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Harry Styles has a busy London summer ahead of him. Having already put on sale a 12-night run at Wembley Stadium, the musician has announced that he’ll curate an entire music festical in the capital.
The Meltdown festival takes place at the Southbank Centre between 11 – 21 June and celebrates a wide array of different musical artists, with the full line-up curated by the former One Direction star. Further details on who is playing will be announced later in the spring.
Styles, who has spoken to The Times this month about his quiet life living in Rome over the past few years for a quieter life, will draw on “broad influences,” spanning pop, soul, electronic and rock music, programming “underground scenes and emerging young British talent,” and he will also play a concert. The programming is supposed to capture “the interests of the curator.”
“My goal as the curator is to share the music and art that I love, and to celebrate the rich history of the venue,” says Styles. “We both share a passionate belief that music is a vital part of life. It brings us together and the Southbank Centre has been at the heart of it, providing easy access to great music for the past 75 years.”
Inside Harry Styles-curated London music festival
Alongside the ticketed events there will be a public programme of “interactive, participatory and free” events. Mark Ball, Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre, said: “Throughout our 75-year history, the Southbank Centre has existed to give our greatest artists a platform to take creative risks and present work that pushes contemporary culture into new and unexpected directions. Harry Styles’ Meltdown feels like a natural express.”
The first Meltdown festival happened in 1993. It is billed as the longest-running artist-curated music festival in the world. Past curators have included Little Simz, Chaka Khan, Grace Jones, David Byrne, Yoko Ono, Nile Rodgers, David Bowie and Patti Smith.
Styles new album Kiss All the Time: Disco, Occasionally drops on 6 March. It follows his second solo LP Harry’s House which was Grammy award-winning Album of the Year in 2023, Harry Styles in 2017 and Fine Line in 2019. He broke through in 2010 on reality TV show The X Factor as one fifth of the boy band One Direction, who released five albums between 2011 and 2015.
