Slowthai has announced details of his new one-day festival, ‘Happyland’. The event, billed in full as ‘Happyland – The Happiest Place in the Universe’ where “the policy is simple: No Smile, No Entry”, is set to take place at Northampton Cricket Ground on September 25.
The ‘Happyland’ line-up has been curated by Slowthai himself, with each act “representing a different facet of the UK music scene in 2021”.
Slowthai will headline the inaugural edition of the festival himself, while there are also sets from IDLES, Beabadoobee, Easy Life, Greentea Peng, Shygirl and Pa Salieu promised.
In a statement, Slowthai elaborated further: “Happyland with happy folk. The place where we can laugh and joke. The place you can be yourself without judgment, expectations and impressions of someone else. The space from the shackles of the everyday. The mountain where we climb to run away.”
Slowthai will head out on tour in the UK and Ireland in March 2022 in support of his recent solo album TYRON, which hit number one in the UK back in February. The album surpassed Foo Fighters, Pale Waves, and Dua Lipa to claim the top spot, outpacing the No.2 album by more than 8,000 copies.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, slowthai said of the album, “I’m probably better suited to make music that’s not that angry. I’m just at a different point in my life where I’m not as angry anymore, so it’s easier for me to write softer songs and talk about actual issues of my life than just do the hype s__t. I just wanted it to be like, these are two different sides, two different types of people.”
Last month Slowthai covered The Verve‘s classic single “The Drugs Don’t Work” for a live session on BBC Radio 1.
Tickets for ‘Happyland’ go on sale here this Friday, at 10AM local time. Given the emotional palette expressed on slowthai’s albums Nothing Great About Britain and TYRON, ticket holders will, however, probably be allowed to enter without a smile.