Friday at Glastonbury with Wet Leg, CMAT, Lorde, secret sets and more – follow it live!

The Glastonbury schedulers get given a lot of grief, for booking the wrong artist on the wrong stage, or at the wrong time, or at the wrong phase of the full moon, etc – so it’s important to give them credit where it’s due: Paris Paloma, on the Avalon stage, at just after 3pm is very well judged. That mid-afternoon slot can be a tricky one to fill, particularly when the temperature is high and people are wanting to save their strength for the headliners to come. Paloma’s crowd fills the Avalon tent but comfortably so, without packing it, and her brand of upbeat, writerly rock gives a welcome injection of energy without demanding too much of us.

Paloma’s pleased too: “This stage is a fair bit bigger than the one I played last year.” She’s still only relatively early into her career, having gained attention with single Labour in 2023. Since her debut album Cacophony was released last year, Paloma has quickly progressed to bigger stages, headlining the O2 Shepherds Bush earlier this month. There Emma Thompson was outed as a fan, caught singing along to Labour in a video posted to TikTok.

Today when she takes the stage, with her guitar strapped across her long-sleeve, full-length, flowing white dress, against a backdrop of folkloric imagery, the uninitiated might expect to be eased in with some gentle guitar, but Paloma obviously sets out to subvert those expectations, opening her set with driving, even somewhat heavy guitar. It’s reminiscent of a folksier, less theatrical Florence + the Machine.

Similarly Paloma doesn’t pull her punches, introducing a song as being about the radical power of “loving yourself when there are so many people profiting from everything you hate about your body”. In the absence of genuine self-love, Paloma suggests, “spite is as good a reason” to try to foster it.

She is more explicitly political in a new, as-yet unreleased song, Good Boy, written in response to “frustrations about the current state of patriarchy in the world”, in the UK and the US. The title refers to men in power, kept chasing their tails and each others’ approval under a system that oppressed them as much as it does everyone else.

“I have a lot of thoughts about what a submissive and self-contradictory belief system patriarchy is; there is nothing more submissive I can think of than… being so painfully frightened of being seen as feminine or queer and living your life in fear,” says Paloma. She goes on to eviscerate the “false promises of patriarchy” and how young men “are being radicalised, whether it’s the incels who haunt my comment sections or the fucking loser billionaires who happen to be in power at the moment … I’ve never seen submission embodied so well.”

It’s an eloquent speech, and a refreshing injection of the bigger world through the typically slow part of the day. The investment from the crowd is evident from the steady sprinkling of hands for the duration of Paloma’s song The Warmth, plus the rallying sing along closing her set with Labour.

But an early standout is Knitting Song, about the legacy of her grandmother and how she’s identified it not only in the rest of her family but also her female friendships. I’m reminded in her easygoing but considered and detailed storytelling of Olivia Dean’s afternoon Pyramid stage set last year – perhaps that’s Paloma’s next slot.