We are thrilled to announce that Gareth Malone OBE will return to Henham Park this July to conduct a choir of one hundred festivalgoers in a performance built entirely around our twentieth anniversary. The setlist: twenty songs from twenty years of Latitude. The stage: the Obelisk Arena. The performers: festivalgoers. Just like everyone else. Until Saturday…
One hundred singers will be selected from festivalgoers. There are no pre-festival rehearsals. You arrive at Latitude as an audience member and leave as a performer. Participants will meet Gareth on Thursday 23rd July, rehearse across Friday 24th and perform live on the Obelisk Arena on Saturday 25th July. No professional experience required. Just a voice and the nerve to use it.
Since our first edition in 2006, Latitude has given British music lovers something genuinely different, a festival where the bill has always been as likely to feature a Booker Prize winner or a stand-up comic as a headline band, and where the music has always felt like it meant something. Blondie. Arcade Fire. Mumford & Sons. Florence + The Machine. Neneh Cherry. The Killers. Hozier. This summer, Gareth Malone’s choir will sing all twenty of them. A celebration, by the audience, of everything this festival has been.
Gareth first came to Latitude for the tenth anniversary, took a group of strangers, gave them three days, and produced one of the most extraordinary moments in the festival’s history. He came back in 2025 and did it again. Now, for the twentieth, he returns once more, because some things are worth repeating, and some anniversaries deserve more than a commemorative programme. His track record speaks for itself: Military Wives. The Choir. An OBE. A BAFTA. A career built on the radical idea that anyone, genuinely anyone, can sing, and that singing together does something to people that very little else can. Latitude, it turns out, agrees.
