The 1975 to headline Finsbury Park in London in July
Emo legends American Football are among the support
By Joe Goggins
The 1975 will headline their biggest ever show at Finsbury Park in London this summer.
The Wilmslow group will top the bill in the capital on July 2 with a hand-picked support lineup including Cigarettes After Sex as well as Bleachers, The Japanese House and emo legends American Football. A crowd of over 40,000 is expected; tickets go on pre-sale on Wednesday (February 15) at 10am, with a general sale following here on Friday (February 17) at the same time.
The news comes weeks after The 1975 wrapped up their extensive ‘At Their Very Best’ arena tour of the UK and Ireland, which met with rave reviews from publications including Rolling Stone UK, which described their Brighton show as “a game-changing arena show for the ages.”. They then played an intimate hometown show in Manchester, to fewer than 600 fans at Gorilla, performing their self-titled debut in its entirety.
The band had initially been set to play Finsbury Park in 2020, in support of fourth album Notes on a Conditional Form, before the COVID-19 pandemic intervened. That show would have seen them supported by Charli XCX, who joined them onstage for a surprise appearance at Manchester’s AO Arena last month, as well as Phoebe Bridgers, Clairo, Pale Waves, Cavetown, Beabadoobee and Deb Never, and would have been entirely carbon-neutral.
No such initiative has been announced for July’s gig, which will see Jack Antonoff, who contributed production to last year’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language, play with Bleachers. A performance from American Football, meanwhile, holds significance for frontman Matty Healy, who cites them as a key influence; the Illinois icons of emo rock, who released arguably the genre’s most seminal record in 1999, reformed to play live in 2014 and put out well-received LPs in 2016 and 2019. Singer Mike Kinsella discussed the relationship between the two bands with Healy in a 2020 podcast; he also covered ‘Me’, one of Healy’s most personal songs, under his solo pseudonym, Owen.
“I would’ve heard it in 2004 on Limewire,” Healy said of American Football. “That’s where I heard it. It is this kind of really, really beautiful moment that stood outside of what was considered emo-rock and stood outside of math-rock.”