After Dua Lipa and Coldplay's sleek and efficient sets, Glastonbury's Sunday night headliner had a tough act to follow. After a rumoured appearance by pop queen Madonna fell through, the slot eventually went to US R&B star SZA. One of the most-streamed artists in the world, she's a vibrant, confident performer, whose complex, messy dissections of modern relationships have endeared her to millennial fans.
But their passion failed to ignite any magic on the Pyramid Stage. The star drew the smallest audience I've ever seen for a Glastonbury headliner, in more than 20 years of coming to the festival. It didn't help that, for at least the first half an hour, her microphone was both distorted and muffled - an issue for an artist whose appeal lies in the precision of her lyrics and the beauty of their jazzy vocal runs.
The 33-year-old also committed the festival sin of failing to address the crowd. Her only interaction in the show's first act was to ask if any of her "day one" fans were present. "You know I need you, right?” she said, perhaps acknowledging that this was not her natural audience.
By the time she got to her biggest hit - the darkly comic murder fantasy Kill Bill (1.9 billion Spotify streams) - people had already drifted away to watch sets from The National, James Blake and London Grammar elsewhere on the site. That's not to say that SZA put on a bad performance, or that the thousands who stayed to the end of her set were disappointed.
She has spectacular vocal comma.