The 10 worst Glastonbury Festival headliners

SZA – 2024

This one really, really hurts. I want to defend this show to my dying breath, and not only because SZA is one of the most exciting R&B artists on the planet right now; she’s two for two on masterpiece albums in the form of Ctrl and SOS. Moreover, she absolutely was big enough in the UK to be in with a shout of headlining. Four sold-out nights at the O2 Arena the year before speak for themselves. She’s also exactly the kind of headliner that should be given the baton these days. Someone new and out of the ordinary to attract a new kind of fan to the festival, and be given the chance to make their own history on the biggest stage in live music.

She gave it one hell of a crack, too—dancers, a Broadway-ready set, a Prince cover. Alas, it just wasn’t the right place or the right time. The quite frankly alarming crowd shots show how few people on site were interested. One for the ‘Glasto’ booking team to hang their heads in shame about because SZA did herself proud and that’s a hill I will die on.

The Killers/Arctic Monkeys – 2007

These two belong together because, hear me out here, they were basically the same set. I know what that sounds like. The Killers’ glossy, showboating new wave is so unreconstructedly Vegas that it might as well come with a forged gambling license. It should have precisely dick-all to do with the Arctic Monkeys at their scrappiest. Brandon Flowers played his set in a gold lamé suit. Alex Turner wore a Topshop hoodie. So, what gives? Well, other than that, everything.

These were two of the UK’s most beloved bands (yes, I know The Killers are American, but that doesn’t make it any less true), both of whom were making a break for the big time off the back of a ludicrously successful debut album. Both had just released their second album and were making their first Glastonbury headline performances the same year on consecutive days, and they both played pretty timidly due to being overawed by the scale of the show. What’s more, both were kneecapped by a sound system seemingly playing at a quarter of its full power. While yes, it was a missed opportunity, both would also make up for it with aplomb, given time.

The White Stripes – 2005

How in Christ’s name did they miss this hard?! Jack is a demi-God at Glasto with several sets from several different bands going down a storm. His Park Stage secret gig in 2022 was one of the highlights of that year’s entire festival. Yet, on the very stage that Jack and Meg could have transcended from being big to being truly massive, they choked. It was all going so well, too. The first five songs of their set were everything the entire set should have been. Raw, exciting, and loud enough that the band turned a field in Pilton into the rock clubs they made their name at.

Unfortunately, the band were promoting their recent album Get Behind Me Satan, which is a decent record, but a quiet, atmospheric one that does not suit a live show with this much riding on it. No ‘Glasto’ headliner should ever be caught playing the marimba. One third of the way into the set, people were already crying out for ‘Seven Nation Army’, which they did eventually get to, but by then, the damage had been done. Had this been two years earlier, off the back of Elephant instead, this would have been a generational headline set.

U2 – 2011

There will be a lot of Glastonbury die-hards wondering why the visit of Bono and Co to Worthy Farm is so low on this list. It’s one of the more famous Glastonbury slip-ups, and Bono’s typically cringeworthy excuse of blaming his shoes (seriously) has gone down as an all-timer of an entry on the Great Chronicle of Bono’s Twattery. Yes, the show is a pretty infamous flop, but hear me out here, I don’t think it’s the band’s fault. The band were on their ludicrously successful 360° Tour yet managed to completely revamp their setlist, shortening it and focusing mainly on the hits for the sake of the slot. Something that many of the bands on this list did not do.

Sure, there’s a bit of the old U2 pomp and circumstance, and the bit with astronaut Mark Kelly was baffling, but this set finds its way on this list due to bad timing. The weather was catastrophic even by Glastonbury standards, which also scuppered the PA system, which was famously weak at the time. It’s telling that the news of U2 flopping came mainly from the festival site, because the show was pretty rad on TV. The part that the band will really never live down, though, is the fact that the night before, Coldplay had set a bar very, very high. One that U2 themselves couldn’t live up to. Ouch.

Travis – 2000

One would assume this made sense at the time. After all, the Scottish rock band’s 1999 album The Man Who was a massive, massive hit. The kind that set Travis up as the Oasis you could take to meet your granny without them doing a line off her settee and then having a fistfight through her geraniums. The British music industry was crying out for someone, anyone, to take the Gallaghers’ rock crown after it became clear that the emperors had misplaced their undercrackers. Thus, this was set to be Travis’ big moment to prove their worth. It didn’t work.

The sweet, sensitive Glasgow boys just didn’t really have the hits to carry off the whole set and the ones they did have, they blew in the set’s opening half hour. This led to the meat of their set being a looooong stretch of Travis album tracks, which even for die-hard fans is still probably a pretty bleak prospect. Not even their notorious cover of Britney Spears’ ‘…Baby One More Time’ could liven things up. The cherry on top was that they followed an absolutely blinding set from the Pet Shop Boys. Not even the band themselves knew why Tennant and Lowe weren’t headlining instead. Neither do we, lads, neither do we.

Guns N’ Roses – 2023

Now, get one thing straight: heavy metal can work at Glastonbury. Metallica had to work really hard for it in 2014, but had the charisma, hits and most importantly, volume to take it on points. That ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ in front of a sea of flares is a genuine Glastonbury moment. Guns N’ Roses, on the other hand, just got everything wrong from the start, and every misstep can be traced back to one key mistake. They played it like it was a typical GNR headline set in front of typical GNR fans, the kind who want to hear Slash’s ten-minute guitar solo version of the theme from The Godfather. Yeah, turns out that wasn’t the case, lads.

