U2 to Headline 2010 Glastonbury Festival on June 25th

Tweet

Thirty years after the release of their debut album Boy, U2 will finally headline their first Glastonbury Festival. The organizers of the famed British fest revealed Bono and Co. will take the main stage to celebrate Glastonbury's 40th anniversary on June 25th, BBC reports. U2 will perform at the festival's opening night during a brief window of free dates in the band's 2010 leg of their North American U2 360° Tour.U2 will leave their giant "Claw" stage setup behind for the performance and instead perform to a sold-out audience of over 177,000 people on Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage.

U2's 360° Tour: photos of the band's opening night.

"The 26-year-old rumor has finally come true. At last, the biggest band in the world are going to play the best festival in the world," Glastonbury organizer Michael Eavis said in a statement. "Nothing could be better for our 40th anniversary party. And there are even more surprises in the pipeline..." The set will mark U2's first festival performance in 25 years, BBC reports, although bassist Adam Clayton appeared at the fest in 1989 to perform one song with the Hothouse Flowers. "The band is really looking forward to it," U2's manager Paul McGuinness told U2.com.

Look back at three decades of U2, onstage and off.

With a four-day gap between gigs on U2's 2010 North American tour, the band will fly to Glastonbury following a June 23rd concert at Edmonton, Alberta's Commonwealth Stadium and return to the States in time for their June 27th gig at Minneapolis' TCF Bank Stadium. (FYI: A similar five-day gap between 360 dates occurs June 7th to 12th, in case you wanted to begin churning the rumor mill about U2 playing Bonnaroo, which takes place June 10-13th.) As Glastonbury is one of the most storied festivals in music, the 2010 fest sold out all of its 177,500 tickets in less than 24 hours before any performers, including U2, were announced. The 2009 Glastonbury featured headlining performances by Bruce Springsteen, Blur and Neil Young.

Related Stories:
• U2 Announce First Batch of 2010 North American 360 Tour Dates
• Riding With U2: Watch the Band Prep For 360 Opener in Chicago
• U2 Beyond the "Horizon": Plans for Next Album Take Shape

• 
  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
• 
  MOVIES The 10 Best Zombie Movie Scenes
• 
  TV The Most WTF? Moments of 'Mad Men'
• 
  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter