Enjoying this re-edited production for New Rules, turned into a prowling tech-house roller – complete with a Bicep-imitating synth rhythm line. Dua’s doing one of the biggest cliches in the pop playbook: getting everyone to crouch down then jump up. Did Slipknot do it first? Then it’s into Electricity, her collab with Silk City, AKA Mark Ronson and Diplo. This could have been a deathly combo made for the most dead-eyed of LA parties, but it’s genuinely euphoric, even rather kindly in tone – thanks in part to Lipa’s easygoing sense of romance. Laura has staked out ground at Levels in anticipation of Charli xcx’s Partygirl set of DJ’d bangers and crowd-goading. “Kelly Lee Owens has just come on at Levels to noticeably more enthusiasm than ANOTR, whoever they were, arriving to Björk’s Big Time Sensuality and walking to the front of the stage for a triumphant pose. Lots of “avin’ it!” from the decks. It also instantly just got a lot busier; we lost about a foot of the space we had. Also, huge shoutout to the guy sitting on the floor at Charli playing Uno on his phone.” Dua is meanwhile down on a catwalk B-stage for another sinewy club track, Hallucinate, wearing a Harley Quinn-ish ensemble like a 1970s New York street gang member who struts everywhere rather than getting the subway. Over on the Other stage, our Safi says Idles have just brought out Danny Brown as a special guest. Good combo! Another Future Nostalgia cut here, Pretty Please. Even though it’s not anthemically melodic, I love this song’s elegant, relatively spartan arrangement, done with so much space that you can hear the happily chattering crowd burst through the moments of silence. Dua’s presumably having a change, so her dancers do some formidable choreo to the kind of heavy dubstep womp that some of the Guardian staff were enjoying at some length at the Glade Dome last night. Me, I was doing a house workout to Ivan Smagghe. A strange wormhole opens in pop, allowing White Town’s peerlessly odd No 1 single Your Woman, from 1997, to emanate from the Pyramid stage. My cassette version is still much cherished. It’s sampled on Love Again, from Lipa’s blockbuster Future Nostalgia LP. Falling Forever now, one of the better songs from the recent Radical Optimism album, even if there’s still something a little perfunctory about the songwriting. Again, Lipa lifts the material with her force of feeling, and she’s commanding the stage even without her phalanx of dancers. Tame Impala"s Kevin Parker is Lipa"s special guest Australia’s Kevin Parker has had a charmingly unlikely career path, from psychedelic oddball to a driving force in pop, called upon by the likes of Lipa to add a certain mind-expansion to their work. Here they duet on Tame Impala’s own The Less I Know the Better, and Parker shows no nerves at the scale of the stage – even bigger than the ones that he’s gradually scaled up to. Some of his work is decidedly un-cosmic, like a high that stubbornly refuses to spike, but this song really is strong and works wonderfully in this duet form. There’s a strong rapport on stage too, as they almost descend into giggles at one point. Sampha reviewed Woodsies, 9pm For so long, Sampha loomed in the background; a secret weapon of A-list talents such as Kanye West, Drake, Solange, Beyoncé and Frank Ocean, often going unnamed and uncredited in features. Your favourite artist’s favourite artist, if you will. That changed with the release of his 2017 album Process, which went on to win the Mercury prize, before he made another retreat from the public. Then, six years later, came Lahai and a tour which ended in London this April. As he performs at Glastonbury in the aftermath of this tour, you can only hope, beg, plead that this is not just another fleeting public moment. The stage at Woodsies is set, with the band’s instruments arrayed against a bright, luminous sunset gradient background. When the show begins, a voice says “It’s in the name of creation that I have something to say.” The British-Sierra Leonean singer emerges when he has made something truly beautiful, and the set is a testament to this. While his debut album was defined by a kind of emotional brokenness and sorrow, Sampha introduces his set singing Suspended, crooning in that smooth, angelic voice: “I’ve been lifted by love.” The imprecise, chaotic discord of love and its infectiousness is narrated in dreamy love songs Can’t Go Back and Stereo Colour Cloud. At times his live rearrangements have the genius of poetic scholarship: hypnotic repetitions abound and the staccato rhythm of “time, missile, back, forward. I miss you, time, misuse” is enchanting. “As you can see, I got in this stage for myself,” Sampha tells the crowd. It’s an indication that he only moves when he is ready and willing. Changes in his life, including the birth of a daughter in 2020, have reshaped his sound with the imagery and cadence of hope, love, imagination. He dances. For Dancing Circles, it’s a funky, groovy vibe as he captures the hopes, desires and missed opportunities of London life. He leaves the platform of the band and grooves to the audience, shuffling, bending and swaying to sublime trippy, spacey synths and basses, as if in a rave. He is possessed by it. On Spirit 2.0 he sings: “Love will catch you, faith will catch you, spirit will catch you.” The spirit is certainly caught by the crowd, and at moments I’m even moved to tears. But it is not only the emotional resonances, or the miraculous elegance of his voice, which move you. It is also the precision of every element of production, from the luminous background beaming from red to blinding