Glastonbury 2021 cancelled due to on-going coronavirus pandemic

This year’s Glastonbury festival has been cancelled.

In a decision which will undoubtedly cause rock fans concern about the fate of this summer’s more genre-specific festivals, Glastonbury owners Michael and Emily Eavis have been forced to declare that the event has been shelved for another year.

“With great regret, we must announce that this year’s Glastonbury Festival will not take place, and that this will be another enforced fallow year for us,” they say. “In spite of our efforts to move Heaven & 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.”

A full statement has been posted on the festival’s social media channels. 

Following the tragic deaths of nine concert goers during Pearl Jam’s set at Denmark’s Roskilde festival in 2003, Glastonbury largely abandoned booking hard rock and metal acts for a number of years, but Metallica, Foo Fighters and Muse have been among the Pyramid Stage headline acts at Worthy Farm in recent years. 

News of the festival’s cancellation has, understandably, promoted concerns among UK rock fans about the fate of this summer’s Download festival, given that the UK’s biggest hard rock and metal festival is scheduled to take place on June 4-6, three weeks ahead of what was supposed to be Glastonbury weekend. The event organisers have responded to one such query on Twitter, saying that they “hope to have news soon” and are “continuing to work behind the scenes to get ready for Download festival this summer.”