Japan's Summer Sonic music festival is coming to Shanghai

Major Japanese music festival Summer Sonic is set to launch a Shanghai spin-off event this summer. Fuji Rock might be the first name in Japanese music festivals (their line-up this year is ridiculous incidentally), but Summer Sonic isn't too far behind when it comes to big ticket events of this kind in Asia - and they're headed our way in August.

The festival has been cooperating with MAO Livehouse to take Chinese bands to Japan to appear on its stages for several years now, in addition to hosting occasional 'warm-up' events here. A fully-fledged Summer Sonic Shanghai has long been rumoured, but this is the first time they're attempting to do a proper festival in the city.

(Unless you count the disastrous Sonic Shanghai at Shanghai Stadium in 2013, which was initially linked with the Japanese brand. After suggesting that the line-up for that would feature Aerosmith, MIA, Jake Bugg and John Legend, organisers instead booked Limp Bizkit as headliners, who ended up playing to a mostly empty arena).

The plan for 2017 is for a host of acts to play at the Shendi Ecological Park beside Disneyland, which seems to have become a home for music festivals in the last year or so, with Storm and others relocating there. Dates are yet to be officially announced, but expect it to be held around the time of the Japan festivals in August.

Unfortunately, their Shanghai spin-off arrives in a year when the Tokyo and Osaka festivals are touting fairly poor line-ups. Calvin Harris, Black Eyed Peas and Foo Fighters are the headliners in Japan, while Liam Gallagher - already confirmed for dates in Beijing and Guangzhou this summer - is set to play one of the festival's side shows with Kasabian. It remains unclear exactly how much resemblance (if any) this will bear to the Shanghai bill, but our guess is that the line-up will look pretty different on these shores.

We've previously heard rumours of Placebo making an appearance here, and naturally we'll be hoping for Babymetal to make the trip over to Shanghai, yet any line-up discussions are largely based on hear-say at this point. Organisers are still to go public with any of this so far, but hopefully we'll know more in the coming weeks.

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