Charli XCX has responded to fan frustration over the limited number of dates on the upcoming UK and European leg of her Music, Fashion, Film tour, explaining that touring takes a significant toll on her.
The singer recently announced a six-show 2027 run across Dublin, Glasgow, Manchester, London, Amsterdam and Paris, prompting some fans to voice disappointment in the comments over the small number of arena dates.
In an Instagram statement, Charli acknowledged the reaction directly. “I know there’s a lot of frustration in the comments about the fact that I am not doing lots of dates. I am really sorry if you feel disappointed, but I have to honor my truth as an artist: touring is really emotionally and physically hard for me,” she wrote.
“I am not looking for sympathy and I have a huge amount of respect for artists who can handle it at an intense, lengthy and high-octane level, but I am just not one of those human beings and I never have been,” she continued, noting she had opted for a shorter run on her current North American tour for the same reasons.
“I’m sorry if you feel I am letting you down; I really am. Perhaps one day I will be built for the kind of touring you expect from me, but right now I am not.” She added that she hoped both fans and herself would enjoy the shows, saying she would “try my best to stay in a healthy and positive mindset.”
The tour supports Music, Fashion, Film, Charli’s seventh studio album, released July 24 as the follow-up to her culture-dominating 2024 record Brat.
The album marked another sharp turn for the Essex-raised artist, leaning into darker, grittier rock sounds, and debuted at No. 1 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart — her fourth U.K. chart-topper, and one that made her the first British female artist to score two new No. 1 albums in the same calendar year.
In the U.S., the album opened at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and gave Charli her first No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart. The UK and European run follows a landmark summer that included her first headline set at Reading Festival, and precedes the North American leg of the tour, which commenced on Friday (Sept. 11) in Philadelphia.
The 12-date arena trek includes stops in New York, Toronto, Boston, Atlanta and Los Angeles before wrapping in Las Vegas on Oct. 23. Electronic artist Underscores will join Charli on the road.
My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way has hinted that the band hopes to make a new album — its first in more than 15 years — during the closing night of their Black Parade tour in San Antonio on Saturday (Sept. 12).
Addressing the crowd at the Alamodome, Way framed the prospect as a hope rather than a firm plan.
“Just know that, like, we’ve kind of really always wanted to make another record, so we hope that life allows us to do that,” he said. “Cause you guys, honestly, you guys kept us alive so long. You guys deserve another record. I don’t know when it’ll be. But it’ll be awesome.”
The remarks stop well short of an official announcement — Way named no title, timeline or release date — but they represent the band’s most direct public acknowledgment of a potential fifth studio album since its 2019 reunion. A new record would be My Chemical Romance’s first full-length since 2010’s Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys.
Since reforming, the band has released just one standalone single, 2022’s “The Foundations of Decay,” and has otherwise focused on touring, including the current run celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Black Parade.
The comments came as the band capped a hugely successful anniversary campaign. My Chemical Romance have been performing their 2006 magnum opus in full throughout the tour, which has since been extended into a global stadium run billed as The Black Parade 2026, with dates across North America, the U.K. and Europe.
Days before the San Antonio show, the band announced an expanded 20th-anniversary reissue of The Black Parade, due Oct. 23 via Reprise Records. The set pairs the original album with six bonus tracks — including three live recordings from a 200-capacity 2007 club gig in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the never-before-released B-side “Someone Out There Loves You” — and features three new pieces of art from original cover artist James Jean.
Released in 2006, The Black Parade remains the band’s commercial and cultural peak. The album was certified four-times platinum in the U.S. and topped Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart, while its lead single “Welcome to the Black Parade” — a No. 9 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 — has been certified five-times platinum and endures as one of the defining rock anthems of its era.
BIGBANG brought its 20th anniversary run, the BIGBANG 2026-2027 World Tour ‘XX : COSMOS,’ to MetLife Stadium for the only East Coast date on the entire trek — and for the trio’s first show in the tri-state area since two nights at Newark’s Prudential Center in October 2015. G-Dragon, Taeyang and Daesung are touring the world together for the first time since 2017, and for the first time as a three-piece, a fact the night never sidestepped but instead absorbed into the celebration.
The set ran through 30 songs across roughly three hours with era-defining K-pop hits (“Fantastic Baby,” “Loser,” “Bang Bang Bang,” “Haru Haru,” “Lies”), solo showcases for each member (who shared their personal affinities for hip-hop, R&B, ballads and even Korea’s traditional trot music), and the live rollout of BIGBANG’s first new single in four years, “BiiiG,” after its official release on Aug. 19 to mark 20 years to the day since the group’s debut.
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Behind all of it, YG Entertainment shared that the show came to life via a 23-ton mobile LED structure, a stage by Tony and Olivier Award–winning designer Es Devlin, direction from 2025 Super Bowl Halftime Show creative director Mike Carson, plus a live band led by Wow Jones, whose work spans Usher, Rihanna, Janelle Monáe and Sabrina Carpenter.
From MetLife, ‘XX : COSMOS’ heads across the Atlantic to Paris’ Stade de France and London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium for shows on Sept. 19 and 26, respectively, before swinging through Asia and Oceania on the world tour’s 36-show, 19-city run that stretches into February 2027.
From an unhinged “SOBER” performance to the promise to keep going “on and on,” the K-pop legends made their MetLife debut count. Read on for Billboard‘s best moments.
The house went dark 47 minutes behind schedule, and 30,000 people went quiet. Céline Dion walked out in a black gown, crossed her hands over her face like a prayer, and began to sing the opening notes of “On Ne Change Pas,” accompanied only by pianist Scott Price and four violinists. She had been gone six years.
