Queens of the Stone Age reviewed Other stage, 9.45pm Playing opposite Elton John’s last ever UK gig is not an enviable position to be in, but hey, Josh Homme and Queens of the Stone Age are here to make the best of it. “We have been hired to come here on Sunday and give you a night that absolutely NOBODY will remember!” smirks the good-humoured frontman. “We’re not leaving until everyone gets laid, gets happy or finds love.” The entire set is like the opposite of Royal Blood’s recent onstage tantrum. And actually, over the course of the night, QOTSA get the crowd they deserve. When they open with a blistering doubler of Go With the Flow and The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret, there aren’t many bodies any further back that the mixing desk. By the time they’re busting out No One Knows an hour later, the audience stretches back to the tents and are yelling the riff back at them. I love this band. They sound like sex and whiskey with an edge of dangerous nihilism. It’s the most danceable alt rock out there, as proven by The Way You Used to Do from the album Villains, unleashed about halfway through the set (sure enough, feet don’t fail us now). But they’re also unselfconscious, Troy Van Leeuwen and Dean Fertita performing all the ripping, finger-stretching bluesy solos alongside Homme without any of the pretension, and they’re not afraid to be languid either, letting those filthy detuned chords linger. Homme looks like a dirty preacher with a manicured beard and ’stache, and he’s grinning ear to ear the whole way through. “There’s nowhere in the fuckin’ world we’d rather be right​ ​now!” he yells. (Except perhaps the Pyramid stage.) Homme is coming off the back of cancer treatment and is embroiled, still, in a protracted child custody dispute with his ex-wide Brody Dalle and her partner Gunner Foxx, the outcome of which is tied up in US courts. So it’s good to see him so relaxed here, swearing happily and good-humouredly telling off gun-jumping moshers towards the end of the set: “You fuckin’ go when I say so!” Even Elton’s fireworks can’t drown out Song for the Dead at the end, as the crowd roils and thrashes once more. In case you missed the double legends slot earlier, here are our reviews of those sets: Let us return now, briefly, to the amazing Lil Nas X performance, because we couldn’t fit all the pics in and they’re so great. All I’ve heard around the site today has been people completely convinced that Britney Spears was going to come out with Elton. She’s been spotted in London! No wait, she’s been spotted in Bristol airport! They did that pretty average single together not so long ago – this is happening! To be honest, it did seem quite unlikely that Spears would choose singing in front of 125,000-odd people as her gentle route back into live performance following the traumas of her recent years, but I didn’t like to bring down the vibe. I expected more from Dua though! Estimating Pyramid stage crowds is a very inexact science and the festival itself doesn’t tend to issue numbers, but that has to be one of the very, very biggest. Organisers closed off parts of the fields that are usually reserved for tents in order to expand the capacity, so Elton will have a reasonable claim to having the biggest ever. Foo Fighters and Lewis Capaldi felt almost as massive earlier this weekend, too. So that’s it, for this Glastonbury’s Pyramid performances, and – sob!! – Elton’s touring career in the UK. He’ll carry on touring until 8 July in Sweden, but that’s his last ever UK tour date, and – as he alluded earlier in the performance – perhaps his last ever UK performance full stop. Let’s wish him well in his retirement; we were lucky to have him while we did. True stars like Elton, with their capacity for – as actual stars do – brightening life, pointing the way and illuminating the human experience, are all too rare, although an inveterate lover of new music such as him would inevitably disagree. We’re not done on our liveblog just yet though – we’ll be having appraisals of Queens of the Stone Age’s Other stage headlining performance, and a full review of Elton John by Laura Snapes. He thanks the crowd for their Elton cosplay: “It makes me feel loved. And I want to thank you also for 52 years of amazing love and loyalty you’ve shown me, it’s been an incredible journey and I’ve had the best, best time. I will never forget you – you are in my head, my heart and my soul.” And he takes off on Rocket Man one last time. There’s such a poignant moment here when Elton is gently and insistently tapping a high piano key, fixated on it, seeming to not want to ever stop playing it. But he builds back up into a coda to bring the house down one last time – ramping up into really quite extreme noise with Johnstone playing droning dives on his guitar – as fireworks explode above him and his exemplary band. He walks out from behind the piano again, to absolutely deservedly milk the applause. Elton John dedicates Don"t Let the Sun Go Down on Me to George Michael “One of Britain’s most fantastic singers, songwriters, artists, was George Michael,” Elton says. “He was my friend, an inspiration, and today would have been his 60th birthday – I want to dedicate this song to his memory, and all the music he left us with which is so gorgeous.” Another incredibly full-bodied performance ensues.