Damon Albarn announced as special guest for Latitude Festival 2021

Damon Albarn has been announced as a special guest performer at Latitude Festival later this month.

The Henham Park festival returns July 22-25, with Albarn scheduled to deliver a Saturday evening (July 24) sunset performance on the Latitude Waterfront Stage.

The announcement comes after it was confirmed last month that Latitude Festival will go ahead at full capacity at the end of July as part of the government’s Events Research Programme (ERP).

35,000 Latitude fans will head to Suffolk for headline sets from Wolf Alice, The Chemical Brothers, Bastille and Bombay Bicycle Club.

Data from the first stage of the ERP was published recently and confirmed that just 28 people who attended pilot events researching the impact of large-scale gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic tested positive for the virus.

Albarn, meanwhile, is gearing up to release his second studio album, ‘The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows’, which arrives on November 12 via Transgressive.

Albarn spoke to NME recently about his new album, and how he decided to create it to lift him out of the “storms” of the outside world and the coronavirus pandemic.

“Obviously March came last year and that was the end of everything,” he said. “What I was left with was all of this great rehearsal recording from just a mic in the room. I just felt like the beginning of this year was so grim and I had to do something to lift me out of those, I wouldn’t call doldrums, but storms – those terrible north wind storms that you get down by the sea in Devon sometimes. They come down off the Atlantic from Greenland, they spin round, and they’re brutal.

Albarn added that, with the album, he “tried to nail everything into some kind of cohesive meditation about particles, now and the future.”

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