With less than two months to go until we’re back in Henham Park, we are excited to be adding 30+ more brilliant names across music, comedy, dance, conversations, theatre and more joining us for our 20th anniversary this July!
Everything Everything are announced as Very Special Guests, set to play the coveted Sunday opening slot on our Obelisk Arena. The Manchester art-rock quartet have grown up alongside the festival: they first appeared at Henham Park in 2011, delivering a standout early-career set that announced them as one of the most distinctive new voices in British guitar music, before returning to a rapturous BBC Sounds stage in 2019.
The Adam Buxton Band will open the Second Stage on Friday. A Latitude regular in every form he’s taken, from the podcast tent to the Listening Post, Buxton has become one of the festival’s most beloved returning voices, hosting live editions of The Adam Buxton Podcast. The band’s Latitude set marks their biggest festival outing yet, and a delightfully Latitude-shaped step up: the podcaster turned bookshop favourite turned bandleader, kicking Friday off on the Second Stage at Henham.
I’m very excited to be returning to Latitude and this time in musical form with half of Metronomy as my backing band no less. We’ll play some songs from my album Buckle Up plus a few appropriate covers and maybe get some musical assistance from the odd audience member too.
Adam Buxton
Matt-Felix opens the Second Stage on Sunday. The Anglo-French, London-based singer-songwriter has emerged as one of the most striking and theatrical new voices in British indie-rock, a black-and-white world of cinematic synths, smouldering balladry and sharp lyrical detail,
Over on the Sunrise Arena, Olympia Vitalis brings West London soul to the stage with a gospel choir-honed voice, socially conscious songwriting and an unmistakable Amy Winehouse-via-Aretha lineage. James Emmanuel arrives at Henham a soul-and-Motown revivalist with one of the most compelling rises in British music. Arkayla bring Manchester guitar-pop swagger, and completing the Sunrise additions are Like Optimists, Latitude’s First Light Festival pick: a high-energy, four-piece alternative rock band from just down the road in Suffolk.
The Alcove plays host to a typically eclectic billing. Aimée Fatale brings her vintage-Casio, beehive-coiffed, retro-romantic universe to the stage. THEATRE travel from Limerick: the five-piece have spent the last two years building one of Ireland’s most talked-about live followings. The Heart Shaped Aces travel from down under to make their first UK festival outing, the pop-rock duo trading in anthemic, 1975-meets-Arctic Monkeys hooks. Clara Mann brings her Franco-British folk songcraft following her widely-acclaimed 2025 debut album Rift on state51. MAGNOLIA make their Latitude debut with a set built for the festival’s most exciting stage. Tracey Nelson crosses the Atlantic: the countrified indie-rock project of Austin Noll, recorded with MJ Lenderman. And Just Alice closes out the billing: the Irish folk-pop singer-songwriter brings her heartfelt blend of folk and modern pop.
A brand-new area also touches down at Henham Park for the twentieth edition. The Virgin Radio Mothership lands in the woods, an after-hours intergalactic dancefloor that will keep Latitude airborne deep into the night. By day the ship rests among the trees; by night the doors open and some of the most distinctive voices in British radio take the controls, in a landmark year for Virgin Radio UK that has brought its biggest schedule shake-up in years. Goldierocks is among the first at the controls, alongside Emma B & Edie, who crack the doors open on Thursday night, kicking off the weekend as the campsite fills and the lights flicker on for the first time.
Elsewhere after dark, Late Night In The Alcove returns once again, Latitude’s late-night jazz club, lovingly modelled on Ronnie Scott’s, complete with table service and a transformed Alcove; a festival favourite since its 2023 debut, it offers the perfect antidote to the dancefloor: the chance to sit down, order a cocktail, and lose an hour or two to live music from some of the UK’s finest jazz musicians, with the full Late Night In The Alcove line-up to be announced.
Massaoke at Latitude, 2025
The Comedy Arena, by night, becomes a buzzing after-hours playground as the UK’s best club nights take centre stage: Massaoke leads the charge with the world’s biggest mass sing-along party, live band Rockstar Weekend powering through hairbrush anthems from across the decades, while pop sensation Guilty Pleasures invites festival-goers to surrender to the joy of feel-good floor-fillers, together turning Latitude’s home of stand-up into the festival’s most riotous late-night dancefloor.
