Olivia Rodrigo loves to bust out her rock moves, so it makes sense that she’s reviving one of the old-school classic-rock traditions: the live album. Live at Glastonbury (A BBC Recording) captures her onstage this summer headlining at England’s most legendary festival, where she was universally acclaimed as the hit of the weekend. It’s a twin-vinyl testament in the mode of Kiss’ Alive!, Neil Young’s Live Rust, or Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive!, available in magenta or periwinkle. But it’s a lot more than just a tour souvenir. It’s a double-live-gonzo coronation moment for Olivia as the truest rock & roller of our moment, a master of every move whether she’s serving pop-punk bangers or piano-ballad weepers.
From start to finish, from “Obsessed” to “Get Him Back,” she rampages through a 90-minute set, stomping in her Doc Martens and winning over this notoriously tough crowd. The Glastonbury moment that went viral came when she surprised everyone by bringing out the Cure’s Robert Smith to duet on a couple of his classics. “He’s perhaps the best songwriter to come out of England,” she announced. “He is a Glastonbury legend and a personal hero of mine!” The goth elder was positively beaming from ear to ear—not a sight you see every day. But when they mesh for “Just Like Heaven” and “Friday I’m in Love” here, it’s just like a dream.
Live at Glastonbury could serve as a greatest-hits compilation, for an artist with only two albums—yet one who’s already sitting on top of a classic songbook at 22. It documents her 2025 tour of rock festivals around the world, with her full-on punk attack. Her original Guts tour was already a fantastic pop show, as seen in last winter’s Netflix special. But for the 2025 version, she ditched all the fussy theater-kid energy and reinvented herself as a bloodthirsty rock & roll animal, red in tooth and claw, with her kick-ass female band. That energy comes across loud and clear on Live at Glastonbury. She seizes the role of upholding the Nineties feminist punk legacy — when she and her band kick out the jams, they update the feral grunge fury of L7 or the Breeders or (Olivia’s childhood faves) Babes in Toyland into something fierce and new.
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This tour definitely deserves a live testament, and Glasto captures Olivia in her peak of rock-star glory. “I’m so excited that I’m so excited that we were able to make this vinyl to act as a little time capsule of this performance,” she writes in her gatefold liner notes. “The set was probably the most exhilarating 90 minutes of my life.”
Glastonbury is one of England’s most cherished music traditions, a place where legends are made or broken. Olivia first played there in 2022 at the tender age of 19, confessing that she’d previously never even been to a festival, let alone played one. But she proved her Britpop fangirl credentials by bringing out Lily Allen for “Fuck You,” kicking off the current Lilyssaince. She also named each individual judge on the U.S. Supreme Court responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade that weekend, and led a chant of “We hate you! We hate you!” As a California girl who grew up idolizing England misery pin-up boys like the Smiths and the Cure, she understands the Glasto spirit. Before she headlined this year’s festival, she was seen in the crowd enjoying the Pulp set, sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders and screaming along as Jarvis Cocker sang “Common People.”
She begins with “Obsessed,” a bombastic explosion of paranoid rage and petty jealousy, going from a whisper to a scream — it says a lot about Olivia’s musical ambition that she dares to open her set with this one. But the energy level never flags, as she leads massive sing-alongs of her stripped-down intimate ballads “Driver’s License” and “Happier,” her Eighties synth-pop raves “So American” and “Love Is Embarrassing,” her Pavement-style drooper “Favorite Crime.” It’s a trip to hear a quarter-million voices belt the vulnerable poetry of “Vampire.” But the big climax comes on Side D, as she signs off with a four-song barrage of pop-punk ragers: “Brutal,” “All-American Bitch,” “Good 4 U,” and “Get Him Back.” (If what you crave in a live album is a knockdown finale, it’s up there with the “Clock Strikes Ten” ending of Cheap Trick at Budokan). She’s never sounded so unrelentingly upset.
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“One thing that you guys should know about me is that I fucking love England!,” Olivia tells the crowd, in her introduction to “So American.” She explains her love for pub culture (“I love how nobody judges you for having a pint at noon”) and the sweets. “True story — I have had three sticky toffee puddings since I have arrived at Glastonbury.” But her favorite thing about England? “As luck would have it, I also really love English boys!” She charms the crowd with the story of how she wrote “So American” about her beau, actor Louis Partridge. “I wrote this next song while I was falling in love with this boy from London,” she says. “I would make fun of him for eating a jacket potato with beans inside of it, and he would make fun of me for pronouncing things very American. “I’m headlining Glaston-berry,” like it’s a berry. So I took all of our little inside jokes and I made a song out of it.”
Her band keeps the aggro level high for all four sides. Guitar heroes Daisy Spencer and Arriana Powell revel in their spotlight solo showcases — in one of the show’s awesomely flamboyant moments, Olivia would crawl down the catwalk during “Bad Idea Right” to kneel before the guitarist and worship her six-string majesty. It’s a classic piece of old-school rock show-biz, yet she made it feel fresh and dramatic.
But the emotional highlight comes when Olivia sings with another one of those English boys close to her heart, Robert Smith. (“Just Like Heaven” and “Friday I’m In Love” have already been released as a stand-alone single.) O-Rod always loves to team up with her heroes, ever since she joined Billy Joel onstage a couple of years ago to do “Deja Vu” and “Uptown Girl.” She made it a specialty of her summer tour — one of the most joyful live experiences of 2025 was seeing David Byrne join her onstage at New York’s Governors Ball, for the Talking Heads’ classic “Burning Down the House,” ending it with a long, hilarious, and touching dance-off. They made it a poignant celebration of the sheer love of music-making. When she headlined Lollapalooza in Chicago, she brought out Weezer for a memorable duet on “Buddy Holly.” There’s no denying it: Olivia singing the line “you need a guardian” to Rivers Cuomo is definitely a sign of the times.
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She’s a longtime Cure superfan — who can forget the footage of teen Olivia in the car belting “Boys Don’t Cry”? — so both stars bring pure enthusiasm together. After they sing “Just Like Heaven,” she calls him “the coolest, nicest, most wonderful man ever.” Smith’s known for not always suffering fools gladly, but for any hardcore Cure freak, it’s heart-melting to hear him have so much fun onstage, grinning over at her as he sang, “I’ll run away with you.” It’s a tribute to the strange but beautiful long-running bond between mopey English rock boys and the SoCal sad girls who love them. Olivia even posted a backstage photo of them doing shots together, which was so American of her.
Fans can always hope for more OliviCure collaborations — love to hear her sing “One Hundred Years” or “Lullaby,” just as it would be a treat to hear him croon “Happier.” But their “Just Like Heaven” stands as a cross-generational moment for the ages. Like everything else on Live at Glastonbury, it shows why Olivia’s at the top — and why she’s here to stay.
