Sure, there's more to festival season than Glastonbury, but it's never quite the same whenever the nation's favourite mudbath has its traditional fallow year. This year's (uncharacteristically dry) festival was hailed as the "best one yet", making the organisers' decision to have a hiatus in 2018 even more agonising.
So a round of applause is in order for the BBC, which is stepping up to the plate to fill the gaping Glasto-shaped hole in our lives. The broadcaster today revealed its plans for a replacement festival, The Biggest Weekend, which will take place during next May's bank holiday weekend (25-28 May), slightly earlier than when Glastonbury usually is.
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Luckily, the music won't be contained to just one area of the UK either, with the four-day festival set to happen across four sites in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
During Glastonbury's last fallow year, in 2012, BBC Radio 1 hosted its Big Weekend festival in Hackney, London, to coincide with the London Olympics which was a few weeks later.
There will be more than 175,000 tickets up for grabs for The Biggest Weekend – more than the number available for Glastonbury – and the corporation says its headliners will be among "the biggest artists in the world". It looks like we'll be waiting a while to find out who'll be topping the bill, but all the speculation is part of the fun.
The director of BBC radio and music, Bob Shennan, said the event will be "the biggest single music event ever attempted by the BBC" and it will "[celebrate] the diversity of music from four different corners of the country, bringing the best UK music to the world and the best global music to the UK," he added.
The Biggest Weekend won't be an annual event though, so it will literally be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It's unclear when the tickets will go on sale – but we're sure we won't be the only ones setting our alarms early on that all-important morning.
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