The Reading and Leeds music festival will go ahead at the end of August this year, organisers have confirmed. The news follows yesterday’s announcement of Boris Johnson’s roadmap out of lockdown – with all social restrictions set to be lifted by June 21st pending certain stipulations are met. Among the acts billed for this year’s event are headliners Stormzy, Post Malone and Liam Gallagher, as well as Yungblud, Doja Cat and Lewis Capaldi to name a few. Taking to Twitter, the organisers announced: “Reading and Leeds 2021. Following the government’s recent announcement, we can’t wait to get back to the fields this summer. LET’S GO #RandL21″
READING n LEEDS c’mon you fuckers LG x
— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) February 24, 2021
Tickets for this year’s event have been on sale since late last summer, as festivals organisers correctly forecast the government’s intention of attenuating coronavirus restrictions by August of 2021. After last year’s festival was cancelled with the stagnation of the live sector amid pandemic complications, Reading and Leeds boss Melvin Benn informed MPs that the event could not take place while full scale social distancing measures were in place. However, he added that should mass testing create “an environment where everybody in the space has tested negative in order to gain entry and are therefore unable to transmit the virus to other people,” then live music could resume. Any contingency plans for social distancing measures at Reading and Leeds 2021 are yet to be revealed.
Earlier this year, organisers Michael and Emily Eavis of the Glastonbury music festival – the largest of its kind in Europe – announced the event would be cancelled for the second year in a row – much to the dismay of organisers and fans alike. In a statement published on Twitter, the pair said: “In spite of our efforts to move Heaven and Earth, it has become clear that we simply will not be able to make the festival happen this year. We are so sorry to let you all down.” Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney and Diana Ross were billed as headliners for the cancelled 2020 event, which would have marked the festival’s 50th anniversary.
Despite the Glastonbury cancellation, in early February Rowan Cannon, of festival organisers Wild Rumpus, told a parliamentary committee that smaller festivals could be ‘as safe as Sainsbury’s” this summer should the appropriate measures be imposed. “The idea that the festivals can’t go ahead and be socially-distanced is inaccurate,” Cannon told MPs. “We can absolutely adapt our programming, put infrastructure in place, [and] change the way that we do things, to enable something to happen with social distancing in place.”
