UK global star Ellie Goulding starts her Brightest Blue tour with paying Tribute to Global Youth Climate Movement
The Brightest Blue UK tour – named after Ellie’s recent number 1 album – breaks new ground in ‘greening’ the live music industry, paving the way for other artists to make the same demands on promoters and venues to address the impact of the industry.
The intimate tour, which continues to visit London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bournemouth, and Newcastle over the next fortnight, sees Ellie perform a career-spanning setlist, performing many tracks from Brightest Blue for the first time, set amongst urgent, vital messages – adding extra meaning to many of Goulding’s most famous hits.
Lighting designer, Cate Carter has also brought Ellie’s thoughts and feelings on the climate and nature emergency to a stunning backdrop. Last night’s show closed with a roll call of names of global youth climate leaders working tirelessly to hold global leaders to account. ‘Today’s youth climate leaders are my heroes. Without them and their actions I don’t think we would have a chance of success at COP26. We need to listen to them. I want to take every opportunity to amplify what they are doing,’ says Ellie.
As a UN environment ambassador and official COP26 advocate, Ellie is known speaking up for the planet. Ellie’s tour tackles the industry’s notoriously large carbon footprint and high impact and scaling down to levels compatible with the Paris Treaty.
‘My young fans in particular are very worried about the climate crisis and this about me stepping up for them and their collective future,’ says Ellie Goulding, ‘Backstage my team has worked tirelessly to address all our impacts and I hope others will follow. There’s such an opportunity to move my industry towards net zero because we touch on so many different areas. We should be doing every damned thing to transition to a clean, green industry and we have to do it right now when we have a tiny window to keep 1.5 degrees (of global temperature rise) alive.’
While the singer delighted fans with her high energy performance, behind the scenes at the Glasgow O2 Academy the whole tour had been engineered to be as low impact as possible but still deliver a stunning visual and sonic performance.
Jane Deady one of the UK’s most experienced tour managers described the protocols rolled out at Ellie Goulding’s Glasgow gig – which range from powering the whole show on renewables to a plastic free backstage as a ‘gamechanger’. ‘Most of the green riders so far are directed towards massive stadium setups, but we want to support quirky UK venues coming out of the pandemic, so we’ve had to create New green plan and that needed collaboration and fresh thinking,’ says Jane Deady.
Ellie and her tour team have worked with Lucy Augusta Perna, global sustainability director for Live Nation Entertainment, to adapt the organisation’s Green Nation Touring Program for the Ellie Goulding tour.
Alongside Sir David Attenborough and Jane Goodall, UN environment ambassador, Ellie is an official advocate for COP26. At COP26 Ellie will return to Glasgow in order to take part in a number of official events for the UNFCCC and fringe events along with Arctic Basecamp and One Young World. ‘We need to be the generation to halt the climate crisis and restore nature. The only way to do that is to start right now’
