Here’s some exciting news for you, dear reader.
Everyone’s favourite new music festival, The Great Escape, will shortly celebrate its 20th anniversary by bringing some bona fide indie superstars back to their hometown of Brighton.
You’d best prepare yourselves for some high-energy guitar music of the highest calibre, for we’re delighted to report that indie pop royalty The Kooks are set to headline a standalone The Great Escape 2026 beach show on May 13th, 2026, in partnership with NME.
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The Kooks played the first edition of the festival in 2006, the same year that they released their debut long-player, Inside In/Inside Out.
As we all know, that record went on to become one of the defining indie debuts of the time, with tracks like ‘Naïve’ and ‘She Moves in Her Own Way’ still firmly attached to that mid-2000s moment (and still guaranteed to fill the floor at any given indie disco across the length and breadth of this fair isle).
And, as both The Kooks and the festival celebrate their 20-year mark in 2026, this show will be a special celebration of two of the most lasting musical legacies of the last few decades. It also lands off the back of a second-time-around imperial phase for the Brighton-born indie-rockers – their latest album Never/Know reached the UK Top 5, and was followed by a headline arena tour that included a date at London’s cavernous The O2.
Not bad for a band who’ve been doing this for more than two decades, eh?
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This show is being billed as a Spotlight Show, meaning tickets will be sold separately rather than included in standard The Great Escape passes.
We can’t see them hanging around for long, so you’d better move fast.
