The pandemic is still making the reappearance of live music as near on impossible. Latest lockdown rules have made Lonely This Christmas by Mud an absolute shoe-in for the Christmas number one: but the news is not all bad.
Two announcements for live music that are planning to go ahead are;
Leeds Festivals announced a massive 6 headliners will perform in 2021 without any clashes as a second main stage is added to accommodate an incredible line-up to mark the festival’s return. Headliners Stormzy, Liam Gallagher, Post Malone, Catfish and the Bottlemen, Disclosure, and Queens of the Stone Age will be joined by some of the most exciting talent in rock, indie, alternative, hip-hop, and dance. However, most excitement was generated with two other artists.
Beatrice Laus known professionally as Beabadoobee is a Filipino-born British singer-songwriter. Since 2018, she has released five extended plays under Dirty Hit and has supported The 1975 during several legs of their Music for Cars Tour. She was nominated for the Rising Star Award at the 2020 Brit Awards and was predicted as a breakthrough act for 2020 in an annual BBC poll of music critics, Sound of 2020. Her debut studio album, Fake It Flowers, is due to be released in late 2020. A sample of Beabadoobee’s 2017 debut single “Coffee” was used on Canadian rapper Powfu’s 2019 single, “Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head)”. The song became a massively successful sleeper hit after going viral on the app TikTok in early 2020,[40] becoming Beabadoobee’s first chart entry in her career, both locally and internationally.[41] By April 2020, it had entered the Top 5 in several countries including the UK, Australia and New Zealand. It earned gold certification status in Belgium, Canada, France, Mexico and New Zealand, as well as Platinum or higher in the US, the UK and Italy, a first for Beabadoobee in all regions. Despite the critical acclaim earned
The second is New York trio Sunflower Bean–Julia Cumming, Nick Kivlen, and Jacob Faber–released their second album Twentytwo in Blue in 2018, which skyrocketed into the UK’s Top 40, and quickly followed it with 2019’s King of the Dudes EP, which featured “Come For Me” the band’s biggest single to-date. Since then, the band opened for Bernie Sanders and The Strokes and the band toured extensively with the likes of Beck, Cage the Elephant, Interpol, Courtney Barnett, and more, while also playing countless international festivals. Now Sunflower Bean return with “Moment In The Sun”,
“‘Moment In The Sun’ is about finally recognizing what is important in one’s life, the people you decide to spend it with,” Sunflower Bean explain of the track. “All of these things we distract ourselves with, the never-ending mountain of career climbing, the pursuit of financial success, and the hope that after all that trying you could finally be cool. All of that is meaningless in comparison to one great day, hour, or moment with someone you really love.”
The next live announcement took everybody by surprise. Chart-topping sisters HAIM will be bringing their long-awaited UK tour ‘The One More HAIM Tour’ to Millennium Square for a special outdoor concert on Thursday 24 June 2021 following the release of their critically-acclaimed third studio album ‘Women In Music Pt.II’. HAIM will be joined by synth-pop singer-songwriter Georgia whose second album Seeking Thrills was a Top 5 hit in the UK earlier this year.
Tickets are available at www. cuffeandtaylor.com and
www.millsqleeds.com
No doubt Stormzy performing Blinded By Your Grace at Leeds will become an iconic moment: it might just wash the Mud away!
