While festivals scramble to book whoever is most talked about right now, whatever artist is dominating the discourse this particular week, BST Hyde Park has quietly done something more interesting: they’ve given us Maroon 5. And honestly? It might be the headline I’m most excited about this season.
Maroon 5 has never been my answer to “who is your favourite band right now?” But their songs have lived in my playlists for as long as I can remember – growing up on their music videos, rewatching ‘Maps’ and ‘Payphone’ on YouTube after school. Finding ‘This Love’ on a playlist at seventeen and feeling like it was written specifically for whatever I was going through. When I mentioned I might be going to their Hyde Park show, the reaction wasn’t indifference. It was immediate, undisguised jealousy. Because they’re Maroon 5. That says everything.
On 3rd July, they headline BST Hyde Park for the first time – a park, a summer evening, a crowd that will span teenagers who found ‘Moves Like Jagger’ on TikTok and thirty-somethings who played Songs About Jane into the ground in 2004. And the fact that this feels completely natural, not remotely surprising, is itself the most interesting thing about it.
We’ve developed a strange cultural habit of treating pop longevity as something that needs defending. As though an artist either remains in constant conversation with the bleeding edge or becomes a relic – an embarrassment, something you explain away. Legacy acts get the most brutal version of this. They headline somewhere and critics immediately reach for the think piece: are they still relevant? Do they deserve to be here? As if the Great Oak Stage has limited space and someone more urgent should probably be in their slot.
But watch what actually happens when a band like Maroon 5 takes a stage that size. The crowd doesn’t need convincing. They already know every word. Over more than two decades, Maroon 5 moved from funk-rock pioneers to global pop superstars, and what that journey produced is something rare: a catalogue that works in almost any room, for almost any person. ‘This Love’ still hits with the same precision it did twenty years ago. ‘Moves Like Jagger’ has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. These aren’t numbers to be embarrassed about. They’re evidence.
And there’s something worth saying about nostalgia that we tend to get wrong. It isn’t passive. It isn’t people turning up to switch their brains off and float on memory. When a song that meant something to you at seventeen plays on a festival stage on a July evening, it does something active – it lands somewhere different to how new music lands. Not better, not worse. Just different. The version of yourself that first heard ‘She Will Be Loved’ gets to show up. The specific heartbreak, the specific summer, the specific feeling of that song finding you when you needed it. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s quite a lot to offer 65,000 people in a park.
BST is particularly good at holding this tension. The lineup this year – Garth Brooks, ATEEZ, Mumford & Sons, Duran Duran, Lewis Capaldi – reads less like a confused booking strategy and more like an honest picture of how people actually listen. Not everyone is chasing whatever dropped last Friday. Some people want the song that got them through a breakup in 2006. Some want both in the same weekend. The festival, at its best, doesn’t have to choose.
What separates the legacy acts who can still command that scale from the ones who can’t isn’t relevance, exactly. It’s whether the songs still do something. Whether they carry weight when the first four bars play. Whether the person in the crowd still feels found by them. Maroon 5’s songs do. They have moved far enough through enough people’s lives to mean something beyond any chart position or cultural moment – and Hyde Park on a July evening is exactly the right place to prove it again.
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Words: Lola Carron