This week on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper profiled pop singer Dua Lipa.
In June, Lipa realized a long-standing personal dream of hers: she performed on the main stage, the Pyramid Stage, of the Glastonbury Festival on a Friday night.
“I’d dreamt about being on that stage my whole life,” she told Cooper in an interview.
“I had written down, ‘I want to headline Glastonbury on the Pyramid Stage on the Friday night,’ being very specific about the Friday night so I could party afterwards,” she said with a laugh.
Lipa’s personal connection to the Glastonbury Festival made the accomplishment even more significant and special for her.
Dua Lipa was born in London. Her parents were refugees from Kosovo who had fled after war broke out in Bosnia in 1992.
When she was 11 years old, the singer and her family moved back to Kosovo. Then, at the age of 15, she convinced her parents to let her move back to London alone to pursue her dream of becoming a pop star.
As a teenager and resident of the UK, Lipa attended the Glastonbury Festival. And as an aspiring artist, her experiences there were formative.
“Dua Lipa had come back to London to break into the music business. And Glastonbury was a big part of that,” Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.
“She started to go to Glastonbury just to be part of it, to hear the iconic performers to feel the energy of the crowd, to party, to meet people…it was a motivator for her.”
For this year’s Glastonbury Festival, Dua Lipa allowed 60 Minutes cameras to follow her before and after her headlining performance on the main stage.
The day before, she visited the Pyramid Stage, wearing sunglasses and a hood, so she could view the stage from the pit area and hopefully stay unrecognized.
“I just wanted to walk the field a bit and see the stage from different angles. And see what other people are going to see me on the next night,” she explained to Cooper.
“This mammoth dream of mine was about to come true. And I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to pass me by.”
60 Minutes cameras were also backstage before the performance with Dua Lipa, her dancers, family and old friends that had worked with her in the early days of her career.
Before heading out on the main stage, she psyched up her dancers with a motivational speech.
“You guys were born to do this…and I feel so lucky to share the stage with all of you. And tonight is just about being present, being yourself and enjoying that,” she said.
In a standout moment from the performance, Dua led a crowd of 100,000 people in singing the chorus to “Be The One.” The song had been released seven years ago, when she was relatively unknown and had yet to become the megastar she is today.
“And everybody knows the words, and 100,000 voices are singing it back to her. It gives me goosebumps to watch it,” Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.
After an incredible performance, Dua celebrated with her dancers backstage. They chanted her name and cheered while she danced in profound excitement.
“You could just see when she got off the stage just how thrilled she was. I mean, she knew she had killed it,” Cooper remembered.
And then Dua Lipa did exactly what she had envisioned in her dream: partied on the festival grounds all night long with her friends.
60 Minutes producer John Hamlin and a camera crew caught up with her again in her RV on the festival grounds the following morning to hear about her night out.
“I just kept going in and out from this really sweaty gay rave to, like, going’ outdoors and just, like, having’ a breather, and jumping’ back into the madness. And then we danced basically until about six in the morning,” she recounted.
Dua Lipa ended the night watching the sun rise from Stone Circle, a gathering spot that resembles a miniature Stone Henge. She said the moment was “really special.”
“Everybody has dreams and envisions things,” Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.
“They rarely come true exactly as you want it to be or exactly as you envisioned it. And I think, for her, that night at Glastonbury was exactly how she had dreamed it might be one day. And what a gift that is.”