Great news for Phoebe Bridgers: she’s booked to play Latitude festival this year. The bad news? The ultra-talented Californian singer-songwriter and queen of Gen-Z indie isn’t headlining. Veteran pop rockers Snow Patrol are, 15 years after they first topped the bill at the very first Latitude back in 2006.
Bridgers is more than capable of headlining a festival. Her live performances are a joy to witness: intimate, romantic and captivating. Others clearly agree. A film of her 2020 gig at Red Rocks in Colorado has almost a million views on YouTube, and her huge online following (1.2 million Instagram followers and compared to Snow Patrol’s mere 227k) is reflected in sold-out shows around the world. Her latest album, the sublime, understated Punisher, received three Grammy nominations and near-unanimous adulation from critics. “Punisher ends with a thunderstorm of manic, discordant brass and drums and a pained scream, the physical culmination of the undercurrent of doom that has lurked throughout,” said The Independent’s glowing review. “But you emerge feeling not deflated but purged. Punisher has the effect of a particularly pummelling massage.” Now tell me that doesn’t sound like it translates to a great live experience?
Yet so far Bridgers appears to have been offered few opportunities. Iowa’s Hinterland festival this summer has the right idea, putting her at the top of the bill, but Bridgers deserves way more. Latitude organiser Melvin Benn – boss of Festival Republic, which also runs Reading and Leeds, Download and Wireless – has an iffy track record when it comes to booking female headliners. At Latitude there’s a huge disparity, with rare exceptions including Grace Jones in 2009, Lily Allen in 2014, and Solange in 2018. Allen was only drafted in at the last minute after Two Door Cinema Club dropped out due to illness. When the new lineup was announced, she was promptly bombarded with online abuse, by people who were unconvinced she was a fitting replacement. Misogynists? Like the ones who went after Florence + the Machine when she replaced Foo Fighters at Glastonbury in 2015? Surely not!
Latitude booking Snow Patrol as a headliner over Bridgers is indicative of the laziness – not just inherent misogyny – that pervades much of the UK festival scene. But maybe the onus shouldn’t just be on festival organisers. Maybe musicians should be calling this problem out, too. I can’t think of a single example where an artist has been booked to headline, only to turn around and say another artist deserves it more. Rather than booking the same old acts to headline for the fourth or fifth time, festival organisers should take a gamble, like Glastonbury did with Arctic Monkeys in 2007, booking them to headline the Pyramid Stage before they’d even released their debut album. Alex Turner was just 21. They smashed it.
This isn’t about pitting artists against one another, but about asking musicians to be more considerate of the opportunities they’ve been given, and the ones their younger contemporaries might be missing out on. Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody was 29 when he first headlined Latitude with his band, just two years older than Bridgers is now. What’s the harm in telling bookers, “Actually, we’ve been there, done that. How about someone new?”
There is hope, however. Reading and Leeds 2022 have booked Dave, Megan Thee Stallion, and Halsey, along with rock staples Rage Against the Machine, Bring Me the Horizon and Arctic Monkeys. Lower down the bill are more brilliant young acts; Little Simz, Wolf Alice, Glass Animals and Fontaines DC. It might be one of the most balanced lineups R + L has seen in years. All six will undoubtedly put on a brilliant show, and the festival gets to remain true to its rock roots while saluting future stars of the genre. But there’s way more progress to be made. If one of the most popular new artists in recent years can’t score a headline slot, what hope do the rest of them have?
