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Nile Rodgers and Chic at Glastonbury review – pop’s most reliable band bring the party to the Pyramid

While you might quibble that Chic’s set has become more reliable than revolutionary, you can’t argue with the effects of the greatest pop music ever made on the crowd

And, despite his attempts to reboot the Chic brand with a new album a few years back and a handful of fresh production gigs, Nile Rodgers seems largely content to see out his days in the business of straightforward reliability, simply touring the world playing his old songs. There’s an argument that it’s too good to be rattled out at such speed, crammed into medleys and interspersed with faintly corny interludes in which Rodgers encourages his vocalists to hit ever higher notes and discusses “maximum funkosity” – stuff that’s all a bit at odds with Chic’s original ultra-sophisticated image, the self-styled Black Roxy Music – and his triple-tested patter about his career (“You may not know that I also produced records for other people including Diana Ross, Madonna and David Bowie”: you’re joking, why have you never mentioned this before etc etc). Photograph: Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty ImagesBesides, you can’t argue with the efficacy of what they do, or indeed the sheer profusion of hits, so many that you barely notice that they don’t play Lost in Music or My Forbidden Lover: this is a set in which Daft Punk’s Lose Yourself to Dance counts as a deep cut on the grounds that it was only the second single from Random Access Memories and shifted a mere 1.3m copies as opposed to Get Lucky, which sold 8m in America alone.

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