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Duran Duran Say They’ll Only Play Glastonbury If They Can Headline
Simon Le Bon says Duran Duran will only play Glastonbury if they get a headlining slot, not a 3pm disco tent spot.
Duran Duran may be open to Glastonbury, but Simon Le Bon is making the terms plain: the band is not interested in coming in under anyone else’s name. Speaking to The Times of London, the frontman said the group would consider the festival only if it receives the kind of placement that matches its history. “We want the right slot,” he said. “We shouldn’t be below anybody on the bill.”
That insistence lands differently coming from a band that spent the early 1980s operating on a near-global pop scale. Duran Duran were one of the era’s defining hit machines, a British new wave act whose popularity was matched by a run of accolades that now reads like a tidy cultural résumé: two Grammys, two Ivor Novellos, the Brit Awards’ Lifetime Achievement honor, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. Le Bon’s point, then, is not really about vanity so much as placement, legacy, and the sort of billing a band like this believes it has earned.
The festival they still haven’t played is Glastonbury, the closest thing the U.K. has to a mythic open-air summit. According to Le Bon, the group has been asked before, but the offer they received did not line up with how they see themselves. “Well, we want to,” he said, “but not in a disco tent at 3pm, which is what we were offered.” The line is funny because it is so specific, but it also makes the subtext clear: for Duran Duran, Glastonbury is only worth doing if it registers as an event, not a polite booking.
Nick Rhodes and John Taylor also appear in the Times feature, where the conversation ranges well beyond festival politics. The band talk about fame, drugs, and the strange durability of technology, with Rhodes delivering one of the article’s more forceful lines about the latter. “Anyone who thinks AI will go away is certifiably insane,” he said, a reminder that Duran Duran remain plugged into the present even when they are speaking from the vantage point of legacy act status.
If Glastonbury is off for now, the wider calendar is not exactly sparse. The festival itself takes a fallow year in 2026, giving the Eavis family’s dairy farm its regular breather, which means the next realistic chance for Duran Duran to land on that stage would be 2027. Before then, they will play outside in a different kind of prestige slot: BST Hyde Park on July 5. It is a setting that already suits them. Their 2022 concert there drew an estimated 70,000 people, a reminder that the band’s pull is still strongest when the scale feels properly matched to the name on the poster.
The recent run also includes new material. Last month, Duran Duran released “Free to Love,” a neo-disco collaboration with longtime producer and friend Nile Rodgers, marking their first new music since Danse Macabre, their 16th album, which opened and peaked at No. 4 on the Official U.K. Chart in 2023. They have also just completed a Las Vegas residency and are set for a string of U.K. and continental European dates beginning June 19 at Denmark’s Heartland Festival. All of it points to a band still working at the level of event rather than nostalgia, which may be exactly why Le Bon is being so particular about Glastonbury.
