None of the region’s main music festivals will be headlined by a female act or group this year, once again, as new research shows women continue to be significantly under-represented on the live music scene.
Across the UK female acts will make up only one-in-ten headliners at the 50 biggest festivals, despite a five-year campaign to improve representation.
In Norfolk, the Sundown festival headliners are male rappers AJ Tracey and Sean Paul, and Let’s Rock in Norwich will close with The Human League and Billy Ocean.
In Suffolk Lewis Capaldi, Foals and Snow Patrol will delight fans at Latitude while Adam Ant and OMD will close out Let’s Rock Ipswich.
Seven of the eight headliners of the East Anglian festivals included in the research, conducted by the BBC Shared Data Unit, are therefore men or exclusively male acts with Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley of The Human League the only women among the 16 headlining musicians.
The line-ups received some mixed reviews with some accusing Melvin Benn, the Latitude organiser who also runs Reading and Leeds Festival, of laziness for booking Snow Patrol to headline again 15 years after they first topped the bill.
One fan added: "When I saw a tweet saying Phoebe Bridgers was playing Latitude I just assumed she was headlining - bonkers how she isn't top of that bill."
The young Californian has over a million Instagram followers and three Grammy nominations with some critics asking why she is not more prominent on the live scene.
Maggie Rogers, a Grammy-nominated American singer-songwriter who will appear at Latitude, said: “Three out of every hundred people are women in the music industry which is just a horrifying number, and it gets even worse when you look behind the board at mixers or engineers or people who are producing music.
“I wish I had a more hopeful thing to say. I don’t know what the solution is. You’re asking me how it makes me feel - it feels awful, of course it feels awful.”
But, she said, the problem was throughout the music industry and female performers wanted to be booked on the quality of their music, not their gender.
Smaller and newer festivals have also struggled to top their bills with women.
The new Wide Skies and Butterflies festival in Raynham gives top billing to The Vaccines, Hot Chip, James, Editors, Everything Everything and Levellers - rock bands made up of 43 men and one woman.
The same festival gives second-billing to acts including “Out of Reach” singer Gabrielle, Ivor Novello-nominated soul star Laura Mvula, and international popstar Natalie Imbruglia.
“Torn” songstress Imbruglia also gets prominent billing for At Ease’s first night In Euston Park, Suffolk, but below Nottingham singer-songwriter Jake Bugg, and then Kaiser Chiefs (five men) and Happy Mondays (six men, one woman) close the festival.
The Kooks (four men) are headlining Norwich’s Neck of the Woods festival this weekend, with DMA’S (three men} and Sea Girls {four men} supporting.
The founder of Wide Skies, Samira Williams said she approached Dua Lipa, Jess Glynne, Anne-Marie and Becky Hill to headline, but found the "Levitating" star was touring, Jess Glynne was contractually unavailable due to a forthcoming appearance in Thetford, and the two others were booked that weekend for festivals in Europe.
Festival organisers have a budget, and artists' managers set their festival appearance fees - which are determined by the demand to see the artist. The artists' relative fees largely determine the singer or band's position on a festival's list.
Ms Williams said: "Another issue is obviously you have very big female artists - Pink, Adele, Lady Gaga - who we could not afford and then there's quite a significant gap where we lie in the market - the female equivalent of a Stereophonics or a Sam Fender.
"And then others we approached weren't available because of backed up commitments from cancelled shows during the pandemic - it's a double whammy this year."
Empty posters - empty promises?
In 2015, blogger Josh Dalton released near-empty versions of festival posters once the male artists’ names had been removed.
The images went viral and prompted a national conversation about gender representation.
Two years later a BBC investigation found 80 per cent of the 600 acts to have headlined the country’s biggest festivals over the past 30 years were male.
It prompted the company behind Download, Reading and Leeds, and Latitude to launch a three year scheme to fund the development of female artists by paying for studio time, travel and accommodation.
Three hundred operators in 12 countries joined an EU-backed scheme asking festival producers to achieve a 50/50 gender balance in their line-ups by 2022.
This year some festivals, including the BBC Radio One Big Weekend, will achieve a 50/50 gender split among performers across all stages, but as far as headline acts go, it seems a lot more progress still needs to be made.
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