Saturday night (Sept. 12) was the first of Dion’s 26 Paris nights, a residency that runs into May 2027 at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre, the largest indoor arena in Europe. More than nine million people had entered the lottery for a shot at purchasing a ticket to see her perform.
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Within a few minutes of walking on the stage in Paris, Dion, who hadn’t put on a headlining concert since sharing her stiff-person syndrome diagnosis with the public, broke a promise she’d made to herself: She cried. Moved by the emotion of the moment, she asked the audience if they could hear her heart beating. Among the tens of thousands in attendance were famous guests including Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Aya Nakamura and Thomas Pesquet.
During the concert, Dion revealed how she’s feeling and delivered ballads, blockbusters, and even a dancefloor section in her set. She also performed her 2026 single, the French-language song “Dansons,” live on stage for the very first time.
Below are the nine best moments from the opening night of Dion’s concert residency in Paris. (Plus, see the full 29-song, two-and-a-half hour setlist from the Sept. 12 show here.)
Céline Dion returned to the stage on Saturday night (Sept. 12) after six years away, opening her 26-date Paris residency at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre. The crowd of 30,000 was the first of more than 480,000 total across Dion’s first 16 dates staged this autumn, with every ticket bought within hours of the sale. The access lottery drew more than nine million people.
Dion hadn’t headlined a concert since publicly sharing her diagnosis of stiff-person syndrome. On Saturday she leaned on the songs that made her a phenomenon in France, a good number of them pulled from D’eux, the Jean-Jacques Goldman-written album that remains the best-selling French-language record ever made. The English blockbusters were there, too. The staging stayed spare on purpose: a large set, no pyrotechnics, everything built to keep the focus on her voice.
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The show started 47 minutes late and ran to 11:14 p.m. local time, close to two and a half hours. She opened in tears on “On Ne Change Pas,” dropped into a mirror-ball disco stretch partway through, sang the opera aria “La Wally” under falling snow, and pulled a gospel choir around her before the “Pour Que Tu M’aimes Encore” sing-along everyone was waiting for. She debuted “Dansons,” her 2026 Goldman-written comeback single, and took “All by Myself” a cappella.
Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Aya Nakamura and Thomas Pesquet were among the guests in the room.
The night’s biggest gamble was the turn onto the dance floor. “I Feel Love,” “Sweet Dreams” and a reworked “I’m Alive” showed a looser, more playful Dion than the balladeer many had come expecting.
Thinking about catching the Paris residency? Here’s Dion’s full setlist from opening night.
Pink is addressing the backlash over her reaction to Macklemore’s onstage calls to “free Palestine.”
During his opening sets for Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium on Sept. 4 and 5, the “Thrift Shop” rapper made pro-Palestine remarks that drew criticism from the pop star.
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Shortly after the shows, Pink reshared a post on social media from StopAntisemitism criticizing Macklemore’s remarks and calling for him to be removed from Sheeran’s ongoing stadium tour. On Friday (Sept. 11), the “Just Give Me a Reason” hitmaker took to Instagram to explain why she shared the post and what concerned her about Macklemore’s onstage actions.
“Last Sunday I reposted somebody else’s post about Macklemore’s set at Ed Sheeran’s show,” Pink began her statement. “It said things in words I didn’t write, and I wouldn’t have chosen all of them. Then the comments came, and I did what I do when I’m hurt, which is post snarky memes and act like I’m fine. That’s on me. A repost isn’t a statement, and a meme isn’t a spine. Social media makes all of us cheap and fast, and we all know it.”
She continued, “I was born a Jew. I didn’t pick it, and I’ve never hidden it. And this week a whole lot of people decided what I believe without asking me, without checking a single thing I’ve ever said or done, because a repost and the word ‘Jew’ were apparently enough to fill in the rest.”
Pink clarified that she has never spoken for “Israel, or for any government” and reiterated her belief that “Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity and their aspirations. Protecting innocent life comes first, everywhere, and nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child. Anybody’s child.”
The singer also pointed to her decade-long work as a UNICEF ambassador, saying she has advocated for children impacted by war regardless of where they were born.
“I have grieved every one of them, on both sides of that fence,” she wrote. “I didn’t do it from behind a screen; I went to those children and held them. I’m not going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption, and I’m not going to recite anybody’s slogan to earn back a follower.”
In her three-part statement, which continued in the comments, the singer-songwriter recalled a 2014 Macklemore performance in which he wore a costume that was widely criticized as antisemitic. The rapper later apologized, saying, “I respect all cultures and all people.”
“Every Jew I know knew exactly what it was,” Pink wrote on Instagram. “But he apologized, and I let it go, because that’s what we do. We let it go. Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them. You don’t get to decide that for us.”
“That’s what prompted my repost,” she continued. “Not ‘Free Palestine,’ and not anyone’s right to say it. I have never asked for another artist to be silenced and I’m not asking now. I don’t need anyone fired, and I don’t need a refund. What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, that scared me, and it scared people I love, without being told our fear is just propaganda, and without being told I’m somehow cool with genocide because I noticed?”
Pink concluded her statement by reflecting on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and the start of Rosh Hashanah, wishing her fellow Jewish people a “shana tova” for the new year.
Following his onstage comments in New Jersey, Macklemore stood by his “free Palestine” statements. “Wanting all humans to be treated equal should never be controversial,” he wrote on X, along with video of his speech from the Sept. 5 show.
The controversy also drew a response from the Israeli-American Council (IAC), which launched a petition calling for the rapper to be removed from the next eight U.S. stadium shows he’s slated to open for Sheeran through early November.
