Music festivals don't get much bigger or more legendary than Glastonbury. The annual festival has been going for more than 50 years and just about every high-profile musician worth talking about has played its stages. With a crowd of more than 200,000 taking in more than 3,000 performances spread across 100 stages, there's always a lot to see and even more to talk about.
And while it might take place on a humble farm in south-west England, its biggest moments capture the attention of music lovers around the world. Here are the big talking points from 2025. Secret sets When Lewis Capaldi played Glastonbury in 2023, he made global headlines for reasons he'd prefer not to.
Struggling to get through his performance, he needed the help of his enormous crowd to soldier on. Lewis Capaldi's triumphant Glastonbury return came two years after an emotional unfinished set on the Pyramid stage. (Reuters: Jaimi Joy) Following the show, he wrote a note to his fans explaining what had happened and announcing a break from performing live.
"It became obvious that I need to spend much more time getting my mental and physical health in order, so I can keep doing everything I love for a long time to come," he wrote in a note after the show. He hasn't played a proper gig since, which made it an extra special moment when he popped up at the festival with a secret performance on the Pyramid Stage on the opening day of festivities. "It's just a short set today but I just wanted to come and finish what I couldn't finish first time around on this stage," he told the elated crowd.
Capaldi debuted a new song called Survive in his set, and closed with Someone You Loved, the song that brought him undone on the same stage two years earlier. Lorde's popular surprise performance forced organisers to close access to the Woodsies stage's surrounding field (Reuters: Jaimi Joy) On the day her new album, Virgin, was released, New Zealand pop icon Lorde popped into the festival's Woodsies Stage to show it off to an adoring crowd. Her set list was simply comprised of her new album in full, before airing earlier tracks Ribs and Green Light as an encore for those who stuck around.
Also fresh from a new album release are Los Angeles siblings HAIM, who appeared unannounced on the festival's Park Stage on Saturday night. They were a little more generous in their song selections, offering just four from their new LP, I Quit, among a bevy of their beloved indie hits from across their four albums to date. Britpop wonders Pulp have a long history with Glastonbury.
Their headline set in 1995 (where they replaced The Stone Roses who cancelled due to injury) saw them cement their place as one of the genre's leading acts. They played a legendary secret set at Glastonbury's Park Stage back in 2011, not long after they'd emerged from a lengthy hiatus, and history repeated somewhat this year: the band are once again back from a long absence, and they once again play the festival as a poorly kept secret. They aired only two songs from their new album, treating the audience to a stack of indie classics like Do You Remember the First Time?, Disco 2000 and Common People.
Special guests Glastonbury's annual "legends" set was filled by the iconic Rod Stewart this year. The set list was packed with all the classics, but the guest list was even more memorable. Simply Red frontman Mick Hucknall belted out "If You Don't Know Me by Now", Rod's old Faces bandmate Ronnie Wood then emerged for a version of their 1971 classic Stay With Me, before the inimitable Lulu dropped by to help him get through 1977 hit Hot Legs.
The Cure frontman Robert Smith tends to pop up in some unexpected places, the latest of which was on stage with pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo as she played her headline set on the Sunday night. Perhaps it was a tacit endorsement for Rodrigo from a pre-eminent God of gloom, or perhaps a grab at credibility from one of pop's finest current artists looking to shirk her former Disney credentials. Doesn't really matter why it happened: they treated the crowd to Cure classics Friday I'm in Love and Just Like Heaven, so no-one was complaining.
It wasn't just musicians getting in on the fun, as some esteemed British actors also made some cameos. Music festivals and Doctor Who may not seem like a common combination but, given Glastonbury is as iconic and British as the show is, some crossover makes sense. Peter Capaldi dropped by to join Franz Ferdinand on their mega-hit Take Me Out, while Little Mix member JADE pulled in Ncuti Gatwa to give an impassioned introduction to her set.
Loading TikTok content Even Sir Ian McKellen was there, reprising his role on Scissor Sisters' 2010 track Invisible Light at their set, which also featured appearances from singers Jessie Ware and Beth Ditto. Amyl & The Sniffers defend Kneecap and Bob Vylan A major trend of this year's Glastonbury saw multiple artists using their platform to voice solidarity for Palestine and condemn Israel. A host of Palestinian flags could be seen in the crowd across the weekend, while the likes of Irish pop-country star CMAT, reunited rockers The Libertines and singer-songwriter Nadine Shah addressed the conflict in their performances.
British authorities are investigating performances by Irish rap trio Kneecap and British grime-punk duo Bob Vylan for leading their audiences in controversial pro-Palestine chants. Kneecap rap biopic interview Photo shows Three members of Kneecap – two standing one seated in an Irish flag coloured balaclava – pose in street. Controversial Irish rap group Kneecap tell their origin story, in their own language, in a riotous new biopic.
Kneecap's Glastonbury billing was deemed "not appropriate" by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in the lead-up to the festival, on the basis of member Mo Chara facing a terrorism charge. In response, Kneecap told the Sunday afternoon crowd: "The prime minister of your country, not mine, said he didn't want us to play," before stoking chants of "F*** Keir Starmer". After leading the crowd in a chant of "Free Mo Chara", fellow MC Móglaí Bap also told the crowd: "Mo Chara's in court [this month] for a trumped-up terrorism charge.
It's not the first time there was a miscarriage of justice for an Irish person in the British justice system." He concluded: "We've said it before, the story isn't about us. It's about the genocide happening in Palestine.
Free, free Palestine." "The story isn't about us," Mo Chara (left) and Moglai Bap (r) of Kneecap perform at Glastonbury. (Reuters: Jaimi Joy) A live stream of Kneecap's set reportedly pulled more than 1 million viewers on TikTok, after the BBC chose not to include it in its live broadcast of Glastonbury.
However, the BBC still came under scrutiny for not pre-empting the views expressed by Bob Vylan. The duo's vocalist, Bobby Vylan, encouraged a chant of "free, free Palestine" and "death, death to the IDF", referring to the Israel Defense Forces, during the group's Sunday set. Starmer condemned the performance as "appalling hate speech" while Bob Vylan, who have American tour dates scheduled later this year, have had their US visas revoked by the Trump administration for their "hateful tirade".
Amyl & The Sniffers, one of a handful of Glastonbury acts representing Australia (alongside Royel Otis, Glass Beams, Parcels, and more), defended the actions of Bob Vylan and Kneecap. "The British media in a frenzy about Bob Vylan and Kneecap but artists all weekend at Glastonbury — from pop to rock to rap to punk to DJs — spoke up onstage," read a statement from the Melbourne pub-punk band, who are opening AC/DC's first Australian shows in a decade later this year. It echoes similar sentiments shared by frontwoman Amy Taylor, who took "the time to say something political" in front of a huge turn-out for the band's Glastonbury set on Saturday.
"I'm thinking about the people in Palestine. We're from Australia, we ain't doing jack shit. I know yours aren't doing jack shit," she told the crowd.
"They want us to shut the f*** up because, if we think about Palestine then, back home in Australia, we think about the Indigenous people there. And we think about the fact that us, as whiteys, we're the f***ing colonisers, and that's disgusting. "That's the truth and I thought I'd share that today.
It was gonna be something way more poetic, but that's just what I said and it's not perfect, but I think it's better to say anything than to say nothing at all right now."
