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The weather was mixed but who cares? Beyoncé got the biggest crowd ever seen at the Pyramid Stage, hip-hop showed the hoary guitar bands a thing or two  and Michael Eavis sang ‘My Way’. Julian Owen sends a postcard home from Glastonbury 2011.

Glastonbury 2011 was not an easy one to define. Blazing sunshine and hard-baked ground, lengthy dousings of rain and troublesome mud, performances from a welter of past headliners, joy and death, it was like the festival’s full history rolled into a single year. Anyone asking for “a bit of everything, please” will not have been left disappointed.

Pre-festival, all the talk was of U2, the band whose singer has done more than most to raise the profile of the Drop The Debt campaign in support of the world’s poorer countries, yet whose shifting of financial operations to the Netherlands made them partial tax exiles from a close-to-broke native Ireland. In the event, both their appearance and the accompanying protests were something of a damp squib. Paul Simon drew a greater Pyramid crowd in his lowly Sunday afternoon slot, and Art Uncut’s “U Pay Your Tax 2″ balloon was torn down by security within minutes. The subsequent pinning of protestors against a fence was, to say the least, ugly.

No, if a single artist can claim 2011 as their own, it’s Beyoncé. Venue has never seen a larger Pyramid gathering. From its vantage point in the back-right corner the crowd it surveys is vast, its weight necessitating something that never happens: every last person is on their feet. It’s not only the scale that confirms her queenly status. As the artist herself observes: “A girl, a woman, a young lady has not headlined for 20 years. This is history for me.”

But that’s Sunday night. Let’s go back to Thursday, and a singer singing an oft-covered song with more justification than most: in the Rabbit Hole Karaoke, Michael Eavis is singing ‘My Way’. It’s a little bit muddy. A six on the mud-o-meter, we’d suggest, confirmed as Venue witnesses a girl stride across firm theatre field ground so’s her friend can snap her standing in a tiny puddle of Glastonbury’s smoothly liquefied finest. A splendid force of volunteer hands are helping nervous travellers over the smooth wooded curve of Arabella Churchill’s bridge.

Friday is the cruellest day. The site is close to dry following Thursday’s sharp early morning shower, the weekend forecast shines bright and then, at 2pm, it begins to rain. Never hard, never even anything to take shelter from, but incessant and mud renewing. Mocking rain.

Like ducks out of water, there’s something intrinsically funny about the sight of policemen in wellington boots. Immaculately uniformed, their natural air of authority is rather undermined by the pair of rubber tubes causing them to enter the world of the ungainly waddle. Truly, Glastonbury is the great leveller. Across the weekend – and Sunday morning’s discovery apart (of which more later) – Avon & Somerset’s finest reported a good festival. The number of arrests might have been up on last year, but the number of reported crimes was down. And the force provided a ‘Dixon of Dock Green’-ish “Mind how you go” presence via their Twitter feed, @Policeatglasto. Sample: “Can hear Rumer on the Pyramid stage up here in the Police Compound, sounds amazing. Enjoy and stay safe.” Presumably the 140-character limit left them insufficient space to explain what they feared the easy listening purveyor might do...

In previous years, The Park’s ‘special guest’ slot has seen the site awash with rumour. Not this. Everyone knows it’s Radiohead tonight, Pulp tomorrow. The former opt for unveiling a tranche of new material, and – concluding ‘Street Spirit’ apart – leaving those hoping for a singalong disappointed. But as Mike White notes in our online band reviews, “they weren’t officially on the bill at all, so let them play their new stuff and sod the proles.”

Saturday dawns and Venue takes itself to the Green Fields because, even in years far worse than this, they remain just that. We avail ourselves of a mug of coffee from the Craft Field’s Buddhafield Café – a real, solid mug, oddly warming in itself – plant down on a bench and lose ourselves in the rhythmic back and forth of saws, surgeon-like application of chisels and aroma of freshly revealed wood on pedal-turned lathes. Like the Cajun band throwing together an impromptu set in the corner of the field, it gives the lie to those who’ll insist “Glastonbury? I caught it on the telly.” No you didn’t. Not even close. It’s as accurate a gauge as watching a CCTV feed from the fountains in the centre of Bristol, declaring it “a quiet night in the city”, whilst riots rage in Park Street, Stokes Croft and St Werburghs.

