Lola Young plays a last-minute secret set at the Reading festival

Lola Young played Reading Festival's main stage on the closing Sunday, August 30, in a slot announced only a few hours before she walked on at 3.15pm. It was her first appearance at the festival, and she admitted she had already let it slip. "I dropped the surprise yesterday at Electric Picnic, so I'm terrible at keeping secrets," she told the crowd.

The nine song set drew on her 2024 album This Wasn't Meant For You Anyway and last year's follow-up I'm Only F**king Myself. Wish You Were Dead and Big Brown Eyes came early, with the crowd in front of The Grid still growing through both. During Conceited she walked off to sing to a camera at the side of the stage before returning.

She used the set's quietest stretch to talk. After Spiders, she remembered coming to a festival for the first time just after scraping through her GCSEs. Before the closing Messy, she left the audience with an instruction: try not to give a fuck. Life, she said, is very difficult, the politics are worse, and this is what they get to do instead, share music and be in the same field.

The appearance matters more than a festival slot usually would. Young cancelled her 2025 tour to recover from exhaustion after collapsing onstage in New York, and later spoke publicly about seeking treatment for addiction and attending AA meetings during the break. Speaking to NME in the spring, she said all healing journeys are never ending but that she is in a much better place and ready to perform and release again.

Her set completed a run of three unannounced performances across the weekend. Jamie T opened The Grid with a midday set on Friday, previewing his album Ghosts (100 Days Of Morning), and Royal Blood played The Gallery tent that afternoon, both revealed further in advance than hers. None of the three played the northern site at Leeds.

In May she released From Down Here, a collaboration with James Blake and her first new music since the second album, giving it a live debut at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend in Sunderland days later. The rest of the weekend's pop bookings and surprise slots are logged on the festival tracker, on a site that has also been running Spotify playlist tie-ins for attendees and hosted Royal Blood's own secret set two days earlier.