FESTIVAL ANNOUNCEMENT

September 01 2019

Lancaster Music Festival regrets to announce that due to circumstances beyond its control its main stage and headline acts will move to new venues as renovations to the Castle will go on beyond the dates of the festival. The Duchy of Lancaster have recently informed us that Lancaster Castle will not reopen to the public in September and will remain closed until the end of October 2019. This is due to health and safety concerns following the discovery of electrical cabling buried underneath the lower courtyard.

Since being informed, the festival team have been working with the Duchy, City Council and other venue operators to find alternative locations for their main stage events which will be headlined by local heroes Massive Wagons, The Lovely Eggs and Lowes.

Due to the number of tickets involved the festival has been forced to split the headliners between two venues. The Friday night Massive Wagons gig will now take place at The Sugarhouse, an 1100-capacity indoor venue that has hosted major touring acts in the past, whilst the Saturday and Sunday all-day events will take place at nearby Kanteena, an exciting new music, events and street-food space in the Canal Quarter. Kanteena will house an indoor stage and bar, an outdoor beer garden with food and drink stalls and will also host music on Friday night of the festival. Plans are also in place to extend the Kanteena main stage line-up into the early hours with after-party events on all three nights.

All existing tickets and passes remain valid and the Massive Wagons VIP packages, including the Lancaster Castle tour with the Wagons, will go ahead as scheduled.

Festival director Stuart Marshall commented, “Ironically, this has occurred in the year when we have sold our highest number of advance tickets and in fact we had sold out one of the nights of the festival for the first time. However, we’re really excited about the alternative venues that we’ve been able to secure which will be fantastic additions to the Lancaster music and events scene. Lancaster Music Festival is all about promoting the vibrant music scene in the city, its many acts and venues, so we’re absolutely delighted to be able to support the launch of a new 800-capacity music and events space in the Canal Quarter. Not only that but we’re also bringing live music back to the Sugarhouse, at which the likes of The Stone Roses and The Charlatans played in the past. Lancaster has been lacking music venues of this size for some time so it’s great for the city that bigger touring acts will be able to perform here once again and right in the city centre too”.

The main stage headliners will be supported by a diverse mix of local, national and international acts from Europe, Australia and the USA. Returning to the festival will be 2017’s big hit Uptown Monotones from Austria - who won a fans poll on social media to select the international act they most wanted to see return to the city - and festival favourites Sensory Hoverload from New Jersey.

Aside of the main stages, the five-day city-wide event will take place in over 40 venues with more than 400 performances and is expected to attract an estimated 75,000 people into the city centre. Musicians of almost every genre will be featured from brass bands, choirs and classical quartets to heavy rock and punk. The festival is taking music into an even wider mix of venues including a string of ‘Busk Stops’ and there will also be secret gigs in secret venues performed by secret acts!

The city’s squares and streets will be filled with family-friendly music and activities, with music and dance workshops in Market Square and the Melodrome stage in Sun Square. There will be musical street theatre and performances all around the city centre. Watch out for the return of the mobile piano-playing Musical Ruth who will be bringing her (?) irreverent performance to the city’s streets!

The Storey, a creative hub in the heart of the city which also houses the Printroom café, will be the festival hub with a full schedule of music performances, a festival market and workshops for all ages. An exhibition of music-related art, photography and film under the title Art of Music will be co-hosted by The Storey and King Street Studios.

The full festival line-up will be announced in the Official Festival Guide which will be available from participating venues and other outlets in early September.

Tickets and passes for all festival events are available via Lancaster Music Festival Tickets