There’s so much else to do at ‘Glasto’, and as GNR creaked into the 90th minute of their two and a half hour set, the Pyramid Stage became an ocean of casual fans deciding that they didn’t need to stick around for ‘Sweet Child o’Mine’ after all. That lack of GNR obsessives also meant that there were far fewer people making excuses for Axl Rose being basically unable to sing most Guns N’ Roses classics anymore. Which is understandable, they’re really, really hard songs to sing, but under scrutiny like the Glastonbury headline slot, no one gets away with caterwauling like that. At least they turned up on time.

Mumford & Sons – 2013

Few things make you realise just how far away the early 2010s are quite like the fact that the biggest band in the country were a bunch of tweed-sporting, banjo-fondling Young Tories of the Year. The world was a very, very different place back then, and few things prove this like the astonishing success of Mumford & Sons, whose (let’s be real here) two decent singles propelled them to the summit of the Pyramid Stage in 2013.

Nevertheless, there’s an argument to be made that the downfall of the Mumfords began here. Under the white-hot spotlight of the Pyramid, it became unignorably clear that Marcus Mumford’s bunch of yodelling toffs were the most one-trick ponies imaginable. Once you’ve heard one spirited crescendo powered by harmonies and acoustic guitars, you really have heard them all. No amount of Beatles covers assisted by members of Vampire Weekend and The Vaccines can cover up a dearth of ideas, and the Mumfords haven’t recovered since.

Gorillaz – 2010

The Damon giveth, and the Damon taketh away. In 2009, a reunited Blur absolutely obliterated the Pyramid Stage. With one set, they wrote themselves into Worthy Farm history with not only one of the best Glastonbury sets in history, but one of the best festival headline shows of all time. The year after, original headliners U2 had to pull out, and Damon Albarn’s other band Gorillaz were drafted in. The stage was set for Damon to make like the LA Lakers in the same years and go back-to-back. It wasn’t out of the question either; people loved Gorillaz, just not quite as much as Damon thought they did. He made like a number of other bands on this list and played a set that die-hard fans would love to hear… if they were there.

It was a setlist typical of the Escape to Plastic Beach World Tour, on which the band were at the time of the show, and the sets on this tour were incredible. However, they drew heavily on the Plastic Beach album, which was in the process of dying a commercial death. Thus, no casual Glastonbury goer would be familiar with it, which meant that once the extended segment spotlighting the Syrian National Orchestra for Arab Music started, folks started making a beeline for trash city. Snoop Dogg turning up for a climactic ‘Clint Eastwood’ was boss but by then, barely any fucker was there to see it. Quite possibly the biggest missed opportunity on this list, and one wonders what they could have done with more than a month to prepare.

Oasis – 1995/2004

Take your fucking pick, both are truly humiliating. Especially the 1995 set, which should have been the kind of crowning moment Radiohead would have had two years later, when the songs from the recently released Ok Computer sailed the band into Glastonbury folklore. One would assume that the biggest band in the country swaggering up to Pilton armed with the upcoming (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? would be an even bigger tap-in. However, never underestimate the Gallaghers’ ability to be handed the world on a platter, then piss on it with glee. On both occasions (and arguably, in life), Liam was the problem.

In 1995, he seemed hell-bent on sabotaging the set. Wandering into the photo-pit at the start of ‘Supersonic’ and refusing to get back onstage, meaning the song had to be restarted. Combine that with a freshly solo Robbie Williams making a prize tit of himself at stage left in a desperate attempt to be cool and the whole thing becomes deeply cringe. 2004 might be worse because Liam wasn’t trying to sabotage the show in the same way; he just sang like a dying vacuum cleaner because that’s what he was capable of at the time. Yet, neither of them is the biggest flop in Glastonbury history. That dubious honour goes to the one ego bigger than both Gallaghers combined.

Kanye West – 2015

God, what a horrible, sour moment to end a really fun list on. At the time, I remember the sheer amount of back-and-forth about this set. Some said it was ponderous, grating and in some cases, outright amateurish. Though that was mainly due to the nearly ten minutes of technical difficulties both preceding and following the appearance of a cherry picker that West performed on for ‘Touch the Sky’. On the other hand, some said that it was provocative, progressive and uncompromising, just like the man himself. While it is true that some art needs time to be truly apprecated, a lot of art needs time for people to get their head out their arse and call a spade a spade.

The set was atrocious. The few moments of transcendence were almost always cut short before they could truly take off, and then what you’re left with is the one thing that Ye almost never is: Boring as fucking sin. Never-ending auto-tuned rants about nothing in particular, berating the backstage team onstage, a baffling appearance by Bon Iver to sing a slew of low-tempo, hookless dirges from the otherwise impeccable Yeezus—everything you could call a hit cut off at the halfway point to audible groans from the audience.

At the time, Ye had enough clout for people to make excuses for him, to complete the patterns that the man was too bored, rich and satisfied to actually complete for himself. He’d made too much great music for it to be this bad; there must be something here that we’re missing? Nope. Now the guy continues to systematically JK Rowling himself out of any good will he ever had, so we can look back on this absolute trainwreck for what it is: an utter waste of time and energy, just like the man himself.