possible, not just as a performer but as a
“Little Simz is showing the next generation what’s
curator and storyteller, too”
SOUTHBANK CENTRE
“There are no limits for Charli,” says Jim King, CEO of European Festivals at AEG Presents and the man behind Lido. “She has supported at All Points East and crushed it, then at Coachella, she came out and owned it. Her sold-out headline Lido shows everyone is now coming to see her. It only gets bigger for Charli.” Charli XCX is far from the only one about to get their moment. “I think you’d have to go back 25 years to the last time there seemed to be this level of artists,” beams AEG Presents UK CEO Steve Homer. “You’d have Reading & Leeds line-ups where they’d have Rage Against The Machine fourth [from the top], or Slipknot in third, where they had more headliners than they needed. But there weren’t as many festival opportunities then.”
Look at the landscape in London alone, Homer says, and you have events in Gunnersbury Park, Hyde Park, Victoria Park, Crystal Palace, Finsbury Park, the London Stadium and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
musicweek.com
JANE BEESE, THE
“Tottenham has got a ridiculous number of shows this summer and that stadium didn’t exist several years ago, and yet the infrastructure seems to be able to cope with it,” he says. Emma Banks, agent and co-head of CAA UK (winners of the Live Music Agency honour at the Music Week Awards 2024 and 2025), told us back in January that this would be the year of new headliners. Today, she says a plethora of acts have been knocking on the door awaiting their moment, it just took a leap of faith from festival bookers to let them in. “The old guard are still enormous, the acts that have been festival headliners for decades, some of them have moved on and will play their own stadium shows or arena runs,” Banks states. “We’ve talked for so long about, ‘Oh, there’s no new generation of headliners,’ but, quite frankly, if you don’t let an artist be a headliner, they’re not a headliner.”
Banks says that festival promoters had to be brave to force change. “They’ve had to take what may have
The view from the top: (Clockwise from main image) Charli XCX, Little Simz and Sam Fender are among the acts achieving milestones in their live careers in 2025
looked like a risk, but in many cases hasn’t been a risk at all and go, ‘OK, this artist is enormous culturally at the moment,’” she argues. “It’s about reading the room. There’s still room for the classic artists, but if people at a festival are interested in pop, Black music, R&B and not really out-and-out rock bands, then don’t put the rock bands on. Curation is key.” The message is: reflect your crowd.
“Reading & Leeds has never been younger,” Banks says, “and there are more young women there.”
Banks adds that where the call for new blood to headline might have been met with resistance in the past, that’s no longer the case. “It’s about capturing an act at the right moment and making sure
Music Week | 59
PHOTOS: Henry Redcliffe, Max Cisotti/Dave Benett/, Joe Maher, Getty
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