"It’s so day-glo, coke binge, shell suit wearing, '80s kitsch that you wouldn’t be surprised if Timmy Mallet turned up onstage." The 1975's Glastonbury headline set is as every bit as wild, weird, wired and wonderful as you'd expect

Patrick Bateman would be having a whale of a time. The notorious, fictional 80s murderer from Bret Easton Ellis’ controversial novel American Psycho loves his pop to be pure pop; Huey Lewis & the News, Phil Collins, excessive, commercial, decadent, aspirational. A style of music that was never cool, and was butchered to death in the '90s by grunge the same way that Bateman would butcher his co-worker Paul Allen with an axe.

But this evening, the sophistipop renaissance that started in the 2010s is complete as The 1975 headline Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage for the first time. Somehow, these weird little nerds from Manchester have repackaged Deacon Blue, Hue & Cry, Living in a Box and myriad other long forgotten, 80s yuppie-pop bands and successfully sold them to the modern youth. And tonight is their crowning moment of glory.

As the band slink on to a saxophone solo (a fucking SAXOPHONE SOLO!) and strike up Happiness, the high-pitched squeals are deafening. The robo-synth beats, the neon throb of the lights, more sax… MORE FUCKING SAX, it’s so day-glo, coke binge, shell suit wearing, 80s kitsch that you wouldn’t be surprised if Timmy Mallet turned up onstage and started bopping the band over the head with a plastic hammer.

The only thing that stops it from looking like a Thompson Twins performance on Top of the Pops from 1984 is frontman Matty Healy. The divisive lead singer has got a bit of the Bateman energy about him; we never really know if what he’s saying is genuine, we can’t really work out what sort of thoughts are skittering through his mind, behind that furrowed brow and mop of floppy, unkempt hair. There’s an idea of Matty, some kind of abstraction, but we never see the real him.

He turns up with a fag in his mouth, swigging a pint of Guinness between vocal parts. Is it a deliberate attempt to look “rock and roll”? Is he a tortured artist? Is this some sort of post-ironic, meta deconstruction of the rock star archetype? Who knows, but as he swaggers around, occasionally being really funny (claiming sincerely to be a poet, before playing Chocolate with the lyrics on the screen deliberately mangled into gobbledegook is a legitimately funny piece of self-sabotage), and occasionally being incredibly annoying (making a speech about not making political statements due to there being “too much” politics everywhere is lame and inherently political. You daft tit!), you can’t help but feel, you know, something. Which is more than you get with most pop stars in the modern era.

The 1975 have a stage set that basically looks like a side mission in GTA, they’ve got a mouthy frontman, they play music that has much more in common with Spandau Ballet than anything “rock” related, style over substance then is it? Well, see, here’s the thing… they’ve also got some really brilliant pop tunes that could go toe to toe with any of the biggest artist they ape. If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know) could swallow Duran Duran whole, Sex would kill The Killers, Love It If We Made It batters INXS, The Sound whams Wham. And even though the energy does dip around the middle when The 1975 decide to spend a bit too long in full power ballad mode, theirs is a set that is breezily fun, knowing, arch, full of personality and with a tonne of danceable bangers.

By the end the band, Healy in particular, look overwhelmed and exhilarated by the whole experience. They just had to thrill a lot of people.