white, to the little triangle played by his bassist Rosetta. Sampha and his band dismount from the stage to crowd around a drum kit for a classic Glastonbury drum circle. Alone it is rapturous and spiritual, but when it leads into early single Without, from his 2013 EP Dual, it is transcendent. “God… God!” an audience member next to me screams out in praise. As he closes out with tracks (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano and Blood On Me, you feel that the warmth of his voice and intimacy of his performance stem from just how personal this journey with music is for him, just how much it comes down to that core function of art: to communicate emotion and to reflect our own. We are so indebted to him for sharing his gift with us. Up next is Be the One, and a costume change from leathers to satin – perhaps even from the same dressing up box as the Last Dinner Party. This song was her breakthrough and a memorably amazing moment at her last Glastonbury set, in 2017. She played an oversubscribed John Peel (now Woodsies) tent to a young crowd in absolute wonderment to this newly minted, athleisure’d star – and Be the One was then the most potent showcase of the strength of vocal feeling I was talking about earlier. The climactic moment, “will you be mi-i-ine?” is charged up with so much desperation. These Walls now, and a noticeable dip in quality and energy: this was put in a prominent position on her latest album, but it didn’t really deserve to be there. The strummed guitar is blah, the melody unremarkable, and a bit of tepid tambourine is hardly bringing the necessary sparkle. But Lipa is still in fine voice here – her actual vocal quality is rather underrated, with a lovely keenness to it. She’s thought of as this otherworldly model type, but she gives her performances a lot of humanity by letting her effort be known – and that is not veiled criticism. She strains for notes but meets them, and that strength of feeling is affecting. “It’s a lot isn’t it? A lot to take in,” she tells the crowd. “I have written this moment down, I have wished it, I’ve dreamt it … and I can’t believe I’m here, and it feels so good.” She acknowledges the hard work she’s done to get here, but also – in true hot-astrology-girl style – “manifesting” and “magic”. This is a very high ratio of hits: I didn’t think she’d have Levitating so early on her set, it being one of her best and biggest. She’s absolutely on top of the beat as she dispenses her spools of rapped chatter, including some a cappella moments that have to be totally word-perfect – and they are. That mid-Atlantic accent gets comprehensively dropped for “dance my arse off”, paired with the words supersized behind her. This is peak Dua: glamorous but not stiff or queenly, just relaxed in the beat and strutting through it to whatever impossibly fabulous party you wish you were at. Dua was lambasted online for some admittedly lacklustre dance moves in the past: one diss, “Girl, give us nothing!” became instant pop cultural canon. But there’s strong choreo here, including from her backing dancers – graduates of London’s Dance School for the Unfeasibly Hot. Next we have Illusion, which the public have rather shrugged at but I love for its filter-house groove. Something that’s perhaps underestimated about Dua Lipa amid the discourse around her is that she is a proper club singer: more of a house vocalist at times than a straightforward pop star. Her songs are genuinely danceable. And generously so: for all her glamazon pop star poise, there’s something quite ego-free about a lot of her songs, which just want you to dance to them in a sticky-floored establishment. After a potty-mouthed first acknowledgement of the crowd, she tells them “I dreamed about this my whole life”, in the kind of mid-Atlantic drawl beloved of the perpetual-holiday set.. Staging-wise, there’s a pair of catwalks that Dua will no doubt strut along numerous times this evening, mega-HD visuals behind her and a heavy-sounding live band. Training Season is a bit tepid on record, but it really connects here and she’s bringing an earnestness and voice-cracking feeling to her vocals that’s lacking on the studio version. Next up it’s One Kiss, her addictively replayable collab with Calvin Harris. Few songs are as good to flirtily dance to. Dua Lipa begins! And we’re off with the first Pyramid headliner this year: Dua Lipa. The narrative among chronically online people is that she’s yesterday’s news, a charisma-deficient drone being overtaken by edgier new-school stars. Other more well adjusted people think she’s a bit of fun with a formidable bank of songs to spill espresso martinis to. Let’s see who’s right! She uses the same vocal sample that Primal Scream use on Loaded: “We wanna get loaded … we’re going to have a party”, perhaps a coy reference to the way she said her latest album was inspired by Primal Scream while being audibly nothing of the sort. And it’s into opening track Training Season. Not sure whether the brown acid has kicked in or something, but I’ve checked back in with King Krule and there’s a five-year-old in a pink dress on stage with him. This is Seaforth, one of his drowsiest, loveliest numbers. Sampha is indulging in that great Glastonbury tradition: a drum circle. Get him up to the Stone Circle with some fire poi and questionable opinions about the Covid-19 vaccine for the canonical version though. Ohhhhhhhh! That’s the maximum eight Hs allowed for his next track, which interpolates a cover of Roy Davis Jr’s Gabriel, the illuminated manuscript that every student of the London club scene pores over in their infancy.