There’s not long to go until Parklife festival returns to Heaton Park, drawing tens of thousands of music fans to the fields.
This year’s event will be headlined by global talent including 50 Cent, Tyler the Creator, Megan Thee Stallion and Lewis Capaldi, as well as returning festival favourites Chase & Status.
Parklife has taken place at Heaton Park since 2013, when it outgrew its original home in Platt Fields Park.
The massive party is attended by some 80,000 people each day and is one of the biggest events in Manchester’s cultural calendar.
Here’s everything we know about this year’s Parklife so far.
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When is Parklife festival 2022?
Parklife festival. Credit: Parklife
Last year, Parklife had to shift to September because of the restrictions placed on the events industry.
But it’s business as usual this time around, and the festival’s back in its usual June position.
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Parklife 2022 will take place on 11 and 12 June.
There’s normally an extra gig on the main stage on the Friday night – previous years have seen the likes of New Order and Noel Gallagher perform – but nothing has been announced for 2022 yet.
In Da Club rapper 50 Cent will be performing in a UK festival exclusive, and Tyler, The Creator will make his long-awaited UK headline debut after Parklife’s 2020 edition was cancelled.
Music heavyweights Lewis Capaldi, Bicep (headlining The Valley for the first time) and Chase & Status (with their largest festival show yet) will all be taking to the stage.
Parklife’s line-up also includes Loyle Carner, Jamie xx, Arlo Parks, Folamour (Live), Headie One, Central Cee, Fred Again.. ArrDee, Caroline Polachek, Tom Misch and PinkPantheress.
DJ sets across the weekend will come from Four Tet, Eric Prydz, Peggy Gou, Carl Cox, Marco Carola, Camelphat, The Blessed Madonna, Andy C, DJ EZ, Sonny Fodera Annie Mac, Jayda G, Mall Grab, Ricardo Villalobos and many more.
You can see the full line-up and stage break downs here.
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Can you still get tickets for Parklife?
Parklife festival. Credit: Parklife
Tickets for Saturday – which is headlined by 50 Cent, Chase & Status and Jamie XX – have sold out.
But you can still grab tickets for the Sunday portion of the festival, with the last few on sale now.
Day tickets are priced at £84.50 plus booking fee for standard admission, or £109.50 for VIP.
You can also pick up the last few tickets for the whole weekend at £155 general admission or £199.50 for VIP.
This year’s VIP zone will be called the Luxury Lounge, with all sorts of luxuries to jazz up your festival experience.
As usual, you’ll get fast track through the queues, and access to an exclusive VIP area with luxury loos, a separate street food village, and The Smugglers Inn bar.
Very Important Parklife-goers also have their own DJs and special guests on a dance floor that’s separate from the rest of the festival site.
New this year is the ‘northern lights’, a light tunnel installation, plus VIP lockers and free phone charging points.
Parklife is even adding a ‘Cloud 9 VIP spa’.
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Where is Parklife and how do I get there?
Parklife festival will be back in 2022. Credit: Parklife
Parklife will be back in Heaton Park, to the north of Manchester, taking over a corner of the 600-acre park.
There’s a Metrolink stop right outside the park’s gates at Heaton Park, though most fesitval-goers will be directed home via Bowker Vale instead.
The festival also puts on shuttle buses to help people get back home safely.
This year, there’s a combined Travel Pass which you can use on either the Metrolink or the shuttle buses.
You can also try to book a taxi, but with 80,000 people pouring out of the festival site, things can get busy – and a lot of people end up walking back to town if it’s safe to do so.
Featured image: Parklife
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Ticket requests are now officially open for Harry Styles’ one-night-only Manchester gig
Emily Sergeant
The time has come – the ticket request system for Harry Styles’ one-night-only gig in Manchester is now live.
In case you hadn’t heard, it was announced on Wednesday evening after much speculation that Harry Styles would be making a return home to Manchester for a one-night-only ‘intimate’ gig at Co-op Live to celebrate the release of his fourth studio album next month.
Styles is set to share Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally with the world on Friday 6 March – and it’s that very same night he’ll be taking to the stage in Manchester.
Although little is known about what to expect at the gig, the poster for the event does state that there’ll be a ‘special performance of the album’, so it seems fair to say that Manchester will be the first to hear the new set of songs in full live.
And if all of that wasn’t exciting enough as it is, the tickets are only £20 per person.
