Embrace - submitted by : Polly

Embrace
Pyramid Stage
20:20 25th June 2000

I'm ashamed to say we didn't really make much of an effort on Sunday. We hovered round the Pyramid Stage for Jools Holland, ignored Willie Nelson then sat in a hammock drinking Red Bull for a while while the friendly hammock-salesman took our photo and tried to persuade us that we really needed hammocks to take back to uni.

But Embrace was a band I really wanted to see, having done my A-level revision to their accompaniment, and we managed to squash ourselves reasonably near the front. I've read a few derogatory reviews of this performance, so I'm going to counter them - I had the most fantastic time of my life. Having got our arms up in the air, we discovered it was impossible to get them down again, and every time the crowd moved behind us we couldn't help but surge forward, then back again. Every now and then an open bottle would fly over our heads spraying us with water, and a couple of over-enthusiastic crowd-surfers fell on us. I found myself singing along to songs I don't recal ever having heard before, which I think is greatly to Embrace's credit: they don't yet have any "anthems" as such, like many Glastonbury acts, so to get that level of participation was great.

Thank you, Embrace. I must admit I'm not your number one fan, but you were fantastic!

review submitted by:
Polly