Neil Young says he won’t play Glastonbury in 2025 because it has become a “corporate turn-off”
While the line-up of Glastonbury 2025 is still a closely guarded secret, one name you can strike off your potential headliners list for the world’s most legendary music festival is Neil Young – the legendary guitarist revealing that the heavy involvement of the BBC in Glastonbury now led him to pull out of negotiation to appear at Worthy Farm.
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In a recent post on his website, the 79-year-old legend wrote that he had been looking forward to playing Glastonbury next year, describing it as “one of my all-time favourite outdoor gigs” but that interference from the BBC – the UK’s state media organisation which broadcasts the festival live every year in the UK – has put him off.
“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,” said Young. “It seems Glastonbury is now under corporate control and is not the way I remember it being.”
The BBC has been broadcasting from Glastonbury since 1997, and Young most recently headlined the festival back in 2009, where the guitarist only agreed for a small sample of his set to be broadcast live on the BBC.
“Neil’s management agreed to let TV and radio broadcast five songs as they watched and listened to his performance. They believe in the live event and retaining its mystery and that of their artist,” the BBC said at the time.
“They have decided to make one song available online over the weekend to give a flavour of his set. That’s Rockin’ In The Free World and that’s their decision.”
While Young gives no details about why he chose to pull-out this time around, merely stating that he feels that it’s “a corporate turn-off, and not for me like it used to be” it seems likely that that issues around the broadcast of the headline set – either on TV or online where the BBC hosts a huge archive of legendary performances on its iPlayer streaming platform – were a sticking point.
Young has plenty of form for railing against technological ‘innovation’ in the music sphere – he famously created his own music player and download service, Pono, as he believed iPods and mp3 formats were ruining the quality of recorded music.
He also got involved in a long-running beef with Spotify – removing his music from the platform in 2022 over its deal with Joe Rogan and the latter’s promotion of anti-vaccine rhetoric. Young later called on Spotify employees to quit “before it eats up your soul”, but returned his music to the streaming service in 2024 claiming that, Apple and Amazon had “started serving the same disinformation podcast features I opposed at Spotify” so there was no point continuing to boycott the world’s biggest music service over it.
Young returned to touring after over a decade last year – he initially planned to return to touring with Crazy Horse in the summer, only for an unspecified health issue leading to the tour being cancelled. He finally returned to the live sphere headlining Farm Aid in September with his new band, The Chrome Hearts – featuring organist Spooner Oldham, guitarist Micah Nelson, and bassist Corey McCormick and drummer Anthony LoGerfo from The Promise of the Real.
Young isn’t the only act rumoured to have rejected Glastonbury recently – Oasis were forced to deny rumours they’d headline Glastonbury or any other festival shortly after their reunion was announced, with various reports citing the low fee acts are offered to perform at the festival as being partly responsible. Liam Gallagher himself later claimed they wouldn’t play the festival because it was “full of drips“.
The only act confirmed for 2025 so far has been Rod Stewart, while Nile Rodgers let slip that disco legends Chic will be performing at the festival – though that hasn’t been officially confirmed yet.
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