According to many British music publications, David Bowie’s headlining set at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000 is the greatest performance in the history of the legendary event. (NME, ever effusive, called it “the best headline slot at any festival ever.”) But it’s greatest that’s doing the work here, not performance. It’s not individual highlights that make the set so fondly remembered, but the overall gestalt. Like the old saw about climbing Everest, Bowie’s Glasto set mattered because it was there.
By the time he took to the Pyramid Stage, Bowie had spent 15-odd years in the mainstream-music wilderness—first, post-Let’s Dance, making milquetoast megapop no one particularly liked, then rebuilding his reputation with experiments in everything from Pixies-inspired garage rock (Tin Machine) to concept-album Eno-industrial (Outside) to a Nine Inch Nails/Goldie hybrid version of drum ’n’ bass (Earthling). Different people liked these experiments at different times and in different amounts, though never at the level of his 1970s and early-1980s output. (Earthling rules, for what it’s worth.) During much of that period, his greatest hits were largely retired from service in his live sets.
But now, with a generosity of spirit as lush and flowing as his hair—which hadn’t been that long since Hunky Dory—Bowie was back! Resplendently coiffed and backed by a familiar band of musicians (including pianist Mike Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, and guitarists Mark Plati and Earl Slick, all of whom worked with the star for years), the once and future king of art pop was welcomed by the sprawling home-country crowd like Arthur Pendragon returning from Avalon.
The resulting set is an ebullient greatest-hits package anyone who was ever a fan is sure to enjoy, almost automatically. Actually, make that mostly automatically. How Bowie performed songs like “China Girl,” “Changes,” “Golden Years,” “Ashes to Ashes” (which he misremembers aloud as being the most recently recorded song in the set at that point, though he’d already sung “Absolute Beginners”), “Let’s Dance,” and so on is much less important, both historically and to the festival audience, than the fact he was playing them at all. And sure enough, none of these hits—not even the surefire crowd-pleaser “Under Pressure,” which he’d dueted on so memorably with Annie Lennox at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert a decade earlier—do anything more special in this performance than exist.
The band works much better when the material allows it to lean into its sleazy, session-pro sound. “Fame,” the John Lennon lost-weekend plastic-funk collab that seems to leave a trail of slime across eardrums whenever it’s played, sounds as dashing and debauched as ever. Recorded when Bowie was just a few months deeper into both 1975 and cocaine psychosis, the teutonic-occult behemoth “Station to Station” is another standout. Both the off-kilter groove of its main section and the barreling braukeller climax, with its guitar squalls and yelps of “It’s too late!,” feel made for massive crowds. (Which, as far as the Thin White Duke persona of that period is concerned, was sort of the point.) Moreover, hearing Bowie croon Kabbalistic jargon like “one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth” to said massive crowd serves as a helpful reminder that he remained, even then, one of the weirdest people ever to achieve festival-headlining success.