Glastonbury Canceled Again, Casting Doubt Over Europe’s Music Festivals

“It’s despatched a really unhealthy sign,” Olivier Garnier, a spokesman for Hellfest, one among France’s largest occasions, mentioned in a phone interview. Hellfest hosts about 60,000 heavy metallic followers every year and its 2021 iteration, scheduled for June, is already offered out.

On Monday, Hellfest sent a three-page letter to Roselyne Bachelot, France’s tradition minister, asking for certainty on whether or not the occasion can happen, and suggesting that the pageant may check attendees for the virus upon arrival.

On Tuesday, Bachelot dismissed the concept that testing can be sufficient to permit festivals to happen. “It’s fanciful!’,” she told a French parliamentary committee, including that festivals have been an apparent potential website of transmission with individuals singing, ingesting and dancing collectively.

The image will not be fully downbeat throughout the continent. In Denmark, festivals are getting ready to go forward, mentioned Esben Marcher of Dansk Dwell, a physique that represents pageant organizers, in a phone interview.

“In fact Glastonbury’s information is an enormous sign to the remainder of Europe,” he mentioned, “however my sense is that constructing its website is a a lot bigger and longer course of than for others.” Glastonbury takes months to arrange its fields to stage the occasion, Marcher mentioned. Danish occasions might be arrange in a couple of weeks.

In December, Roskilde, Denmark’s largest pageant scheduled for June, announced rapper Kendrick Lamar as a headliner. Signe Lopdrup, Roskilde’s chief govt, mentioned in an electronic mail that she was “cautiously optimistic” about it going forward.