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BBC announces details of The Biggest Weekend
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 30 January 2018
The BBC has announced more details about the big music festival it is staging in May because, you know, Glastonbury is on a fallow year and Glastonbury is the only music festival in the UK, which means we are all relying on the BBC to fill the void.
If only someone else somewhere in this country of ours would think to set up a music festival that the BBC could champion and cover and support. But no, all you lazy fuckers continue to refuse to stage innovative, invigorating and awe-inspiring music events, so the BBC is going to have stage its own thing to have any live music to broadcast this summer.
With that in mind, it’s put in calls to Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Noel Gallagher, Snow Patrol, Beck, Billy Ocean, Manic Street Preachers, Courtney Barnett, Nigel Kennedy, Eliza Carthy & The Wayward Band and Public Service Broadcasting. Between them they’ll play at four sites around the UK on the bank holiday weekend at the end of May.
Because, yes, the BBC’s Biggest Weekend festival is a truly national event. It takes place in Coventry, Perth, Swansea and Belfast. So that’s England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all covered.
Which means the UK’s community of brilliant, risk-taking, game-changing independent festival promoters – oblivious of where they are based – will all be equally fucked over by an empire-building, silo-inhabiting, arrogance-infested British Broadcasting Corporation that would much rather compete with the music industry than champion it.
Now, live from inside that arrogant silo, here is Empire Builder In Chief, Bobby Shennan, with some waffle: “The Biggest Weekend is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime festival for everyone that loves music, whether they are at the venues in person or enjoying the whole spectacle of performances being streamed through iPlayer along with all our TV, radio and digital networks. Wherever you are in the country, you will be part of the biggest music event, with the widest selection of musical genres, the BBC has ever put on”.
