London's most unpredictable festival has its next director. FKA Twigs will curate Meltdown at the Southbank Centre in 2027, taking creative control of one of the UK's most respected music events and hand-picking the line-up across the venue's halls, spaces and riverside terraces.
Meltdown works differently from most festivals. Instead of a promoter booking acts, one artist is given the keys and builds the programme in their own image — line-up, collaborations, one-off performances and all. Previous curators have ranged from David Bowie and Morrissey to Grace Jones, who famously performed her entire back catalogue during her 2022 edition, and more recently Chaka Khan and Gossip's Beth Ditto. That tradition makes each year feel like a finite, unrepeatable event: when the week is over, that exact programme will never exist again.
For Twigs, the appointment fits an artist who has always treated performance as a full-spectrum project — choreography, visuals and fashion woven into her music. Her 2019 album Magdalene and its touring show, plus later work like the Caprisongs mixtape, built a reputation for staging that feels closer to art installation than standard gig. Expect her Meltdown to lean into that: dance-led commissions, guest collaborators and a line-up that pulls from club music, experimental pop and beyond, rather than a straightforward billing of support acts.
The setting matters too. The Southbank Centre — the brutalist concrete complex on the Thames between Waterloo Bridge and the London Eye — spreads the festival across the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room, with free events often spilling into the foyers and outdoor spaces. Unlike a field festival, everything is walkable, indoors and tied to a single Tube station, which makes it one of the easier ways to see a packed, eclectic programme in a single week.
For travellers, the practical draw is timing: Meltdown typically runs for about a week in June, and passes and individual show tickets usually go on sale a few months beforehand, with the biggest nights selling out fast. Twigs-curated shows at intimate venues like the Purcell Room — a few hundred seats — will be the hottest tickets of the whole programme. If London is on your 2027 list, anchoring a trip around Meltdown gives you a major cultural event, riverside walks past the Tate Modern and Borough Market, and a line-up nobody can predict yet.
News of the 2027 curator came via Secret London.
