Glastonbury 2024: Watch Damon Albarn join Bombay Bicycle Club as special guest
During their performance on The Other Stage at Glastonbury Festival, Bombay Bicycle Club delighted the crowd by bringing out special guest Damon Albarn to perform their collaboration, ‘Heaven’ and Blur’s ‘Tender’.
The first track appeared on the London indie group’s sixth studio album, My Big Day, released in 2023 and also included guest appearances from Chaka Khan, Nilüfer Yanya, Jay Som and Holly Humberstone. Albarn’s cameo at Glastonbury marks the first time he has played ‘Heaven’ live with Bombay Bicycle Club.
Ahead of their performance, which got underway at 17:15 on The Other Stage on June 28th, guitarist Jamie MacColl spoke exclusively with Far Out and revealed they would be joined by a “very special guest”, which proved to be Albarn.
“It feels like coming home after being away for a long time. We’re bringing a very special guest, but we can’t tell you who,” he said about returning to Pilton for the band’s first Glastonbury appearance since 2014.
Elsewhere in the conversation, MacColl reflected on Bombay Bicycle Club’s relation with Glastonbury, noting, ”We actually first played in 2009 on the Park Stage. My memories of that gig are quite bad… It was a very sunny day, and I managed to detune the bottom string on my guitar by a semitone for most of the first song, which sounded terrible.”
The guitarist added: “The John Peel Stage in 2010 was much happier — we brought out the London School of Samba for ‘Always Like This’, and it was joyful.”
While Albarn has spent the large portion of the last twelve months on tour with Blur, with the band’s reunion coming to an end earlier this year at Coachella, he now has free time on his hands for the first time in a long while.
Last year, Blur were heavily rumoured to appear at Worthy Farm, either as a headliner or last-minute special guest, but it didn’t come to fruition. However, his small appearance with Bombay Bicycle Club partially makes up for this faux-pas by Glastonbury bookers.
MacColl told Hot Press of the Albarn collaboration last year: “Jack’s known Damon for a while. He played him some of the demos to hear what he thought. He heard ‘Heaven’ and said ‘I’ve got an idea for it’ and came up with a new part – I don’t think you can really say no to Damon Albarn.”
In a four-star-review of the last Bombay Bicycle Club album, featuring ‘Heaven’, Far Out wrote: “My Big Day isn’t a huge departure from the band’s core sonic principles, yet it sounds and feels as fresh as warm bread. Whether it is through a deliberate return to their original creative constitution, a lack of care for the reception the record will receive or simply that the band are back to their best, this album feels like a maturation of the original starter kit that saw them turn into ready-baked brilliance 15 years ago.”
Glastonbury Festival is currently underway until June 30th and Far Out is on the ground at Worthy Farm to provide coverage directly from Pilton. This year’s event will be headlined by Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA.
Watch Damon Albarn join Bombay Bicycle Club at Glastonbury Festival below.
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