Kettering to host Greenbelt Festival celebrating 49 years of music, activism, artistry and ideas

Kettering’s stately home, Boughton House is set to host the eclectic Greenbelt Festival’s 50th anniversary event for a weekend of music, activism, artistry and ideas.

Topping the bill, that includes music, comedy, craft, theatre, dance, food, spirituality and talks, will be songwriter Laura Mvula, and former prime minister Gordon Brown.

Greenbelt has also scrapped its usual, tiered ticketing deadlines and replaced it with three simple price-points for adult tickets to ease the costs for festival goers.

A spokesman for Greenbelt said: “This year Greenbelt launched a revolutionary and inclusive ticketing pricing structure where those who can pay - do - and those who can’t - have the opportunity to pay what they can. Greenbelt has spent 50 years doing everything it could to be a festival that everyone and anyone could afford to come to.”

The first Greenbelt Festival took place in 1974 on a Suffolk farm with the words ‘If you’ve got a field, you’ve got a festival’.

Dubbed ‘The Nice People’s Pop Festival’, Greenbelt grew from the desire of a bunch of ‘creative, restless misfits’ as somewhere to ‘believe in’, and somewhere that ‘welcomes anyone and everyone’.

The ethos reaches across the whole Greenbelt Festival line-up from theatre to comedy, talks to activism, music to spirituality.

Over the years it has welcomed acts such as Pussy Riot, Sinead O’Connor, Kae Tempest, Russell Brand, Estelle, Magic Numbers and Mavis Staples and has seen the birth of artists such as Ed Sheeren, Corrine Bailey Rae, as well as U2 who played Greenbelt in 1981.

The spokesman said: “The Friday night kicks off with multi Grammy-winning duo, Indigo Girls, followed by folk noir’s Balaklava Blues, back for a second year, with their wild brew of Ukrainian dance-meets-protest-music. They will be teaming up with a fabulous scratch choir of Ukrainian refugee singers.

“Laura Mvula will headline the main stage on Saturday with her spiritual, soulful party music, and critically-acclaimed American singer-songwriter Ezra Furman, shares her songs of community and acceptance across a dreamscape of lush indie rock on the Sunday."

The festival also welcomes back Grace Petrie and Duke Special, and Canadian-born singer-songwriter, Bruce Cockburn.

As part of the series of talks, former prime minister, Gordon Brown, will be discussing the ‘moral failure’ of poverty existing in the UK, Jasmin O'Hara founder of Asylum Speakers, will be discussing the current refugee crisis and Dr Eve Poole will be discussing her book ‘Robot Souls’ and the implications of Artificial Intelligence for the way we work.

Greenbelt’s theatre stage will include comedy shows from multi-award winning comedian Josie Long and ‘Prince of Puns’, Milton Jones.

Greenbelt’s head of programming, Katherine Goodenough, said: “Our programming is always intentional. Whilst we are not Glastonbury or Reading and can’t secure the big name artists filling stadiums such as the O2, we always aim to make our line-up as inclusive of gender, sexuality, race and religion as possible.”

For weekend and day tickets – that start at £68 for adults, (concessions £35) , under-18s £20 and infants free – go to https://bookings.kaboodle.co.uk/book/16680/ticket .

Visit the Greenbelt website for more information https://www.greenbelt.org.uk/.