iHeartRadio releases festival lineup
U2, Drake, Britney Spears and Sting will perform at the 2016 iHeartRadio Music Festival in September.
Sia, Billy Idol, Ariana Grande, Usher, Sam Hunt and Florida Georgia Line will also perform during the two-day event at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on Sept. 23-24, iHeartMedia announced Monday.
Tickets go on sale Saturday. Pitbull, Zedd, twenty one pilots, OneRepublic, Cage the Elephant and Tears for Fears will also perform on the main stage.
The festival will also include its daytime performances, dubbed Daytime Village, at the Las Vegas Village. It will feature Sam Hunt, Panic! at the Disco, Alessia Cara, Troye Sivan, Hailee Steinfeld, Good Charlotte, Jeremih and Bryson Tiller.
The CW Network will air a two-day televised special Oct. 6-7.
Film motivates Sharon Jones
Preparing to go on stage for the first time in months after intensive rounds of chemotherapy, an atypically nervous Sharon Jones sat backstage at New York’s Beacon Theatre, clutching a cup and shaking.
“Then they announce her — ‘Miss Sharon Jones!’ — and she goes like a prizefighter onto the stage,” recalls Barbara Kopple, the Oscar winning filmmaker. “And she just kills it.”
It’s one of the many moments in Kopple’s documentary “Miss Sharon Jones!” that capture the stark difference between life on and offstage for the dynamic soul singer most often compared to James Brown. In 2013, Jones was diagnosed with stage-two pancreatic cancer. The film documents her transformation into cancer patient and, ultimately, back into a fullthroated force.
Yet what might have culminated in triumph has instead been complicated by the cancer’s recurrence, which Jones announced at the film’s Toronto Film Festival premiere last fall. She has continued to perform, including a July 9 show in Memphis at the Levitt Shell, but she’s now on debilitating pain medication and recently had a blood transfusion.
The documentary has, the 60-yearold singer says, turned into a kind of motivation for her second round with cancer: visual proof that she got through this once before, and can do it again.
“You got to be brave,” says Jones. “I want to use the time that I have. I don’t want to spend it all laid up, wishing I had done that gig.”