Folk Festival rescheduled due to coronavirus

J.P. Cormier and Tim Edey impress at the concert in Walls on the opening night of the 2019 Shetland Folk Festival. Photo: Dave Donaldson

This year’s 40th Shetland Folk Festival has been rescheduled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The festival’s committee said that the decision to postpone until 2021 was taken “with regret”.

The decision had been taken after weeks of consulting with venues, musicians, stakeholders and volunteers, with the health and wellbeing of everyone in the community and visitors the priority, they said.

In a statement, the committee said: “We want our 40th Festival to be a celebration of everything good about our islands, and recent measures such as global travel restrictions, limits on public gatherings and an understandable uncertainty amongst the most vulnerable in our community has led us to conclude that it’s better to wait another year to really do Shetland and its musical family justice.

“With most of this year’s visiting acts already confirmed for 2021, we promise we will be back with another stellar line-up and we’ll be even more hungry to welcome world-class musicians and audiences back again come 29th April 2021. We will be in touch with members in the coming weeks regarding refunds and the opportunity to carry forward your membership to next year.”

The committee said they were aware of how difficult the situation would be for the live music industry, but encouraged festival-goers to support artists in whatever way they could, from purchasing albums and merchandise to going to the festival next year.

They added: “In the meantime, we wish everyone good luck and good health in what is a difficult and unprecedented situation. If our community shows the same spirit and resilience in this current time as it does during our festival each year, we have no doubt we will get through this.”

“Let’s make up for it in 2021!”