The Great Escape Festival 2026 to celebrate 20th anniversary with The Kooks Spotlight Show • Festivals • DIY Magazine

The sun is out and festival season seems closer than ever - especially when The Great Escape have just announced that none other than The Kooks will be playing their TGE Beach stage on Wednesday 13th May.

The indie stalwarts will be returning to Brighton to help the new music festival mark its 20th anniversary in style with a special Spotlight Show, two decades after they played the very first edition of TGE back in 2006 - the same year they released their era-capturing debut album, ‘Inside In/Inside Out’.

“The Great Escape is special because it’s fundamentally about music happening in rooms where you can feel people breathing,” the band’s Luke Pritchard has shared. “There’s something really powerful about when the distance between the band and the crowd just disappears. It always takes us back to the beginning and why we started this in the first place.”

The Kooks are the third act to be confirmed for a TGE 2026 Spotlight Show, following Kingfishr (Thursday 14th May) and Peaches (Friday 15th May), both of whom will be playing Brighton Dome. Tickets for all Spotlight Shows will be sold separately to main festival tickets, with those for The Kooks’ going on sale on Friday 13th March here.

What’s more, The Great Escape has also just expanded its 2026 bill to include over 100 new genre-spanning artists, including raucous party-starters Adult DVD, new Palma Violets offshoot Dead Dads Club, R&B multi-hyphenate Wesley Joseph, rising singer-songwriter Heidi Curtis, and many, many more.

Taking place between 13th-16th May in various venues across Brighton, TGE 2026 is already shaping up to be a stacked weekend of new music discovery and hidden gems. Tickets for the start-of-summer event - including four-day, two-day, and individual day tickets - are on sale now via the festival’s website.

Check out the full lineup for The Great Escape 2026 below.