Who might headline Glastonbury 2021?

Have you still got the summer festival blues? You’re not alone if you have, because most probably do. By this point, festival-goers would have done Glastonbury and be gearing up for Reading, maybe even heading up north for Blue Dot or abroad for something with a European flavour. Instead, everyone has done nothing at all. It’s a good job that people are able to start talking about next year’s festivals because if they couldn’t do that, they’d undoubtedly start worrying about their sanity.

Nothing is set in stone yet for next year. There’s also been some press coverage that suggests Glastonbury 2021 will be canceled in the same way 2020 was. That reporting is inaccurate and misleading. What founder Michael Eavis actually said in the interview he gave was that planning for next year might turn out to be “wishful thinking” but that he and everybody else involved in making the festival happen would “continue to move Heaven and Earth” in the attempt to deliver it. With that in mind, festival fans are choosing to be optimistic and believe that Glastonbury 2021 is going to happen. Here are the speculations about who might be on the legendary Pyramid Stage as headline performers.

Of course, booking an ideal Glasto lineup is a matter of personal taste, so if you find the following predictions objectionable and want to express your own ideas, that’s what the comments section is for!

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift was the draw for Glastonbury 2020. She was the most advertised act, and she was scheduled to bring the festival to a close on Sunday night. In other words, she was going to be in the ultimate headline slot. She might not be to everybody’s taste, but it would seem cruel to deny her the chance to close the festival just because 2020 was a terrible year. Aside from being one of the biggest-name performers on the whole planet, Swift would arrive at Glasto 2021 as an even better act than she would have been in 2020. She’s used this year’s downtime to write and release the album Folklore, with its new folk-indie sound and more mature lyrical content. If Taylor Swift was good enough to headline in 2020, she’s good enough to headline in 2021. Making this happen should be priority number one for the Eavis family.

Fleetwood Mac

Every year, Fleetwood Mac gets linked with Glastonbury. Every year that they don’t play, the chances of an appearance ever happening get smaller and smaller. Given that they’re a favourite band of not only Michael Eavis but his daughter Emily, it would be a terrible shame if too much time passed, and Michael never got to see his musical heroes perform at the festival he created more than 40 years ago. With several former members of the band now deceased and Lindsey Buckingham no longer performing with them, time is rapidly running out. Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood and John and Christine McVie are all still in the band, and so while they still nominally look and sound like a Fleetwood Mac lineup, this might be the best (and last) chance to grab them for an appearance.

KISS

Glastonbury was always more of a rock festival than a pop festival in the past, and what says rock better than KISS? The band is currently in the middle of what’s being marketed as their final ever tour, but we’ve been here before with KISS and farewell tours. The tour is scheduled to run on most of the way through 2021, and there’s enough space in it during June to fit in a Glastonbury appearance. What better way to mark their final year in the business than a headline slot on the main stage of the world’s most famous music festival? Not only that, think of the sight of 250,000 people in KISS makeup. It would be the final great merchandising achievement of a rock band that’s already excelled at it. You can buy KISS dolls, KISS whiskey, KISS candy and play the official KISS online games. You can say what you want about their age, but the majority of younger bands and performers don’t have their own game at Online Slots websites. Well, OK, the Village People and Saxon have their own online games too, but the less said about that, the better. The point is that this is KISS, and they deserve to be at Glastonbury.

Aerosmith

While talking about KISS, why not mention Aerosmith too? Somehow, people have managed to make it through forty years of Glastonbury without Aerosmith making an appearance. The boat appeared to have been missed on this when the band “retired” in 2017, but they quickly got bored of that and came back to take a residency in Las Vegas in 2019. Although they were never officially confirmed for the 2020 Glastonbury event, they had a date in Glastonbury, England listed on their 2020 gig schedule before everything got called off, and there isn’t another venue there for them to play apart from the festival. If they agreed to come once they’d presumably agree to come twice, and Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing is the perfect song to close the main stage on one of the three evenings on offer. It’s possible to do it, it makes sense to do it, so let’s just do it.

Elton John

KISS isn’t the only legendary musical act that’s midway through a last-ever tour at the moment. British pop-rock legend Elton John is also on his travels for the final time with his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour. At the age of 73, he’s prepared to say goodbye to live performances forever – but not until 2021. That gives us one last chance to see Elton close out the show at Glastonbury. The fact that this happened already is, to be honest, mystifying. Elton said in a 2015 interview that he’d never been asked to play Glastonbury, and couldn’t comment on whether or not he’d be willing to play until someone made him an offer. No one can’t think of anyone more suitable or deserving to sit in the spotlight of the Pyramid Stage with his piano to say a golden goodbye to his career and so while this might be a sentimental choice, so Elton John is more appropriate a selection than anybody else.

The editorial unit