Glastonbury Festival 2020: Arcadia to debut new pieces to stage

The team behind Glastonbury Festival favourites Arcadia will be producing four new performance pieces for this year’s festival.

The company, who lit up the 2019 festival with the first outing in the five-year ‘Pangea show’, are known for introducing the huge balls of fire shooting across the sky as part of the show.

A traditional part of the festival, Arcadia hoped to be given licence to take things further after being awarded a grant to develop features for the festival.

However, they had their plans to keep its 20m crane base at Glastonbury Festival until 2023 rejected.

According to Somerset Live, the council refused the plan because of its “excessive scale”, its “alien industrial design”, it was “incompatible” with the countryside and would “degrade” the quality of the agricultural landscape.

Meanwhile, the team behind Glastonbury’s much-loved Shangri-La area announced that their acclaimed ‘Gas Tower’ installation will return for 2020.

The Gas Tower is a 10-metre high, 360 degree audiovisual space for DJ sets and digital art, with programming running late into the night.

Last year it featured sets from the likes of Bicep, Sub Focus and Rob Da Bank, while in the past it’s featured the likes of Diplo, DJ Yoda and Benga.

First set up in 2017, it’ll be The Gas Tower’s third appearance at Glastonbury, with the Worthy Farm festival taking a break in 2018. In 2019, it was constructed entirely out of recycled plastic.

Meanwhile, Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis is to be crowned as this year’s Godlike Genius at the NME Awards 2020, following in the footsteps of the likes of Blondie, U2, The Cure, Coldplay and the Pet Shop Boys.

Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney have been announced as two of this year’s Glastonbury headliners, with one massive name still to be announced for the festival’s 50th anniversary edition.

Yesterday, Groove Armada issued a come-and-get-me plea to the festival to book them for this summer’s bash.

“We’d love to do it, it’s the 50th year and there’s history for us because we’ve closed the second stage,” the band’s Tom Findlay told NME.

“We headlined the John Peel Stage too, and it was one of my favourite gigs of all time. We’ve got that history and Groove Armada need to be there – so I’m sending that out to the bookers. We’d love to play it, in some shape or form.”

The post Glastonbury Festival 2020: Arcadia to debut new pieces to stage appeared first on NME Music News, Reviews, Videos, Galleries, Tickets and Blogs | NME.COM.