Elton John to say farewell to UK fans at next year’s Glastonbury

Elton John has announced that his last ever UK show will take place at next year’s Glastonbury festival.

The event’s first act to be revealed, John will perform on the Pyramid stage on Sunday 25 June in what will be only his second appearance at a British festival.

The announcement arrives soon after John played his final US show at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium last month, a fittingly grand affair that featured appearances from Dua Lipa, Kiki Dee and Brandi Carlile and was livestreamed on Disney+.

“I couldn’t be more excited to be headlining the Pyramid stage,” John said in a statement. “As the end of my Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour comes into view, there is no more fitting way to say goodbye to my British fans. They have been beyond brilliant, and have supported me through all the highs and lows of my career … I can’t wait to embrace the spirit of the greatest festival in the world.”

Glastonbury co-organiser Emily Eavis added: “We will be closing the festival and marking this huge moment in both of our histories with the mother of all send-offs. We are so very happy to finally bring the Rocket Man to Worthy Farm.”

While the festival will mark John’s final UK show, it will not be his final show overall. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which began in 2018, will continue through Europe until July 2023, with a date at Paris’s Accor Arena rescheduled from 25 to 21 June.

John’s Sunday night booking puts to rest rumours that Taylor Swift, set to make her return to the stage with her Eras tour in 2023, would be rescheduling her planned 2020 headline slot for next year. As it stands, Swift’s tour dates would only allow her to play Glastonbury on 25 June.

Glastonbury 2023, in which the Guardian is a media partner, will run from Wednesday 21 June to Sunday 25 June. The price for tickets, which sold out within an hour when they went on sale in early November, was £335 plus booking fee; anyone who joined the deposit scheme for the cancelled 2020 festival paid £280 plus booking fee to attend this year.

On Twitter, Eavis has said the price increase was due to “enormous rises in the costs of running this vast show”, as well as “the huge financial impact of two years without a festival because of Covid”.