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Ticketmaster
/ 30 March 2026
News
After more than a decade away from UK stages, Ye’s big comeback marks a defining moment for London’s flagship rap weekender
Kanye West has been announced as the headliner for this summer’s Wireless Festival, signalling a long-awaited return to UK stages after an 11-year absence. West will headline all three back-to-back nights of the weekend in July, following the template set last year by Drake.
West – now known as Ye – last performed in the UK in 2015, when he delivered a seismic headline set at Glastonbury. In the intervening years, he has remained a towering, if unpredictable, presence in music and culture, releasing a string of albums and staging elaborate live events elsewhere, while conspicuously bypassing Britain altogether. Billed as “a three-night journey through Ye’s most iconic records”, the residency promises to span everything from 2004’s The College Dropout through to this year’s Bully – 22 years of a musical legacy that redefined hip-hop.
Wireless, now firmly established as the UK’s premier rap and R&B festival, has built its reputation on capturing the genre’s shifting centre of gravity. For a festival that has hosted everyone from Jay-Z to Travis Scott, landing West after more than a decade away still feels like the biggest booking in Wireless history.
Ye’s public persona has sometimes overshadowed his music, and his live performances have occasionally veered boldly into conceptual territory, but it’s all this that continues to make him such a compelling headliner. Who else could generate this level of buzz before even stepping out on stage?
For Wireless, this is a rare chance to stage a genuinely era-defining weekend residency – one that bridges generations of fandom while placing London at the centre of the global conversation. For Ye, it offers an opportunity – perhaps overdue – to reconnect with a UK audience that has not seen him live in over a decade.
How to get tickets to Ye at Wireless 2026:
Pepsi Max presents Wireless festival returns to London’s Finsbury Park between 10-12 July.
Sign up here to register for the presale, which starts at 12pm on Tuesday 7 April.
Photo credit: Scott Dudelson/Getty Images