John Summit Cancels Four European Festival Dates to Rest Before Arena Tour
Electronic music producer John Summit has pulled out of four European festival dates across August, telling fans he needs to "recharge my battery a bit" before his first arena tour launches in October.
Summit announced the cancellations on Monday, August 17, via Instagram Stories, writing that he had decided to take the rest of August off touring to rest and prepare for the upcoming run. He named the affected events directly: Belgium's Pukkelpop, the U.K.'s Creamfields, BBC Radio 1 Dance in Malta, and France's Touquet Music Beach Festival. "I rarely cancel shows," he wrote, "but needed to recharge my battery a bit" before the fall tour, according to Billboard.
The Malta date — BBC Radio 1 Dance: Malta, scheduled for Saturday, 22 August at UNO, Malta — had already been flagged earlier in the week. MaltaToday reported on 14 August that Summit was no longer able to headline the event, with the BBC citing "unforeseen circumstances" — the label promoters and broadcasters use when no specific cause is given. BBC Radio 1 had planned to broadcast live from the event.
Summit, an Illinois native, has been one of the busiest DJs on the summer circuit. Since June, he has headlined Lollapalooza in Chicago, held a Monday-night residency — a recurring, venue-exclusive booking — at UNVRS Ibiza under his Experts Only brand, and played Ultra Europe, Tomorrowland, and Canada's Cowboy's Music Festival. He was also among the headliners at Italy's Nameless Festival in June. His Ibiza residency ran weekly from 1 June through 27 July, though one July date was cut short when a power outage struck the venue; the official Experts Only and UNVRS Ibiza Instagram accounts attributed the cancellation to a local power cut.
The tour Summit is resting up for is behind "CTRL ESCAPE," his April album, which reached No. 9 on Billboard's Top Dance Albums chart — a genre-specific ranking of the week's biggest-selling dance records in the U.S. The 21-date North American arena tour begins 1 October in Champaign, Illinois. It closes 12 December at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a 77,500-capacity venue, in what will be the largest headline show of his career. Summit added the Coliseum date the week before announcing the August cancellations.
Before the CTRL ESCAPE tour starts, Summit has September dates booked in Bogotá, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, plus his own Experts Only Festival in New York and a gig at Las Vegas' LIV Nightclub.
The cancellations leave four festivals scrambling for replacement headliners during peak European festival season — the busiest stretch of the continent's outdoor events calendar, when promoters compete for a finite pool of top-tier acts.
