Glastonbury 2003Everybody Hurts but no one feels the pain
Craig McLean sees REM join the festival legends of Worthy FarmIt is of those special Glastonbury moments. Around midnight on Friday, REM are nearing the end of their set on the main stage. Singer Michael Stipe, looking like a cross between a hospital orderly in blue scrubs and a light bulb - wormy veins throbbing on his temple - is singing ' Everybody Hurts '.
REM's greatest ballad is transporting a field of tens of thousands. Like Robbie Williams's triumph with 'Angels' last year, or Radiohead bewitching the masses with 'Lucky' two years ago, this was one of those legendary snapshots that pass into festival folk memory.
Last week during their London shows, the fortysomething members of REM looked tired and worn. But when they were headlining on Friday night they were like a band reborn.
'This is what is technically known as a crowd-pleaser,' said Stipe, introducing their breakthrough hit, 'The One I Love' - 'but we fucking love playing it.' After that song's lusty abandon, they turned on a dime and went into the aching 'Sweetness Follows'. Stipe commanded: 'Grab yourself a partner and start to cry.'
One thing, Michael - ditch the green mascara. It's scaring the children.
Maybe Stipe has been taking presentational pointers from his good pal Courtney Love, with whom he arrived on site in a helicopter. The Hole singer staggered around the stage in bra and pants, scaring the children's parents as the band ran through their caterwauling Fleetwood Smack-rock.
Some fans invaded the stage. Courtney coralled behind them, where they looked fearful and bewildered. Well, who would want to be confronted by Courtney's barely-clad bum wiggling in front of them? Also having something of a fashion crisis was Debbie Harry of Blondie. Tottering on stilettos so high they needed scaffolding, she looked like your drunk collapsed auntie. But Blondie were a disco sensation.
Fatboy Slim played a blistering set to a heaving dance tent. He welded 'The Rockafeller Skank' to the Rolling Stones' 'Satisfaction', and blasted the delirious crowd out of the tent flaps. It was big and it was clever and it was also gloriously, riotously dumb.
Billy Bragg, meanwhile, is still doing his Citizen Smith Tooting Popular Front routines on subjects ranging from Woody Guthrie to killing fascists and dropping the debt. But that's as it should be. Like the ravens leaving the Tower of London, the Vale of Avalon would surely disappear in a fug of corporate festival-going if Billy Bragg's righteous ire was not to hand.
And finally, the sublime: Mercury Prize-winners Gomez played their Yorkshire-on-the-Bayou blues beneath a delta moon on the Other Stage Groove Armada and their colliery band trip-hop single 'At the River' rang out on the jazz stage and, on the same stage, there was the promise of the techno duo, Orbital, repeating their 1994 Glastonbury Festival triumph late on Saturday.
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