But, of course, there is a bit of a catch, as this isn’t your regular online queuing up for tickets scenario, this is a ‘ticket request’ system instead.
So, like us – and literally every other fan in the vicinity of Greater Manchester and beyond this week – you’re probably wondering what a ‘ticket request’ system is… what does it look like? How does it work? Basically, what the heck is it? Well, we’ve done a bit of digging around to get to the bottom of it so you’re not left too much in the dark.
According to Ticketmaster’s website, if an artist is running a ticket request, they’ll invite fans to request tickets so you don’t have to compete in a first-come, first-served sale.
This means you can take your time to review the available options and request the right tickets for you.
All you need to do is tell Ticketmaster which shows you’re interested in, the type of ticket you want, and your payment details. Then, if the tickets you request can be fulfilled, your card will be charged and you’ll get emailed instructions to access them in the Ticketmaster App.
Unfortunately, as much as we’d love it to be the case for everyone, submitting a request doesn’t guarantee you tickets – it really is just luck of the draw.
To request tickets, you’ll need to follow these three simple steps:
Select which shows you’re interested in and the type of ticket you want
Add your payment details
Harry Styles ticket requests are now live / Credit: Johnny Dufort (Publicity Picture)
Ticketmaster will then send you a summary email that details the tickets you’ve requested. Your card won’t be charged at this time, but they may charge a temporary £1 authorisation to your card to validate your request.
A maximum of two tickets per person can be requested, which has been set to allow for as many fans as possible to get tickets.
Now, here’s the crucial part – you will need to submit your request for tickets while the window is open until Sunday 8 February at 11pm GMT. After the request window closes, you’ll get a second email by 11:59pm GMT on Tuesday 10 February confirming whether or not your request has been fulfilled.
All that’s left to do now is provide you with the link here and send you on your way… oh, and may the odds be ever in your favour.
Featured Image – Wikimedia Commons
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The story behind Sâlo: the rising Georgian-born Salford artist set be one of the region’s next stars
Danny Jones
We always love stories of people moving to Manchester to be more creatively engaged, but tales of entire families relocating here for a better life and art being born out of it is something truly special – and besides her obvious talent, that’s what has attracted us and plenty others to Sâlo.
This up-and-coming Salfordian artist may have been born around the border between Eastern Europe and Western Asia during a particular fraught time for her country, but she’s been raised and moulded like so many of us by this city’s rich music culture and wider artistic heritage.
She came to the UK with her family as a baby, with her parents fleeing poverty and lingering friction in Georgia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s, and their journey as asylum seekers eventually brought them here to the North West.
It was clear from a young age that Sâlo (short for Salome) had a gift for the piano, but it was when her family moved to the Greater Manchester area that her own interest in genres and styles began to develop. Here’s a little snippet of her recent performance at the stunning Stoller Hall.
This short video was taken from her feature in a recent episode of Manchester: Unplugged, the web series by StreamGM that launched just last year and spotlights local songwriters.
Honing in on one of her newest releases, ‘Set Me Free’, which taps into that pure love for the keys.
While this clip shows a stripped-back version of the fully-fledged electronic studio version, with production playing a key role in defining her sound, she blends everything from classical music and jazz to neo-soul as well as drum and bass.
You hear the phrase ‘genre-bending’ thrown around a lot these days, but if this mid-20s star in the making isn’t the epitome of that term, then we don’t know who is.
Speaking more about her background in the short documentary film, which aired on YouTube this week, she talks about her first memory of visiting Forsyth Music Shop in Manchester city centre, and the inspiration behind the track in question.
You watch the Sâlo episode of Manchester: Unplugged in full here.
Detailed in the description of the newest edition of the online show, “Classically trained from the age of four, Sâlo’s journey runs through some of Manchester’s most important music spaces”, including time spent at the RNCM and Chetham’s School of Music and more.
As for the tune itself, not only do the lyrics revolve around a difficult patch in a personal relationship – this being one of the first times she felt like she’s fully opened up and not held back on letting people know what she’s speaking about – but it’s also the first track she’s produced and mixed entirely on her own.
Painstakingly mastered from a small studio at home, she almost “fell out of love” with the song altogether, but getting back to that simple joy of playing piano helped revive her passion for it.
With a stunning voice, natural musical talent when it comes to her instrument, and a great blend of different analogue and digital influences, Sâlo is definitely one to watch moving forward.
Daisy Jackson -
30th April 2022 
