Neil Young has dropped out of the 2025 edition of the U.K.’s famed Glastonbury Music Festival, citing the BBC’s “corporate control” as the reason he and his band, The Chrome Hearts, will not appear at the event in June.
“The Chrome Hearts and I were looking forward to playing Glastonbury, one of my all-time favorite outdoor gigs,” Young wrote on his website. “We were told that BBC was now a partner in Glastonbury and wanted us to do a lot of things in a way we were not interested in,” the singer continued. “It seems Glastonbury is now under corporate control and is not the way I remember it being... We will not be playing Glastonbury on this tour because it is a corporate turn-off and not for me like it used to be. Hope to see you at one of the other venues on the tour.”
Young and The Chrome Hearts hadn’t been officially announced as part of Glastonbury, though the “Heart of Gold” singer previously headlined the festival in 2009. However, the BBC’s partnership with Glastonbury is hardly a new arrangement, having begun almost 30 years ago in 1997. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Young had been scheduled to perform at the 1997 edition of Glastonbury but was forced to cancel his set after cutting one of his fingers while preparing a sandwich. It would be another 12 years before Young made his way to the festival.
Since then, the BBC has considerably ramped up its Glastonbury coverage, with up-to-the-minute news about performances and artists dominating the publicly funded corporation’s outlets during the five-day festival. Still, some fans have complained that the influx of coverage is more an advertisement for the British Broadcasting Corporation and its presenters than balanced coverage of the music festival.
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