Justice live at Glastonbury 2024: finely tuned stagecraft from true dance veterans

Last month, NME asked French dance dons Justice how they were feeling about tonight’s closing performance on Glastonbury’s West Holts stage. “There’s such a long gap between every tour and every album that we always feel that we start again from zero,” replied Xavier de Rosnay, who went onto fret: “What’s the scene? What are the expectations of people?”

There are no signs of this trepidation at this perfectly crafted show, whose audience seems to bear every flag on site, many of the flag poles flashing with lights that could only hope to compete with the display onstage. De Rosnay and his bandmate Gaspard Augé stand adjacent to one another at decks that looks like nothing less than the hull of a spaceship. Before long a fair few audience members are, presumably, reaching the outer limits too.

The light show is utterly bedazzling, the stage adorned one minute with TV screens that pop like flash bulbs and then lasered with red beams that resemble something you’d expect to encounter up at Arcadia. NME described the duo’s long-awaited recent fourth album ‘Hyperdrama’, which was subject to lashings of pre-release acclaim, as a five-star “blockbuster” that “meets the hype: flashy, over the top and keen to make a spectacle”.

The same could very much be said of this gig, which offers crowd-pleasing moments such as the chant-along that accompanies ‘We Are Your Friends’, as well the proggy likes of ‘Safe and Sound’ – with scything slap-bass line shakes the ground.

The 2008 Justice documentary Across the Universe depicted the wheels coming rapidly off the band during their troubled US tour, and the duo told NME in that aforementioned interview that they’re more “studio guys than stage guys” because they don’t have “the charisma of Mick Jagger or whatever”. What they do have, though, is an immaculately tailored show that could only result from two decades of sonic adventures. The band say nothing – they were never going to bring out Tame Impala‘s Kevin Parker, who appears on the new album, or make a speech about the general election – but their stagecraft speaks loud and clear for itself.

Of course, they bow out with the immortal ‘D.A.N.C.E’, the only track that could do – ahem – justice to a show like this. Bubbles float across the audience, the lights onstage stutter as if resisting the end of the night and a couple stood near NME savour the moment with a snog. Here was that fabled “Glasto moment”.

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