The People’s Frontroom in the Croissant Neuf field looks mighty inviting with its plush, padded – padded! – upholstery. But alas, the sign behind the cordon of red tape reads ‘Closed for Drying’. Still, every cloud and all that: if we’d sat there we’d have missed The Boat Band on the Croissant Neuf stage and their utterly beauteous, Unthanks-recalling, scale-straddling harmony. The stage’s line-up board takes the prize for Most Pointed Note Of The Weekend Award: “We would just like to point out that all these artists PAY THEIR TAXES!!” On our way back down, the Frontroom is lazily packed with loungers. The site is drying out.

You need downtime of course but, as ever, the more you move the better the weekend gets. And thank insert-your-chosen-deity-here that we didn’t miss Janelle Monáe, energising a sometimes lethargic West Holts crowd from front to back. Immaculately chosen covers alongside pointers to the future for both soul and funk – never mind an object lesson in how to sequence a set, drill a band, and stage a show – make her a vivid highlight. For viewers beyond the site too, we later learn: top trending topic on UK Twitter and the festival’s biggest post-show sales surge on Amazon, up 4,928%. A day of two halves for an act whose tour bus caught fire on the way to the fest.

Elsewhere, there’s delight and disappointment with Pulp’s greatest hits set in The Park – the gates are locked at a heaving 30,000 within, leaving plenty more without – and Coldplay surprise no one. Venue is off to Arcadia and faces a choice: take the favoured route up the rail line and straight into the frustration of queue central, or walk around to come in from the other side. This we do and get in without breaking stride. Meticulously kept notes revealed that we happened upon “towering Ballardian architecture”, “honeycomb corridors of delight”, “TUNES!” and “put down your pen, mister, you’re missing the point”.

On Sunday morning an eerie scene confronts breakfast seekers in the hospitality compound between the two main stages: police, ambulance, and a large square of blue and white Do Not Cross tape. Half an hour earlier, the body of Christopher Shale, chairman of David Cameron’s West Oxfordshire Conservative Association, had been discovered in a portaloo. Events take a turn for the faintly surreal as the breakfast bar DJ opts to float Elvis’s ‘Crying in the Chapel’ across the near-silent tableau. As we went to press, an inquest was opened and adjourned by the East Somerset coroner at Wells town hall. It was told that there was no suspicion of foul play, and asked for futher toxicology tests after the results of a post-mortem proved inconclusive.

So to Beyoncé, via Paul Simon proving he’s even more mellifluous live than he is on record, and a day of glorious unbroken sunshine. If her set was the weekend’s biggest, a couple of others may prove more important. Because as far as Glastonbury’s future is concerned, before the festival returns from its 2012 year off it should note that in 2011 hip-hop laid one mighty big calling card. Previous years’ shows from Jay Z and Snoop Dogg felt tokenistic. Wu Tang Clan on the Pyramid and Big Boi headlining West Holts did not. It’s getting serious. It should get more so, for it adds a whole new ingredient to Glastonbury’s already peerless brew. A significant section of festival attendees were left cold at the wearily predictable prospect of U2 and Coldplay headlining sets. Compare and contrast the cringe-at-the-memory moment of Bruce Springsteen throwing his mic to the crowd and the ensuing embarrassed murmur with the high voltage, to-a-person response to Wu Tang. Everything deserves its place here – that’s the point – but the grandiose guitar bands need to shift up a little and share the floor. Glasto has always evolved, and should do so again. The call for Public Enemy to headline the Pyramid in 2013 begins here.

Copyright Julian Owen 2011

Pic credit: Ellen Doherty - www.duchessphotographic.com