Glastonbury 2022 Line-Up Strives for Gender Equality
This year’s billing is honouring the festival’s commitment to gender equality, playing host to over 50% female musicians ranging from hip-hop to hard rock.
The Glastonbury Festival has just announced its full list of performers for the 2022 festival, which is set to be held June 22nd until June 26th in the rolling hills of Somerset’s Worthy Farm. Music buffs and eager concertgoers will have something to look forward to this year, as the event prepares to host 80+ musicians, with a line-up including the likes of Sir Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lamar, who will join teen sensation Billie Ellish in headlining the iconic Pyramid Stage.
Ellish’s sophomore album ‘Happier Than Ever’ was nominated for seven Grammy Awards last November. Source: Joseph Okpako/WireImage
Glastonbury 2022 is a welcome return to normality for the highly anticipated event, which has had to postpone its regularly scheduled festivities for the past two years due to COVID restrictions. In an interview with BBC sounds, co-organiser Michael Eavis, who runs the event alongside his daughter, expressed his excitement for the festival’s big comeback. He said: “We’re going to run a really brilliant show this year, and it’s going to be the best show ever I’m quite sure.”
The post-pandemic festival, which in previous years, has been known to attract up to 200,000 visitors, will be a fantastic platform to promote promising female talent and celebrate already well-established women in music within an industry that’s often oversaturated by men. In a 2020 interview with BBC Radio 1, co-organiser Emily Eavis said that the event’s future “has to be 50/50” in terms of its line-up’s gender split. She continued: "Unless you consciously change and really address it, then it will stay the same because we're always going to be flooded with male acts."
Emily was named music publication NME’s ‘Godlike Genius’ in 2020, dedicating her award to female musicians making a name for themselves.
Glastonbury’s last fully-fledged festival in 2019 was subject to heavy criticism from disappointed music fans, who grew tired of the event’s lack of female representation and underpromotion for some of their biggest names – many of who happened to be women. Dissatisfied by her relatively low placement in that year’s billing, five-time Grammy award winner Janet Jackson went to the trouble of editing 2019’s poster to position her name above male headliners Stormzy, The Killers and The Cure.
Jackson was initially mocked for repositioning the poster, but the singer’s bold move has since become more poignant as female artists are moved further into the limelight.
The Reading and Leeds Festival also stirred up controversy when their 2020 line-up contained only 18 female performers in a list of 91 names, meaning only 20% of that year’s acts were women. The event’s problematic billing inspired ‘The 1975’ frontman Matty Healy to pledge, via Twitter, that he would only play festivals that hosted a certain number of female and non-binary musicians. Urging other large-scale music events to get on board, Healy told The Guardian: “When it comes to big socio-political issues and governments are involved, sometimes action or protest can just be ignored. But when it comes to the music industry, we can change that. It’s not a geopolitical nightmare: it’s the music industry, and it’s something that if everyone gets on board, we can fix.”
BBC Radio 1’s Annie Mac expressed her disappointment with Reading and Leeds’ 2020 line-up on Twitter, letting followers know she was “disheartened” by the festival’s “blatant lack of want to represent women”.
But the Primavera Sound Festival had already proven, a year before, that a well-balanced gender split was entirely possible. The 2019 event, hosted in Barcelona, became Europe’s first-ever large-scale festival to meet the 50/50 quota, as over half of its 226 performers were women. Headliners included R&B trailblazer Erykah Badu; multitalented actress and musician Janelle Monae; and female fronted Stereolab, who, until then, hadn’t performed together since 2009. In a statement, Primavera said: “Equality in the line-up between men and women, a stylistic eclecticism that is patently obvious and the drive to constantly take risks to connect to the times we live in are central concepts of the Primavera Sound 2019 line up,", adding that this should be “the new normal” for festivals everywhere.
Primavera celebrated “the new normal” in their stylish teaser for 2019’s festival. The event is scheduled to return this June, featuring 413 different artists.
Female talent should not be hard to come by for Glastonbury’s showrunners, especially considering the wide and ever-growing musical landscape Britain has right on its doorstep. Little Simz, for example, is currently revolutionising U.K. hip-hop as a woman in a typically male-dominated genre, taking home ‘Best New Artist’ at last month’s BRIT Awards. Charli XCX, since her ‘Boom Clap’ days, has helped coin the term ‘hyperpop’, which subsequently inspired floods of new artists hoping to get in on the genre’s early noughties infused eccentricity. FKA Twigs continues to defy genre, pulling back on her typically avant-garde sound earlier this year for new mixtape ‘CAPRISONGS’, which was unexpectedly packed with potential chart-toppers.
Succeeding Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis, Twigs took home this year’s Godlike Genius award at London’s O2 Academy Brixton.
Fortunately, Glastonbury has heard its audience’s outcry for more women, as this year’s festival does meet the gender balance Emily Eavis was hoping could be achieved two years ago. Of its 89 confirmed performers, 48 are either female musicians or acts that involve women in some capacity. Headlining Sunday’s ‘Legends’ slot is ‘Supremes’ lead vocalist Diana Ross; while female-led bands like HAIM and TLC will also be playing; as well as upcoming British female performers like Arlo Parks, Beabadoobee and Welsh singer/songwriter Cate Le Bon. This is an exciting prospect for the future of British festivals and will hopefully set the tone for others to follow in Glastonbury’s footsteps.
You can find information on Glastonbury 2022 tickets here, while resales are set to happen on March 27th.