Glastonbury Festival’s Green Futures field welcomed Jamala, a Eurovision Song Contest winner, to cap an extraordinary weekend of independent music.
Jamala, who won the 2016 contest for Ukraine, delivered a powerful performance to a packed Toad Hall stage in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Jamala’s music combines elements of the Tartar folk tradition with contemporary pop, as she wowed the audience with her vocal range. A day after her performance on the Toad Hall stage, she joined fellow Ukrainians DakhaBrakha on the Pyramid Stage.
Her performance in the Green Futures field followed a barnstorming set by Gangstagrass, a US bluegrass rap group that sets genre boundaries ablaze. Mixing hip-hop with bluegrass, Gangstagrass is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based producer and rapper Rench. The band have been touring the UK with singer-songwriter Rodney Branigan, following a successful run in the 2021 edition of America’s Got Talent, where they reached the quarter finals.
Over at the Lizard Stage, Glastonbury-goers were treated to a raucous solo performance from Jazz Delorean – the showman behind Tankus the Henge, a vaudevillian ensemble that has enthralled audiences across Europe. Old Green Futures favourates including Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman, The Portraits and The Bohemianauts returned to Green Futures, with the latter headlining the Lizard Stage on Thursday night in a show that finished with a rousing accordion-led cover of Creep by Radiohead that had the whole crowd singing.
New acts in the Green Futures field for 2022 included Charango powered trio Mamacha and Swedish pop punk trio The Magnettes.
The Green Futures area of Glastonbury started life in 1989 out of an old bus and has grown to four music stages, powered by solar panels, and in the case of the Mandala Stage, by audience members’ own pedal power.
Beyond the music, the Green Futures field provides a place for activism to flourish. The field’s Speakers Forum hosted the likes of Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam and Labour’s shadow environment secretary Ed Milliband.
Meanwhile, in the Science Futures area, guests at the Futuranium included rocket scientists, experts on climate change and a colony of bees.
The Green Futures field wish to thank Mapex UK for kindly supplying drums for Green Futures at Glastonbury 2022.
Bernard Goyder on behalf of Music Instrument News