Radio 1's Big Weekend will turn Sunderland into a three-day live music site this week, with tens of thousands of fans expected to make the trip to Herrington Country Park and a Friday opening set aside for a huge dance party across every stage.
Fatboy Slim, Fisher, Sonny Fodera, Clementine Douglas and MK are all on the opening-day bill, alongside Notion, Marlon Hoffstadt and HorsegiirL, in what is the first time the festival has used all of its stages for a dance-focused start. Charlie Hedges said music is one of the best ways to bring everyone together and said she could not wait to perform on the main stage on Friday, adding: “I think that's what we need right now, right? Good music, good times.”
The Sunderland show is the latest stop for a festival that has become one of the biggest fixtures in the UK radio calendar, and this year the lineup is being pitched as a span of styles and generations within dance music. Zara Larsson will headline on Saturday and Olivia Dean will close the event on Sunday, giving the weekend a route from club-heavy opening day to two nights led by mainstream pop and soul.
That mix reflects where dance music sits now. In the 1970s and 1980s, disco, acid house and techno drew crowds onto dancefloors across the UK, and by the 1990s jungle, garage and drum & bass were driving underground raves and clubs. More recently, the genre has surged back into the mainstream, with artists such as Fred Again and Sammy Virji headlining UK festivals, while Spotify says consumption of dance music among under-25s has grown 73% worldwide since 2020.
For Clementine Douglas, the moment feels like part of that shift. She will play the main stage with a live band and said dance music has moved “out of the underground and go more mainstream,” adding that “You have a lot of pop-dance crossover acts now that are really smashing it,” after a year in which she was nominated for two Brit Awards. The opening-day experiment also gives the festival a sharper edge than a standard big-ticket bill: instead of one genre sitting inside a broader programme, Friday is being built as a full-scale dance event from the ground up.
That is the pressure point for Big Weekend in Sunderland. The crowd will come for the familiar spectacle of a major festival, but Friday is asking whether a single genre can carry the whole opening day and still feel broad enough for the tens of thousands heading to the park. The answer will arrive first at Herrington Country Park, and then, if the booking works as planned, in the way the rest of the weekend follows it.
