Stuart WoodBoomtown has announced it is resetting the festival’s recurring storyline to ‘Chapter One’ for the 2021 festival, which goes on sale today, 1 October.
The festival would have been in its twelfth ‘chapter’ for the cancelled 2020 edition, the theme of which was ‘New Beginnings’.
It will now reset to ‘Chapter One: The Gathering’, with a number of changes to match. The festival will not be releasing its lineup, with the majority of acts playing remaining secret until just before the festival.
It will also introduce a new story with a new layout of the Winchester festival site.
Boomtown previously announced a reduction in its ticket prices for 2021, in the build up to its ticket sale.
A statement from Boomtown’s founders says they are “resetting from the foundations to allow us to really get things right and to be the forward-thinking, progressive, and inspirational festival community we know we can be. By starting a brand new story with Chapter One: The Gathering, this allows us even more scope to start afresh, with our ethos, creativity and ambition all aligning into one combined vision.”
“The complex process of releasing a music line-up with exclusivity, billing and escalating costs has led us to decide this is the time to rethink the way we approach [lineups].”
They go on to add: “We have spent months debating whether this was the right thing to do but what is clear, is that there are many aspects to the way the music industry runs that don’t work for independent festivals. The complex process of releasing a music line-up with the exclusivity, billing and escalating costs has led us to decide this is the time to rethink the way we approach it and explore new ways of doing things.”
“We have always been a creatively led festival and people attend Boomtown because of the overall experience; we will continue to book incredible headline artists, and all the festival favourites, but by approaching our programming announcements in this radical way, we can create lineups that are even more phenomenal and diverse than we have ever been able to before.”