‘Super incredible’ to perform at Glastonbury, say teenage Ukrainian punk band

A Ukrainian teenage all-girl punk-rock band, The Sixsters, said it was “super incredible” to perform at Glastonbury.

The five-piece punk rock band, featuring teenage girls aged 13 to 18, took to Glastonbury’s Woodsies stage on Friday morning.

Drummer Kateryna told the PA news agency after the band’s performance: “It was simply amazing. The crowd was wonderful. The stage was wonderful.

“Every person who works there is just doing everything that they can to help the artists’ performance. Super, super incredible.”

She said Glastonbury was a “really, super big festival, one of the biggest, and it means a lot for us, it’s just amazing emotions.”

The band was established in 2018 in a small town in the Kyiv region in Ukraine, when the girls were as young as seven years old, and has released two Ukrainian albums and one English-language album.

Kateryna described the band’s music as “energetic”, adding: “You can dance to it and just have fun, but also we’ve got a bunch of sad songs that are more serious.”

Ukrainian all-girl band, the Sixsters, who opened the new Woodsies stage at Glastonbury Festival – (left to right) Anna, Kateryna, Polina, Mariia and Maiia at Worthy Farm in Somerset (Ben Birchall/PA)PA Wire/PA Images - Ben Birchall

The band had been performing in Ukraine but when Russia invaded in February 2022, the girls fled the country and moved to Essen, Germany, where they are still based.

Band mentor and board member for Kids Rock for Kids Gary Fortune told the PA news agency that the band makes “music beyond their years”.

Playing at Glastonbury will be the “start of a lot more attention” for the band, he said, adding, “We’re just looking for opportunities for them to help them along the way.”

Mr Fortune said he first reached out to Glastonbury to attempt to book a slot for The Sixsters with only around eight weeks to go before the festival began and secured a slot on the Woodsies stage.

He said: “We got the pleasure of sending the girls down while they were in the studio in Germany and telling them the news and they were just ecstatic.”

The band will perform at Come Together festival, which is organised by Kids Rock For Kids, over the weekend.