Broadsheet round-up: The last knockings

This is an emergency message: Christopher Howse, are you alright? The Telegraph's virgin-in-a-tie last posted just after lunch yesterday, and hasn't been heard of since. We fear he may have been sacrificed in a distant corner of Worthy Farm. Or, worse, succumbed to the spirit and is, even now, heading onto the next festival in a camper van, naked except for daubings. And his tie.

In the Telegraph proper, Tom Horan suggests that Babyshambles were "compelling" (perhaps you had to be there), the Klaxons "all outfits and no content was about the sum of it".

It's a measure of how much stuff goes on at Glastonbury that even with the breadth of the internet, you still miss stuff. Horan, for example, tells us that Lily Allen sprung a surprise:

Her bright and breezy ska sound and acerbic delivery were a treat, and to top it all she produced Terry Hall and Lynval Golding, two of the founder members of Coventry band the Specials, who had not played together since the 1980s. They did their timeless first single Gangsters and the hillside was transformed into a riot of silly dancing.

Good lord, bringing on the Specials? It's like Ronald McDonald giving a job in the kitchens to Mrs Beeton.

Is the spirit of the festival fighting back against the 2007 wheel-heeled attendees? The Times reports that the people who splashed over a thousand pounds to hire a teepee for the weekend ended up getting splashed themselves, as the teepees peed:

Unlike traditional tepees, which have a fire in the middle to keep the damp out, Glaston-bury’s tepee village is banned from lighting fires for safety reasons. The problem is usually overcome by placing a “rain cap” over the hole, but families who thought they had paid for a premium service were told that there were only a handful to go around the 300 tents.

Kevin Stockton, 49, a water maintenance consultant, also found that most tents were not fitted with waterproof groundsheets, so he was soaked not only from above but from the soggy ground beneath. “We’ve been flooded out every time it has rained,” he told The Times. “About 5 or 10 per cent of tepees have rain caps. When we asked reception why they couldn’t give us one, they said that they didn’t predict the weather was going to be so bad.”

It's hard to feel sympathy for someone who would pay so much for a posh tent. The irony is that a thirty quid job from Millets would probably have kept everyone nice and dry.

Over in the Guardian, Alexis Petridis weighs the weekend's peformances:

Saturday night's headliners offer an intriguing study in opposites. The Killers offer pyrotechnics, ruthlessly efficient mainstream indie rock hits and the steely, unwavering professionalism of a band abundantly aware of how a successful Glastonbury headlining slot can affect album sales in the next financial quarter.

Over on the Other Stage, meanwhile, havoc reigns. Whether or not Iggy And The Stooges really fit with the Glastonbury ethos is a matter of some debate. The reconstituted punk pioneers are rightly legendary, but the violence and glowering negativity of their music seems at odds with the Glastonbury vibe of bucolic togetherness and abundant good cheer.