Earlier on Adele said: “I don’t really have many upbeat happy songs which I think is why a lot of people moaned about me coming tonight, but fuck you, they’re obviously not watching.” Yes, quite. There’s a kind of national sport – which could perhaps only be played in our country, where we manage to make cynicism so dreadfully boring – of people always moaning about the Glastonbury headliners. Noel Gallagher is probably to blame. You get it from keyboard warriors every year, sometimes with an uncomfortable racial undertone with the likes of Kanye and Stormzy, or a sexist one with Taylor Swift this year. They’re almost always proved wrong, and they certainly were with Adele. Emily Eavis has had to put up with this bullshit in person. “I think that one of the sides of the festival that is more challenging is the opinions that you get, and the negativity stuff,” she told me last week. “There was a dad who came up to me when I came to pick my kids up in our local school, and he was like, I don’t agree with what you’ve done, you shouldn’t have Stormzy, you should have the Stereophonics… he started really ranting, like he was banging a hammer over my head. Somerset is a really, really white area, and it doesn’t really reflect the rest of the world, this rural farming area where we live. So to put a festival on that introduces people to a whole new type of music, but pushes it on, that’s what I want to do.” I was so glad to hear that. The Pyramid has room for power balladeering just as much as anything, and I can’t wait til next year, and onward, to see what flavour of pop they let us taste next. Come back tomorrow when we follow along with David Bowie’s totally mindblowing, hits-packed 2000 set. Thanks for reading! She comes close to tears as she tells the crowd she’ll never forget this set, and goes into her last number, Someone Like You. What a strange song to sing to a crowd of this size. It’s a song from one person to another, and not even that: the subtext, perhaps, is that this is a letter that was written and never sent. It’s a consolation to herself, and a bit of wry self-deception: “I wish nothing but the best for you.” Yeah, right. And yet here we are – there’s lads shouting the words into her mic, and the whole crowd singing the top notes. It feels like a collective smoothing of everyone’s bumps in the road – the kind of mass emotional experience that only Glastonbury can bring. When We Were Young opens the encore. “It was just like a song” – one of the great meta-moments in pop, because this, of course, is one of the songs that things are just like. Or in other words: it’s a song that evokes the power of song itself so strongly, a song about how songs can throw life events into sharp relief. Does that make sense? I’ve spent some of the money I would have blown on Glastonbury pints this weekend on some extremely wanky craft beers to accompany this set and maybe they’ve kicked in. Technically for Adele I should be drinking rose wine, or shots of my own tears harvested from previous breakups, but wanky craft beers it is. Bit of footage here of a teenage Adele performing early on her career at Glastonbury at something Guardian-branded called the Guardian Lounge! Need to bring this back next year and shamelessly curate a loads of music desk faves. I go to around eight or nine festivals each summer (not this year, sob) and each one has their own tribes. Wireless: teenagers who have spent all their Saturday job money on Bape. Reading: teenagers who have spent all their Saturday job money on Supreme. Green Man: dads who have spent all their children’s university fund on shorts from the Boden catalogue. But Glastonbury is a much broader cross-section and all the better for it – around me at this Adele gig were hipsters trying not to feel anything, wholesome families, lads with flares... Most memorable were a group of women right in front of me who were feeling every song so profoundly, but none as much as Set Fire to the Rain. There was a lot of reaching up, grabbing handfuls of air, and pulling them back towards their chests. They’d all clearly gone through some non-specific shit, and Adele was summing it all up in song. Emergency mode Maria from Brazil! I really remember this, she had planned a road trip around the world to this gig. Maria can’t remember any bands she’s seen all weekend, and to be honest, by Saturday night I barely can either – and I’m not having to remember them in front of 150,000 people. Then Adele has to fill in while an unwell person is carried out (“They’re probably moshing too hard to one of my songs”) and she tells a story about a woman in Vegas who pissed herself at one of her concerts and had to be carried out too. Extremely on-brand filler. Weird straw poll here of how much the UK hates or loves different parts of the UK, as people shout out where they’re from into her mic. Big boo for Stoke-on-Trent, but, y’know... Love for Holloway which is a 6/10 part of London at best. Mixed feelings for the underrated Coventry. General appreciation for Yorkshire and rightly so. “Oh my god you look like Brian Harvey from East 17!” Don’t get distracted, you gotta do your best song! And pound for pound, I’d say Rolling in the Deep is still her greatest work to date, knitting together her hell-hath-no-fury scorn and her bruised hurt into an irrepressible piece of retro pop perfection. I was in the field for this whole gig and this was just total euphoria and pandaemonium. “Fackinell, that was amazing!” It was! Insta shoutout After an endearing screw-up on the first attempt, and a couple on the second attempt too, it’s River Lea, where I was living more or less next to when this song came out. Once went on a cycling date up there that ended with getting lost in a piece of frozen industrial wasteland near an Ikea. Pretty slick. Shout out to the Anchor and Hope pub on the river at Clapton, one of London’s very best pubs in my book. Adele has just done one of her relatively rare Instas, throwing back to this gig: Send My Love now, introduced as being about a person who “tried to come into my personal atmosphere, my personal space, trying to fuck everything up, and I was like: nah bruv. Naaaah.” This is the most Tottenham thing to have ever happened at Glastonbury, even more than the BBK takeover the following year. One of the best things about Adele is how un-mannered she is as a vocalist – such a clear, straightforward tone that hits you where it hurts. But that does make the few vocal tics she does have stand out all the more: the tongue clicks on “thick” and “opaque” on Hometown Glory, or the bluesy rasp she just gave those top notes on Don’t You Remember. I find these just a little bit forced and blandly theatrical, but it’s probably the only criticism I ever really have during her live sets, and a very pet-peeve one at that. Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s sublime Raising Sand getting a shout out there, ahead of Don’t You Remember. Alison came in to the Guardian a while back to answer readers’ questions – some of which made her cry, in a good way, and I had no tissues, it was awkward – and she had this to say: Raising Sand was an experiment, really, for Robert and myself. We went in there for three days and said: well, if it doesn’t work, see you next time! It was very lighthearted, and easygoing, with no expectations, and Robert is a lot of fun. He kept everybody laughing the whole time. My job was to be a singer for that project, just as Robert was - it was to support the duet. Band records are... you have a history of being together for a long time, I love how those records change as we change as we get older, have experiences, come back together and grow as a unit, just as people grow. They’re not as lighthearted recording sessions as Raising Sand was, hahaha! People’s personalities, they become more developed, I guess, and I think the reason that our band [Union Station] is what it is is because of those differences. And we’ve been incredibly lucky to have this long history together, I wouldn’t trade it for anything, it’s what I’m most proud of. Each one of them has such a personality, an equally interesting musical personality to go with it, and those things need to be honoured and held up, and admired. In a similar way, without the long history, that’s why I believe Raising Sand was interesting to people – there’s such a romance in contrast. Something for my Raising Sand stans there anyway. Back to Adele! “I’m on the fackin’ side screen at Glastonbury, wheeeey!” Love the laddish energy here. She was like this at Wembley too, firing T-shirt cannons into the audience and comparing those poles of popcorn bags to sex dolls. I bet she’d organise an amazing and really depraved stag do. Adele would 100% duck-tape you to a lamppost in a French maid outfit, without suncream on. It’s just occurred to me that the verses of Skyfall and Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime share a lot of DNA.