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But Kylie isn’t Mumford & Sons. We gave so much money to Taylor; surely people are ready to give the rest of their money to our greatest ever pop star?
Some might question if a 55-year-old singer is the answer to enticing the all-important under-35s set back to Splendour. These people clearly don’t know the word “icon”.
It seems wild to say that a performer who did Better the Devil You Know in 1990, Love at First Sight in 2001, and Get Outta My Way in 2010 is at the peak of her powers, but that’s the pull of Padam Padam. The song’s TikTok success introduced Kylie to a new generation of pop fans, and reignited the synapses of those of us who’ve taken her for granted for decades. The fact that she’ll be pulling from almost five decades of hits for her Splendour set is mind-boggling.
Kylie performs at Glastonbury Festival in Somerset in 2019.Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
Some might also question whether pop music works in festival surroundings, so conditioned as they are to looking at guitars while stomping around in dirty mud feet.
But pop music is a unifying force; overseas festivals, like Coachella and Glastonbury, have increasingly understood this. Before Taylor did Eras, Beyonce’s 2018 set at Coachella was considered a generation’s defining live experience; in the UK, meanwhile, Glastonbury has made pop a regular fixture on its bills from Billie Eilish to Lil Nas X to, yes, even Kylie.
In fact, Kylie’s slot at Glastonbury in 2019 was the most-watched Glastonbury performance ever at the time, and received five-star raves from the likes of The Guardian and NME (even though Nick Cave and Coldplay’s Chris Martin interrupted her pop perfection).
People, including Kylie herself, were in tears during her set. Speaking to You magazine about it a year on, Kylie – who was originally supposed to headline at Glastonbury in 2005, but had to pull out due to her breast cancer diagnosis – said it “felt like this massive acknowledgement of me as a performer”.
That should feel like a knife to our hearts, Australia. She’s ours and we let some English festival validate her as an artist first. So $192.63 seems a fair price to cover all that shame. Kylie and shame, that’s what’s going to save Splendour.
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