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Festival legends and where to find them
Rounding up the big game of festival season 2025 – from Tom Jones and Iggy Pop to Neil Young and Alanis Morissette
Robin Hood is a legend. King Arthur is a legend. So is The Loch Ness Monster and Dracula. Robbie Williams isn’t. Or is he? When you move from Radio 1 to Radio 2 to a Hollywood biopic starring a CGI chimpanzee, something happens to your celebrity that crosses an unmarked line – an elevation that lifts you a bit higher than all the other names on a festival poster. It’s supernatural.
Suddenly you’re TikTok famous. The mums and dads love you. Your Sunday teatime slot is too busy to get into. You’ve got T-shirts in Primark. It’s star power plus time plus the meaningless of modern language that births a new “legend” every few years, and the 2025 festival season is teeming with them if you know where to look…
Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts
11 July, BST Hyde Park
![Neil Young - Heart of Gold (Live) [Harvest 50th Anniversary Edition] (Official Music Video)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WZn9QZykx10/0.jpg)
You can argue about all the other names on this list except this one. Neil Young’s name was writ in legend from the very beginning; weaving folk and rock into something new and old that helped changed music forever. Today he’s settled into his role as the counterculture’s elder statesman with exactly as much ease as you’d expect: unpredictable, honest and wholly original. This is the real deal.
Stevie Wonder
Thursday 3 July, Lytham Festival and Saturday 12 July, BST Hyde Park
Plot the history of 20th Century music on a Venn diagram and Stevie Wonder will be somewhere in the middle, jamming to ‘Higher Ground’. Around him orbit the spheres of R&B, pop, soul, gospel, funk and jazz that he’s either directly or indirectly influenced since the early 60s – with his own towering back catalogue propping up one of the most remarkable careers around.
Find Stevie Wonder tickets here
Alanis Morissette
Friday 4 July, Lytham Festival
When 10,000 people all hold up a spoon in reference to one niche line from a song you wrote 30 years ago, you know you’ve crossed some kind of fame threshold. Alanis Morissette’s career has ebbed and flowed gently over the years since Jagged Little Pill, but somewhere along the line made another seven terrific albums, played God, and turned in a historic Glastonbury set that lifted her legacy somewhere even higher than the Pyramid Stage.
Find Alanis Morissette tickets here
Iggy Pop
Various dates
Surely Iggy Pop isn’t real anyway? Half man, half sinewy punk demon dog, Iggy Pop might very well be an actual legend – summoned into being by John Cale and David Bowie one night in a Berlin basement as they danced around a little pile of hot tin foil. Still vibrating with the kind of raw energy that would terrify most younger headliners, Iggy is the kind of anomaly that makes festival stages shake. You’ll have to travel a bit to see him this summer, but it’s worth it.
Jeff Lynne’s ELO
Sunday 13 July, BST Hyde Park
The band that answers the question, “what would have happened if The Beatles didn’t break up?”. Jeff Lynne picked up the baton from Let It Be in 1970 and took it interplanetary – progging up art pop into something that defined a new era and then some. Fifty five years later, the spaceship is finally landing for the last time this summer – with BST Hyde Park marking the very last time ‘Strange Magic’ and ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ will ever be played live.
Judas Priest
23 July, Scarborough Open Air Theatre
Okay so Judas Priest aren’t quite ready for the Sunday teatime slot just yet, but they’re also only one Stranger Things soundtrack away from Gen Z immortality. Or maybe the kids aren’t ready for Rob Halford yet – a man so metal he bleeds nails – the Harley-riding, whip-cracking, twin-guitar packing, face-melting monster of rock at the centre of the New Wave of British heavy metal. A legend forged in pure British Steel.
Find Judas Priest tickets here
Sting
Friday 25 July, Latitude
Spotting Sting isn’t easy. Only appearing on stages occasionally over the last 20 years (Live 8, the Oscars, the Grammys, Obama’s inauguration…), it’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to see a full tour. This year he’s spoiled us, though, playing outdoor shows in June along with top-billing at the Isle of Wight Festival – with just one last summer date left, closing out Friday night at Latitude.
Tom Jones
Various dates
That’s Sir Tom Jones thank you very much – Officer of the Order of the British Empire, commander of the most powerful baritone in Wales, bona fide international treasure and owner of over one million discarded panties. The solid gold sex bomb celebrated his 85th birthday this summer, and he’s keeping the party going at parks, castles and racecourses across the UK over the next few months, as well as heading up the last night of Camp Bestival.
Robbie Williams
20 August, Come Together Festival
Not too many other ex-boyband members have made the jump to legend status (probably just Paul McCartney…) but Robbie has more than put the work in. Along with Alanis Morissette who, at the same age, is far too young to have any kind of legacy at all, Robbie Williams has forged one anyway – packing more into his solo pop career than most manage in twice as long. He now commands stadiums, arenas, New Years Eve shows and weird monkey biopics like someone with far more mileage, and he’ll be entertaining Newcastle at Come Together Festival this August.
Find Robbie Williams tickets here
Photo by Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
