other stage
Filling in last minute after Deftones pulled out, the Londoner shows he’s still top of his game with a kinetic performance that jumps from garage to grime to Fred Again bangers

The Glastonbury “surprise set” has proved futile this year – anonymous billings for Lorde, Haim and Lewis Capaldi were leaked long before the gates opened. Yet there manages to be a genuine twist in the lineup: grime legend Skepta, as a last-minute replacement for alt-metal band Deftones, who have been forced to cancel due to illness. Skepta happens to be kicking around because last night, at Glade, he performed a DJ set alongside Mochakk from São Paulo and Carlita from Istanbul – an advertisement of his house-techno project Más Tiempo, launched with Jammer in 2023, with regular slots in Ibiza.

But he’d not required the full force of his production for Glade, so stepping in for a billing just shy of the headline slot on Glastonbury’s second largest stage, Other, is certainly a challenge. On that, of course, Skepta steps up to the plate with incredible energy and conviction, saying “Let’s go!!! No crew, no production but am ready to shut Glastonbury down. Victory lap time. Pre-Big Smoke 2025!” (his multi-genre festival taking place at Crystal Palace Bowl, south London, in August.)

Other stage
Playing to a dizzyingly huge crowd, for many this is Saturday’s true headlining set: a bawdy and uncompromising icon playing alone with no frills

For my money, one of the best pop tours of the 21st century was Kanye West’s Yeezus tour. Like the album it was supporting, the Yeezus tour was abrasive and minimal and totally spectacular: West stood in front of gigantic bright-red screens and blasted arenas with some of the harshest, most acidic sounds ever considered mainstream. That tour was unrelenting and uncompromising and, as a result, totally compelling.

Charli xcx’s Brat tour may be the only clear successor. It is a show whose main components are a curtain, a few stadium strobe light rigs, and one star whose vision is so specific and so well realised that the “necessities” of an A-list pop show – dancers, set pieces, etc – suddenly seem like crutches for anyone less in tune with themselves. This makes sense, given that Charli is also our clearest successor to West himself: despite being a prodigiously talented mainstream songwriter, she has dedicated her career to exploring the most caustic, hallucinatory sounds of the underground, and working out how best to synthesise them with the pleasures of pure pop music.

West Holts stage
From Rod Stewart to Keir Starmer, no one is safe from the Irish group’s ire, as the weekend’s most talked-about set became a mosh-heavy, provocation-filled melee

• Mosh pits and mayhem: Kneecap play Glastonbury – in pictures

It is perhaps worth recalling Kneecap’s appearance at last year’s Glastonbury, a lunchtime set in the Woodsies tent that saw the band widely acclaimed as bringers of boozy, edgy hilarity, complete with songs called Get Your Brits Out and Rhino Ket. Twelve months and some provocative onstage comments about Palestine and Conservative MPs later, they’re both folk devil and cause celebre, whose appearance at the festival is the most hotly debated of 2025 – both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition have had strong opinions about it.

It’s a perfect example of how quickly stories can become overheated in the 21st century: vastly more people now have a opinion about Kneecap than have ever heard their music, which is, traditionally, a tricky and destructive position for a band to find themselves in. Invoking a name one probably shouldn’t invoke under the circumstances, you might want to ask the surviving members of the Sex Pistols how that worked out for them.

There’s a stacked bill on offer at Worthy Farm. We’ll be bringing reviews, news, pictures and more throughout the day, with Raye on the Pyramid and Skepta replacing Deftones

When Ichiko Aoba was a child, experiencing loneliness and isolation, she lost herself in the fantasy worlds created by animation studios such as Studio Ghibli and Disney. The Japanese folk singer-songwriter further nurtured that interest in intricate world building as a form of escapism through creating her music – and despite its niche and experimental composition, she has found global popular appeal built up from a significant cult following.

She sings entirely in Japanese so live I cannot dissect her lyrics, but you can parse her themes from the visuals and from her tone: the stage is draped with willows and Aoba’s airy vocals are atmospheric and expansive, bringing to mind the serene and tranquil ancient forests of Japan like Aokigahara or Yakushima. You half expect a deer to gallop on stage and be fed by her hand. Aoba certainly looks the part of a nature deity: she is donning a laurel crown and she wears a shimmering, long ruffled dress with iridescent and metallic colours. “That must be so warm,” says a woman sat next to me, and indeed Aoba acknowledges the “sunny day” and sips from her bottle.

No lineup, no map and no meet-ups with friends: is it possible to survive the festival phone-free?

• Glastonbury 2025 – live updates

For someone who gets lost on the way back from a restaurant bathroom, the 364-hectare (900-acre) sprawl of Glastonbury is a navigational nightmare. I’ve been to the festival three times, and between the music and the drinking I’ve always been glued to my phone, risking a rolled ankle as I hurry along, staring at the site map on the app and racing to recorrect my route to the shows. Losing power or losing my phone hasn’t ever seemed an option here. Without it, I would cease to function.

But perhaps, at the ripe old age of 31, it is time to face my fears. What would happen if I ditched my phone for the day? Would I perish from boredom or find myself liberated, finally embracing the full freedom of the Glastonbury experience?

Pour près de cinq millions de Français, elle est Jackie, personne central de L'Amour ouf, un des plus importants succès de 2024 réalisé par Gilles Lellouche. C'est grâce à ce rôle que Mallory Wanecque, bientôt 19 ans, a été révélée au grand public avant de décrocher une nomination au Cés…

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