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Music

Electrical Storms Hit Glastonbury. Saves everyone from John Newman.

And everything else that happened on Friday

In the early 20th century, rich aristocratic men believed that the testicles of monkeys could provide enormous virility for the male sex drive. While some people would grind up monkey balls and ingested them orally, others would remove the tissue from a live monkey's groin and, in a brutally painful operation, surgically place them in their own ball sack.

I'm told this story (I've no idea if it's true) on a tour of a genitalia museum in Shangri-La. My guide then walks me past a wall of plaster casts of vaginas, and a range of purchasable merkins and arsehole paint, over to a pile of monkey glands that recreate the shape and flavour of the monkey ball tissue. "Except these ones have alcohol in them, two shots in each, they're pretty strong.

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This is Glastonbury - where you can be as surreal, cultured and guttural as you want, as long as, in the end, it leads to you getting smashed.

I spent a lot of Friday in the sunshine wandering to the further reaches of the site, happening on shit like this. I did a bit of salsa class and met a bloke who did heavy metal carvings in wood.

But then I started to feel guilty for not watching any music so I went to see Rudimental on the Pyramid stage. They have about 20 people on stage, two drummers, some horn players, I think maybe some maracas. It's proof, that no matter how many number ones they've had, this lot are still basically a drum'n'bass trumpet jam band you might see playing at a council-funded concert in the park in Bristol and then getting kicked out straight afterwards because they got caught with an eigth. Dispensing with last year's roll call of guest vocalists - Ella Eyre, Sinead Harnett - they're instead got two main singers - a girl that looks like Jaime Winstone with a dodgy bleach job and a bloke with a soul voice so malleable he could probably call up Sam Smith's own mum and she'd be convinced she was hearing her son.

But they can't compete with the electrical storm brewing above them. Long thick zig zags of silent white lightning spark across them. It's the most impressive light show of the weekend. Then, just as John Newman comes out and does a verse of "Feel The Love", some lightning strikes too close for comfort, hitting the ground by the stage, and they cut all the power, apparently on every stage in the festival. By the time they're allowed to power back on it's too late and Newman never gets to return. A silver lining we're happy to take.

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Lily Allen is delayed by the storm but spends the down time filling the stage with light up baby bottles. If you're more than five rows back though, they just look like giant laughing gas canisters. Her stage show is full of drum and bass breakdowns and proper festival singalongs, the "Tesco" and "alfresco" rhyme from LDN given particular gusto. Perhaps envisaging a different set of circumstances in which she'd be playing at the same time as England's second round game, this is a heavily World Cup themed set. She dedicates "Fuck You", a song originally written about Nick Griffin to "Sepp fucking Blatter, you cunt." But the highlight is her own football song "Bass Like Home" with it's jingoistic refrain "Who gave you Shakespeare? Who gave you Lennon? Who gave you Gazza? Twisted your melons." Seems like she's been taking a few songwriting tips from her dad.

I watch one minute of Elbow and it bores us to tears. Guy Garvey is in a plaid shirt whinging about something, give me strength.

MIA's good though, she comes out in a sort of weird gold lame matching suit, complaining that the BBC won't broadcast her set because her dancers are wearing "free Tamil" T-shirts. Someone texts me to say they just saw her say that on the BBC. Her live show hasn't progressed a lot in the decade she's been doing it, but that doesn't mean winding about to "Bucky Done Gun" and "XR2" isn't infinitely better than seeing Arcade Fire swap instruments ever nine seconds.

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What happened next gets a little fuzzy because drugs, but here are some key points:

- The guys at Shangri-La love Noisey. As well as giving us a tour of their site, they've taken some stills from our Big Night Out films and stuck them to their production cabin.

- Jackmaster and Oneman did their Essential Mix live from Shangri-Hell. It started off quite an esoteric and slick mix of weird disco tunes and ended with them just playing a bunch of old 80s bangers, probably off a compilation CD. Either way - it was one of the highlights of the festival.

- Our mate Francessca from i-D climbed inside some bloke's van and took advantage of his hammock, than ran away like a scared child when he came back.

- The Black Butter Records party was a laugh, mostly because there was a guy selling laughing gas with a huge military canister of nitrous, meaning the balloons came out bigger than watermelons. A lot of the party was just people passing in and out of consciousness and then recounting their hallucinations. A lot of them seemed to involve serene lakes.

Tonight: Fatboy Slim! And some other shit we'll let you know about tomorrow.