Glastonbury 2024: Watch The Streets’ euphoric performance of ‘Blinded By The Lights’
Taking to The Other Stage at Glastonbury Festival on June 29th, The Streets brought the Saturday feeling to Worthy Farm, producing a thrilling set and turning Pilton into a nightclub.
After previously headlining the John Peel Stage in 2019, which led to an overcrowding issue as thousands were left unable to enter the jam-packed tent, The Streets were unsurprisingly promoted to an outdoor stage for this appearance in 2024.
While they’ve released a mixtape and an album in the last five years, after Mike Skinner first started performing as The Streets once again in 2018, it’s the early work from Original Pirate Material and A Grand Don’t Come For Free that produced the most spellbinding parts of their electrifying set.
Over 20 years on from The Streets’ debut, seemingly everyone is still trying to be their own region’s version of Skinner, and at Glastonbury this year, you’re never more than 200 metres away from hearing somebody deliver their vocals in Sprechgesang. However, without the influence of the Brummie, they likely wouldn’t be doing so.
Therefore, even though later material from The Streets hasn’t connected with the masses on the same level as those first two albums, a large reason for that is because Skinner set an unreachable bar and captured the zeitgeist.
‘Blinded By The Lights’ is a shining example of his brilliance. Going on a night out, taking a pill, and getting lost from your mates may not be the most romantic narrative for a song in history, but it’s relatable to those in the crowd at The Other Stage, who all remember being locked in a similar formative experience during their youth.
The set saw The Streets deliver a career-spanning set with Master Peace joining Skinner for the relatively new track ‘Wrong Answers Only’ and also airing Original Pirate Material favourites such as ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ and ‘Weak Become Heroes’. They also covered the Black Sabbath classic ‘Iron Man’ before ‘Fit But You Know It’.
A true highlight of the set saw Skinner embark upon a crowd-surf during a rendition of the heartbreakingly emotional ‘On The Edge of a Cliff’, which originally appeared on The Streets’ fourth album, Everything Is Borrowed.
Glastonbury is also a festival very close to the heart of Skinner, who only truly grew to understand the full magic of the event over the last decade. Speaking on the Sidetracked podcast on BBC Sounds, he said of his relationship with the iconic event: “It’s not until you go on stage and realise it’s completely different to anything else on the Earth.”
He continued: “The other thing for me was when I started DJing because when you watch Glastonbury on TV, you’re watching all of the big shows that are travelling around the world that are doing the other festivals, but when you DJ, and go up the hill, y’know, for me actually, that was the thing that really opened Glastonbury up to me was leaving the big stages and thinking, ‘This is crazy.'”
Watch The Streets perform ‘Blinded By The Lights’ at Glastonbury Festival below.
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