Glastonbury Festival has announced the launch of its first ever dedicated South Asian area, named Arrivals. The space will play host to British Asian musicians including DJ Ritu, Anish Kumar, Manara, and Nabihah Iqbal and was designed by South Asian cultural institutions in conjunction with the festival organizers. Arrivals will be parked in the Shangri-La area of the festival in Somerset from June 26th to the 30th and promises to offer visitors an immersive audio and visual experience in a “redefined South Asian aesthetic”.
British Asian music and artists have been underrepresented in previous festival lineups, which have featured headliners such as Dua Lipa, SZA, and Shania Twain. Some promoters of the music genre have run small festivals, but nothing has ever been on the scale of Glastonbury. “This is a seminal moment for UK festival culture,” said DJ and presenter Bobby Friction, founder of Going South, an organization that helped bring the space to life alongside Dialled In and Daytimers.
South Asian artists represent a small section of the wider festival music scene, but the industry is beginning to embrace the sounds from this population, particularly those of Punjabi origin. Last year’s Coachella festival featured a host of Punjabi musicians, including Mercury Prize nominee Joy Crookes and Diljit Dosanjh, Ali Sethi, Jai Paul, and Jai Wolf. On Thursday, BBC Asian Network launched the inaugural Official British Asian Music Chart, which aims to make room for British Asian artists on a chart often crowded by Bollywood and increasingly by Canadian acts.
According to organizers, visitors to Arrivals will be “immersed by an audio-visual world coded in solar punk, carnivorous plants, cyborg beasts, and space pirates”. Glastonbury Festival tickets, priced at £355 per person, sold out in under an hour when they went on sale in November. On Sunday, resale tickets became available, but organizers have warned that they are “very limited,” and coach resale tickets for the festival sold out in 18 minutes when they went on sale on Thursday
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