Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA to headline Glastonbury

Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA will headline this year’s Glastonbury Festival, organisers have announced.

It marks the first time in the event’s history that female acts have taken two of the three headline slots.

And country star Shania Twain will play the coveted “legend slot” on Sunday afternoon.

The singer told BBC News she was “over the moon” to be taking part. “Everyone always talks about it being the pinnacle of festival slots,” she said.

“The only advice everyone gives me is to bring my wellies,” she continued, joking that she might “get myself a little pony and ride around the festival” instead.

Other acts on this year’s line-up include Afrobeats star Burna Boy, who is taking his first stride onto the Pyramid Stage; and award-winning rapper Little Simz, who will play immediately before Coldplay.

“This is the only show I’m playing this year,” she told BBC 6 Music. “All roads are leading for me to Glasto, so I’m really taking time to craft a show, to make it as much of an immersive experience as I can. Just bringing vibes to the farm, really.”

Thirteen-piece boyband Seventeen, meanwhile, will become the first K-pop group to grace the main stage – an indication of how dominant the genre has become over the last five years.

More traditional Glastonbury acts include Idles, Disclosure and The National – all of whom will headline the Other Stage, the festival’s second-biggest arena.

Sugababes, who shut down the Avalon field with a reunion performance in 2022, will return – this time on the much bigger West Holts stage.

And pop stars Avril Lavigne, Cyndi Lauper and Camila Cabello will make their Glastonbury debuts.

Tickets for the event sold out in November within an hour of going on sale. A resale of cancelled and refunded tickets will take place in April.

But the focus is always on Glastonbury’s headliners – and there’s always a fierce debate about who is and isn’t worthy of the slot.

Some fans may feel let down by the absence of Madonna, Bruce Springsteen or Stevie Wonder, who had all been heavily rumoured to appear – but the final line-up displays an ambition for Glastonbury to diversify after the all-male, all-rock headliners of 2023.

Dua Lipa last played the festival seven years ago, with a Friday afternoon slot on the smaller John Peel stage.

Although the tent was packed by in-the-know pop fans, the singer’s star had yet to explode: her breakout hit New Rules was still a month away from being released, and she closed her set with a crowd sing-along to what was then her biggest song, Be The One.

She was booked to headline the Other Stage in 2020, before the festival was called off due to the Covid pandemic. Since then, the singer has become a world-class performer, opening both the Brits and the Grammy Awards this year.

Her headline set on the Pyramid Stage is likely to focus on her new album Radical Optimism, which was announced on Thursday evening.

The singer has called it a “confidently optimistic” record, inspired by her love of psychedelia, trip-hop and Britpop.

Coldplay, meanwhile, are Glastonbury veterans. They first topped the bill on the Pyramid Stage in 2002, and this year’s set will see them become the first act to headline Glastonbury five times.

They haven’t played there since 2016, however, with Chris Martin previously telling the BBC he’d been put off by “hurtful” comments about his ubiquity at the festival.

The singer’s comments came in 2019, after he had popped up as a surprise guest during sets by Stormzy and Kylie Minogue.

“I saw a tweet afterwards which said, ‘You can always rely on him to come on in a tracksuit and ruin everything’,” he recalled.

“So I was like, you know what? A), I should work on my trousers; B), I shouldn’t be online; and C), maybe just go and watch Glastonbury for a year or so.”

The self-imposed ban seems to have been lifted – with Glastonbury the only European festival date on Coldplay’s record-breaking current world tour.

SZA is perhaps the biggest unknown quantity among this year’s headliners. Born in Missouri and raised in New Jersey, the singer – real name Solána Imani Rowe – trained in marine biology before launching her music career.

But she’s had an incredible year – with her second album SOS spending 10 weeks at the top of the US chart, and its signature single Kill Bill spending almost six months in the UK top 40.

She beat stars like Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Miley Cyrus to the Brit Award for best international artist earlier this month, and won three Grammys in February.

Her recent arena tour was praised as a “vigorous, confident, theatrical and intimate” tour de force by the New York Times, and it’s quite possible she could steal the show from her more established co-headliners.

Meanwhile, Shania Twain will come to Glastonbury fresh from her third Las Vegas residency, and is promising to pull out the stops to make her legend slot a memorable one.

“I’m doing the hits – the songs that everybody knows and the versions that everybody knows,” she told BBC News. “It’s just going to be a big sing-along party.”

And she admitted it had been hard to keep the booking under her (cowboy) hat.

“It’s been a couple of months now, so it’s a relief to tell everybody. I think it’s going to be a real stomper.”

We’ll find out when Glastonbury opens its gates on Wednesday, 26 June.

Other acts announced on Thursday included:

Pyramid Stage

Other Stage

West Holts

Woodsies

The Park