There are many words you could use to describe the launch of the Co-op Live Arena in Manchester earlier this year - none of them good - but the upshot of its chaotic opening was that a slew of big-name artists were forced to postpone or relocate their shows.
One of these was Olivia Rodrigo; due to play at the venue in May as part of her Guts World Tour, she had to cancel two gigs because the arena wasn’t ready. These have now been rescheduled for 30 June 2025 and 1 July 2025 (tickets for the original shows remain valid for the new ones), dates that just so happen to fall right after the Glastonbury Festival, which runs from 25 to 29 June.
Inevitably, this has immediately led to intense speculation that, because we now know that Rodrigo will be in the UK in performance mode around that time, she’ll be adding a third date at Worthy Farm.
This could, of course, be a case of people putting two and two together and coming up with five, but Rodrigo was already among the favourites to get a headline slot - her 2022 set on The Other Stage was considered one of the standouts at that year’s festival - and the theory makes a lot of sense.
Leaving aside the bolted-on Manchester dates, Rodrigo is currently the final throes of the Guts World Tour, performing a run of shows in Australia up to 22 October. After that, there’s the small matter of a Netflix Special; directed by James Merryman, this was filmed at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles and lands on the streaming platform on 29 October.
