Somewhere in Manchester, Tennessee, a field is being told to go lie down. Bonnaroo just canceled its entire 2027 edition, taking a full year off so The Farm can "rest and recover" after back-to-back weather-wrecked years, the 2025 flooding that cut things short and the 2026 Sunday storm that killed sets on the final day. This is the third straight cycle the festival got hit, and it happened even after the promoters spent this year on new drainage, 4.5 miles of roadway and 135 acres of fresh grass. You can lay down all the grass you want. You can't out-engineer the sky. Reports point to a 2028 return, which is a nice way of saying nobody knows.
The Long Take
Why the phone held up all show means you already left
Bring Me the Horizon's Oli Sykes went down in St. Louis when a phone caught him in the head. Someone in the crowd wound up and threw the thing they'd been holding up all night, and he played on with a concussion. The Boston Globe spent August cataloging this stuff: fans who won't leave their seats to the point of soiling them, Olivia Rodrigo saying she can smell the crowd from the stage.
The phone that concussed Sykes and the phone filming every ballad are the same object, held by the same kind of person.
Every person filming has left the room.
Start with the honest history, because everybody gets it wrong. The lighter at a concert was a presence. You held up a flame with a hundred strangers and it meant you were there, in it, part of the thing. The phone flashlight replaced the lighter and that was roughly a wash. Then the phone flashlight became the two-handed, held-aloft, full-song video, and that is not the same gesture at all.
The lighter said I'm here. The camera says I'll deal with this later.
Iron Maiden ran a whole tour with phones banned and the fan reaction was not fury. It was relief. People forgot they were allowed to just watch a band. When you take the screen away, the room comes back, and the crowd acts surprised that it was ever an option.
The counter is that this is simply how concerts work now, and fighting it makes you a scold. Fair. It is how they work now. It shouldn't be, and the artists locking phones in pouches aren't snobs pining for 1994. They're trying to hand the audience back an experience the audience forgot it was capable of having.
You paid for the room. Then you spent it behind a lens.
Held up, and long gone.
Concert Law #13: The phone up for the whole song is someone who already left the room.
The phone up for the whole song is someone who already left the room.
This Week in Shows
Reading & Leeds runs this weekend. The UK's biggest festival lands Aug 27–30 with the first fully British-and-Irish headliner slate in 25 years, Charli XCX, Chase & Status, Dave, Florence + the Machine, Fontaines D.C. and RAYE, a run all six are keeping UK-exclusive. Leeds is adding a main-stage Thursday for the first time ever, headed by Kasabian. In a cycle stacked with cancellations, the big one is actually happening, and it's stacked.
Big Thief announced an album by playing all of it. On Friday the band walked into Nashville's Ryman and performed a surprise 29-song triple album, Horsepower, front to back, once, with Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch and Iris DeMent guesting and every phone banned at the door. Adrianne Lenker told the room they'd cut it in Nashville back in May. There's no release date and, because photos and video were forbidden, almost no footage. You had to be there, which is exactly the point.
BIGBANG actually came back. The K-pop group BIGBANG played three hometown shows at Goyang Stadium this weekend, their first concerts since 2017 and the first time G-Dragon, Taeyang and Daesung have shared a stage in nearly a decade. It's the opening of a 31-date world tour running to February. Reunions get announced constantly. This one landed.
The Venue Report
For the first time in almost a decade, there was live music at DC's Carter Barron Amphitheater. The 4,000-seat Rock Creek Park room, built in 1950 and one of only three non-segregated venues in Washington when it opened, went dark in 2016 and stayed dark. Last week Rock Creek Conservancy, the DC Jazz Festival and Washington Performing Arts put local acts on a temporary stage built over the first rows, three nights, $15 general admission, as a proof-of-concept for a full National Park Service restoration. This is a room that hosted Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Chuck Brown, and where Bruce Springsteen essentially premiered Born to Run live before the record came out. It's not saved yet. It's three nights and a hope. In a year this full of closures, that's still the best news on the page.
Combined gross for the top 100 worldwide touring artists in 2024, an all-time record. The very top of the pyramid has never been richer, the same season three mid-size festivals in this issue folded.
Then
Thirty years ago this month, Toni Braxton launched the Secrets Tour, the road run behind the diamond-certified album that gave us "Un-Break My Heart" and "You're Makin' Me High." It was mid-'90s R&B at its commercial peak, a voice built for rooms that big. "Un-Break My Heart" is still a karaoke fixture three decades on, which is its own kind of longevity. Not every anniversary is Knebworth. Some are just a great singer and a full house.
B-Sides
- Offlimits Abu Dhabi is off. The Yas Island festival, headlined by Shakira with the Jonas Brothers, Christina Aguilera, NE-YO and Kaleo, was scrapped entirely for 2026, refunds at point of purchase, a 2027 return promised.
- Hot August Music Festival didn't make it either. The Maryland roots-and-jam weekend (Cory Wong, Galactic, Eric Gales) pulled the plug over soft ticket sales the week it was supposed to happen. One festival killed by weather, one by math, same fragile summer.
- The Jonas Brothers are Burning Up all over again. A 45-city fall run from late September through December, bookended by a three-night MSG residency.
- Luke Combs booked a 2027 stadium leg. Twelve dates from April to June, the same four openers on all of them, presales already underway. Country fans plan a year out, and now they can.
- The Fugees are reuniting on Central Park's Great Lawn. Ms. Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean headline Global Citizen on Sept 26, marking 30 years since The Score, with Lenny Kravitz, John Legend, Lainey Wilson, Shaboozey and TOMORROW X TOGETHER on the bill.
The last time I saw a band before I owned a phone, I couldn't tell you what they wore or what the lighting did, only that the bass came up through the floor and everybody near me stopped talking at the same second.
The Bit
The best answer to a hater in festival history is fourteen years old and still undefeated. Noel Gallagher had spent weeks trashing the idea of a rapper headlining Glastonbury, "I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury, it's wrong." So in 2008 Jay-Z walked out to headline, slung a guitar over his shoulder, and opened his set with a gleefully terrible, half-strummed cover of Oasis's own "Wonderwall," letting 100,000 people carry the chorus before he swerved into "99 Problems." Watch it once. You don't answer a diss. You sing the guy's biggest song, badly, to his home crowd.
The whole festival model looks shaky this week, and Bonnaroo's field is lying down to catch its breath. But somewhere this weekend, 100,000 people in a British field are going to lose their minds for a band, phones down or up, and that part still works.
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