Who: Gorillaz.
Where and when: Pyramid stage, Friday 10pm.
Dress code: Nautical. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon both look suspiciously like U-Boat captains.
What happened: Damon Albarn's supergroup has two giant live acts to live up to: not just U2, who pulled out of this slot when Bono injured his back in May, but also Albarn's own Blur, whose emotional reunion at last year's festival was an unalloyed triumph. Both Blur and U2 have a sackful of famous hits to snare the passer-by. It quickly becomes apparent that Gorillaz, for all their charms, do not. Glastonbury crowds are demanding of big moments, and unforgiving of nuance and risk, thus stacking the cards against Gorillaz from the start, and the pacing doesn't help. Apart from Stylo, featuring a mesmerising Bobby Womack, the set is loaded with introspective songs and grinds to a halt all together with a recital by a Syrian ensemble that seems to last longer than Mahut v Isner. There is a time and place for spotlighting virtuosos in unfamiliar disciplines but this emphatically is not it.
Grime MCs Bashy and Kano provide a restorative jolt of electricity and herald a parade of guests you would not usually expect to see headlining Glastonbury 2010. Shaun Ryder and Mark E Smith, seemingly beneficiaries of a Make-a-Wish foundation for raddled northern indie icons, attack their roles on DARE and Glitter Freeze with wonky charisma. Lou Reed, whose monumental cragginess makes Smith look like the face of Esteé Lauder, scrawls a Velvet Underground-style guitar solo over Some Kind of Nature. Yet festivalgoers continue to drift away at alarming rates. Disaster strikes when Albarn urges the crowd to sing along to Pirate Jet, a sombre album track about environmental blight. When few take up his offer, Albarn's face falls and he mouths a desperate "please". Next to the memory of Blur last year, when he cried with happiness at the audience's overwhelming warmth, it is heartbreaking. The moment gives the encore an unexpected emotional charge. The ballad To Binge is devastatingly tender, while Feel Good Inc and Clint Eastwood (the latter featuring a masterful cameo from Snoop Dogg) are joyously cathartic. Clint Eastwood's chorus sounds strangely relevant: "I felt useless but not for long." Albarn holds his microphone out to the crowd and, after a rocky, risk-taking night, finally gets his singalong.
Who's watching: The Albarn faithful, people curious to see which guests will appear (Snoop Dogg? Mark E Smith? Prince Charles?) and U2 fans who haven't heard about Bono's back. But as the set wears on the question becomes: who's still watching?
High point: For the rock geeks, the unrepeatable sight of Lou Reed playing alongside Damon Albarn and half of the Clash. For the hit-hungry punters, the one-two punch of Feel Good Inc and Clint Eastwood.
Low point: A large portion of the crowd on the left of the field spends five minutes watching a man atop a wooden pergola, exposing first his arse and then his penis before descending amid a hail of bottles, a spectacle with which the electro-soul elegance of Empire Ants just cannot compete.
In a tweet: The site of Albarn's greatest triumph is the venue for a humbling encounter with a crowd that demands more tunes than Gorillaz can provide.
• 26 June: Thanks to commenters who noticed the absence of a star rating on this article. One has now been added.