During the day, Thanyia Moore brings her commanding stage presence and razor-sharp wit to Henham as MC; the Funny Women Champion and 2022 Chortle Comedy Breakthrough winner has become one of British comedy’s most reliable room-warmers. Kemah Bob, the Houston-born, London-based comedian, writer and founder of the FOC IT UP! Comedy Club, brings the show that landed her debut Miss Fortunate in the Guardian’s Top 10 Comedy Shows of 2024. Lewis Garnham, one of Australia’s most distinctive comic voices, makes his Latitude debut: a laconic, gifted storyteller whose 2025 Stream of Contentedness tour sold out across Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Byron Bay, with three full-length specials to his name and a viral following to match.
BalletBoyz at Latitude, 2018
On the Listening Post, the legendary Comedy Store Players return to Henham for their long-running, mid-show, no-script-needed masterclass in improvised comedy, the UK’s most celebrated improv troupe in their natural festival habitat.
The Waterfront welcomes Zoie Sings… Pop Up Choir, a long-loved Latitude fixture, with Bristol-based natural voice practitioner Zoie returning with her open-to-all forest choir, gathering festival-goers, whatever their experience, to learn songs from across the world in glorious unrehearsed harmony, by the water. Over in the Theatre Arena, The Place brings Anatomy of Survival, a collaboration between award-winning playwright Vivienne Franzmann and choreographer-psychotherapist Frauke Requardt, which takes a single witnessed meltdown in a coffee shop and refracts it through twenty-two shifting eyewitness accounts: with four performers, dance, drumming, sharp text and (yes) a person in a bear costume, it is a darkly funny, viscerally felt journey through the fight, flight, freeze and rest-and-digest states of the human nervous system.
Latitude also welcomes one of the most celebrated names in contemporary British dance back to Henham Park. BalletBoyz return to the festival with their landmark 25th anniversary production Still Pointless, fresh from a sold-out run at Sadler’s Wells and a major UK tour. No strangers to Latitude, having performed multiple times across the years via the festival’s long-standing Sadler’s Wells dance partnership. Featuring ten world-class dancers and fusing live performance with film, Still Pointless is a thrilling, irreverent, deeply moving celebration of where the company have been and where they’re going next, and a perfectly Latitude piece of full-circle programming for the festival’s twentieth.
Joining them in the Theatre Arena, Circus Zambia & Wake the Beast present Afronauts (preview), a UK debut for one of the most extraordinary new shows on the international circuit, inspired by the true story of Edward Nkoloso and Zambia’s 1964 attempt to join the space race armed with little more than a wheelbarrow and unshakeable optimism. The show fuses breath-taking acrobatics, theatre, choral music and spectacle into a joyous, defiant celebration of the imagination, courage and audacity of a newly independent Zambia.
The Cosmic Shambles Forest also gains a host of new names. Singapore-born comedian Sam See brings the storytelling, suits and stadium-ready charm. Zoologist, vet and former CBeebies Minibeast Adventure presenter Dr Jess French brings her boundless enthusiasm for the small, scuttling and overlooked. And Dr Mark Spencer, Britain’s foremost forensic botanist and author of Murder Most Florid, brings extraordinary tales from a career using brambles, pollen and plant fragments to help police solve murders, arsons and missing person enquiries. They are joined across the weekend by comedians Jo Turbitt and Alice Fraser, science communicator Bertie Suesat-Williams and writer-presenter Simon Oakes.
Twenty years on, and Latitude remains the trailblazer it was in 2006: the original cross-arts festival, where music, comedy, theatre, dance, poetry, science and ideas have always shared the same fields. Today's announcement is Latitude at its most Latitude. Everything Everything returning to Henham Park, where they first played in 2011, as our Very Special Guests is a beautiful piece of full circle. BalletBoyz back at the festival to celebrate their own twenty-fifth year. A brand new Virgin Radio Mothership landing in the woods. Snapped Ankles back to headline a Sunday in the Sunrise Arena. Circus Zambia bringing their extraordinary Afronauts to a UK festival for the first time. And right across our programme, a whole new generation of artists who give me complete confidence about where the next twenty years of Latitude are going. I cannot wait to welcome everyone back to Henham in July.
Melvin Benn, Latitude Founder and Festival Director
