The 1975 at Glastonbury review: A success story, just a complex one

Posted On June 28, 2025June 28, 2025

Whether you like them or not, The 1975 are a recent British success story – perhaps one of our biggest, at least the biggest since Arctic Monkeys. After forming in secondary school in Manchester, the band have climbed the ladder. On Friday night of Glastonbury 2025, they reached the apex – and they were deeply moved. 

There is something about The 1975 that seems to make people very angry, and always has. They are an oddly divisive band for a group that generally has soared to the top off the back of indie bangers built to please a crowd. That’s what makes them a great booking. Even if you don’t know these songs, or even if you don’t like them, your feet will start to move. They’re infectious, they’re catchy. But in the odd cloud that hangs over them, plenty of people won’t let themselves surrender to that, causing the mass Twitter moan when they were announced.

On the ground was a different story, though. Before the band came on, I heard them. A group behind me moaned that they thought Matty Healy was a dick and they didn’t know the songs. Three songs in, by the time the band played ‘Love Me’ and Healy yelled to his audience, “In 2025, with zero irony, here’s a guitar solo”, they were cheering, they were moving and they’d essentially merged with the group of more stereotypical 1975 fans to my left; now a mass of all ages moving and singing together.

Within a few songs, the crowd where I was standing was dancing, really dancing. Dancing to the point where I was worried about the broken toe I’ve been nursing, but not worried enough to stop.

In that moment, The 1975 were the perfect headline band. After last year’s choices felt flat as the festival tumbled into a pop hole and refused to do what would have been the brave and bolder thing of letting Fontaines DC headline, the booking of the 1975 goes a way to rectify it. Here is a huge indie-rock band, ticking the box of having good guitar music on a stage traditionally made for that. But also, here is the festival backing one of the country’s home-grown new greats. On Friday night, The 1975 became the first new British band to headline the festival’s main stage since 2014, over a decade. 

Sure, if they wanted to be bolder, they could’ve let the band headline back in 2014 when their debut had made them new and bright ones to watch, but they were booked for 14:45 instead. More so than that, they could have let them headline in 2016 when they were even bigger, but played an early evening Other Stage set while Coldplay rolled out another tired headline performance. They’re a band that Glastonbury could have backed early and given them their own Arctic Monkeys 2007 moment – but I suppose it’s better late than never, and the band seemed just as moved now as they ever would have been.

By now, they’re no stranger to headlining. They sell out huge tours, play huge venues and are comfortably one of the biggest bands around. But the visible emotion on the group’s faces as Healy stood there genuinely shaking with nerves, obsessively repeating, “Thank you so much for coming to see our band,” and “We love you”, it was a reminder of just how much this moment means. That’s a moment the Pyramid stage has been lacking for a while. None of the headliners there last year seemed all that fussed.

Despite being too big to be deemed a band the festival took a chance on, The 1975 being clearly emotional about this achievement should serve as a reminder to the Eavises about what this means, the power they hold to make a band’s dreams come true and the way that reflects back, as even the naysayers behind me were eventually cheering, loud, as Healy’s face appeared on screen with tears on his cheeks. 

Now let’s get to the elephant in the room, which, as it always is with The 1975, is Matty Healy. He’s the reason why the band is always deemed as ‘divisive’ or ‘conflicting’. He’s the thing people tend to hate about them if they fall into that camp, whether it be for his hyper-ironic lyrics or his sleazy rockstar on-stage persona. On the Pyramid stage, he delivered an odd apolitical speech. “I want you to know it’s a conscious decision, we don’t want our legacy to be one of politics. We want it to be that of love and friendship,” he started, “I’m not trying to be too earnest, but you can go out into the world, and there’s loads of politics everywhere. I think we don’t need more politics. We need more love and friendship.”

It was a confusing moment. The 1975 have always been a political band. They are still a political band as few songs after that speech, they played ‘Love It If We Made It’, a protest song through and through, with video clips on the screen of recent attoricities accompanying lyrics about Trump, Kanye West and the state of the world. A portion of merch sales is being donated to War Child – a true deeds, not words decision.

They also performed ‘People’, a punk song that is very much their Sex Pistols moment and another protest cry as Healy screams his thoughts on apathy, bawling, “Wake up, wake up, wake up / We are appalling and we need to stop just watching shit in bed / And I know it sounds boring and we like things that are funny / But we need to get this in our fucking heads / The economy’s a goner, republic’s a banana, ignore it if you wanna.”

The statement was odd, yes. But like everything else about The 1975, perhaps it asks for a little more nuance. This is a band who was recently arrested for protesting anti-LGBT+ laws. This is a band who collaborated with Greta Thunberg. This is a band that has many political songs and a long history of matching them with on-stage statements, being seen at protests and putting their money where their mouth is with donations and merch schemes — it’s the main reason the statement felt so out of sync. To believe them to be genuinely politically apathetic is minimalistic. It asks the age-old question of what a band should do – speak or entertain? Or more so, is it not good enough to be acting on their political beliefs? In a world with so much talking, surely actions should speak louder than words, on the main stage or otherwise.

There’s a good chance that, as they achieve their own dream, The 1975 don’t want their huge moment to be fogged by being an insufficient mouthpiece. As the four members who started this whole thing back at school hugged and cried at the end, perhaps Healy’s albeit odd and poorly worded statement was simply about that, and about that fact that just for that night, they didn’t want to tick boxes or make statements or hide behind the role they should play, they just wanted to be the band, the boys, the friends. Whether that represented a wasted platform or a position of choice is perhaps in the eye of the beholder.

The entire story of The 1975 is one of contradiction. It’s something they’ve never shied away from and something Healy clearly lives in. Their discography sways between intense sincerity, shown on stage last night in ‘Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)’ and ‘Couldn’t Be More In Love’ and then the boyish desire to be the ultimate rock and roll frontman, right there in ‘Love Me’, ‘The Sound’ and then them taking the piss out of themselves during ‘Chocolate’. But Healy clearly wanted to drop it all on the Pyramid Stage and just be.

Shaking, crying and clearly being unable to believe his eyes at this huge achievement, it was a new peak for a modern British success story, a decade-late return to the festival confirming that, and as the whole field moved, the band’s deserved place there was proved – whether you like them or not.

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