Glasto highlights countdown: #5 Florence and the Machine
In an attempt to prevent all this year's Glasto memories evaporating, I'm counting down my top 5 moments in reverse order, one per day, in true Fluff Freeman style. In at 5...
Glastonbury is all about serendipity, seeing the stuff you wouldn't normally make an effort to or would never even come into contact with. If anyone says to you "don't fancy much in the line-up this year" *that's not the point*. There has never been much I really like in advance; the first year I went, this house music fiend was not catered for at all but still had the time of his life.
Anyhow, Flo and her unspecified contraption are just the sort of thing Glasto is for - I wouldn't normally go out of my way to see her Kate Bush 2.0 stylings but was intrigued to see her live. Her performance was superb: generating huge stage presence with nothing more than great theatricality and an astonishing voice. I thought some of the songs were over-long and, on occasion, a little dull, but I was clearly the minority in a large, loud, adoring crowd.
The unexpected treat was a cover of Fleetwood Mac's The Chain, something suprisingly few partists have tried. Here's an audio version, probably a case of enjoy this before it's taken down:
PS I'll be linking to YouTube material in these Glasto posts. There is a ton of material available on the BBC's Glastonbury site (including the Florence gig), but I believe it will all be taken down fairly swiftly in true iPlayer fashion. In addition, most of the material is not embeddable anyway.
I don't know the ins and outs of the copyright issues involved, but surely the BBC would be better equipped to defend its spending on the coverage if it was a permanently accessible archive of a national arts institution, rather than something that disappears after a few days.