PinkPantheress cancels tour ‘to focus on health’

PinkPantheress has cancelled all of her forthcoming tour dates, saying she has to “focus on my physical health and overall wellbeing”.

The 23-year-old musician had been on tour with Olivia Rodrigo in the US, and was due to co-headline the Field Day festival in London later this month.

She announced her decision to drop out of those dates in a series of Instagram posts.

“It appears I have reached a wall which I’m struggling to penetrate through,” wrote the singer, whose hits include Boy’s A Liar and Just For Me.

“I would like to thank all of you, as well as my touring team and Olivia for giving me the platform to perform some super fun shows,” she added.

“I’m sad to disappoint anyone and can only hope we will be in each other’s company once I return to health.”

PinkPantheress had been due to play support slots on Olivia Rodrigo’s tour for several more weeks, interspersed with festival dates in Florida, Arizona, the UK and Thailand.

She has also cancelled an entire tour of Australia and New Zealand, which included eight dates supporting Coldplay.

PinkPantheress rose to prominence during the pandemic, after posting snippets of songs on her TikTok account.

Placing breathy vocals over retro garage samples, tracks like Break It Off and Just A Waste rapidly went viral, even as she initially kept her identity secret.

She won the BBC’s Sound Of 2022 poll, and went on to score a massive transatlantic hit with the Ice Spice collaboration Boy’s A Liar Pt 2.

In June 2022, she cancelled a performance at Spain’s Primavera Festival due to “partial hearing loss”, and later revealed she had lost 80% of the hearing in her right ear.

However, she continued to record and perform, contributing the song Angel to the Barbie soundtrack last summer, before releasing her critically-acclaimed debut album, Heaven Knows, in November.

Earlier this year, the singer, whose real name is Victoria Beverley and who is from Bath, embarked on her Capable of Love Tour, which has produced several breakout memes on social media.

During the first night in Dublin, she sent the crowd wild by bringing out a Cairde – an all-male group of Irish dancers – during Angel, which incorporates a fiddle in the breakdown.

Later, in Ohio, she presented one of her fans with her Coach handbag, thought to be worth about £300, after they passed her a home-made gift from the front row.

“Meeting some longtime fans was the best feeling ever,” she later told Billboard.

“One of them handed me a custom made Funko Pop so of course I had to give them my Coach bag in exchange for their hard work!”

Separately, the rock band Garbage have also cancelled their future shows, after singer Shirley Manson sustained an injury during their European tour.

In a statement, the band said the Scottish star would “require surgery and rehabilitation” to recover, but did not specify the nature of the injury.

“No-one is more crushed about this than I am,” wrote Manson on Instagram.

“You know I would push through if I could.”

Among the cancelled dates were several high-profile festival appearances in the US.

The band have been replaced by Liz Phair at the HFStival in Washington, DC; and by Devo at the Ohana Fest in California.