The Rolling Stones, Adele, Taylor Swift, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney — the Great Oak Stage has hosted era-defining artists and performances that have helped shape the cultural fabric of music history.
On Friday 27th June, Olivia Rodrigo added her name to that list.
At just 22 years old, Rodrigo took to the Hyde Park stage in front of 65,000 fans and delivered a show brimming with emotional precision, pop euphoria, and a rare ability to turn collective teenage angst into something almost sacred. From the explosive opener ‘bad idea right?’ to the roaring, pyro-lit encore of ‘get him back!’, her set captured the same sense of scale and spectacle that previous BST headliners have cultivated over decades.
Rodrigo’s rise from Disney Channel star to chart-dominating artist has been swift and seismic, but this performance — followed by a Glastonbury headline just two days later — felt like a true turning point. There was a unique tenderness woven through her set — a vulnerability she shares with past BST icons like Adele, but expressed with the humour, honesty, and bite that defines a new generation. Songs like ‘drivers license’ and ‘traitor’ became cathartic communal therapy sessions, echoing the emotional resonance of Taylor Swift’s 2015 BST performance.
Her surprise duet with Ed Sheeran on ‘The A Team’ only cemented her arrival into a musical lineage of British greats. It was a moment that felt both intimate and monumental — a cross-generational bridge between two of pop’s most beloved storytellers.
What’s perhaps most striking about Rodrigo’s Hyde Park set is the way she exists in harmony with her contemporaries. Just two weekends later, Sabrina Carpenter headlined the same stage for back-to-back nights in full rhinestone glamour, bringing sharp wit and sugary pop hooks to another sold-out crowd. In another era, two young women topping the bill of a legacy festival might have seemed unthinkable. Now, it feels revolutionary — and joyfully inevitable.
This year’s BST line-up felt like a reclamation. From The Last Dinner Party’s baroque-pop theatrics, to girl in red’s fearless honesty about her time in rehab — the women of BST 2025 aren’t just performing, but shifting paradigms, creating space, and building community with every note.
Olivia Rodrigo’s Hyde Park homecoming was more than a concert — it was a cultural marker. A reminder that pop, when it’s this honest and this artful, belongs not just in the charts but live, in history. And standing shoulder to shoulder with the greatest to ever grace the Great Oak Stage, Rodrigo didn’t just hold her own — she radiated.
Olivia Judd
Image: @sophiajcarey
If you enjoyed reading this article please consider buying us a coffee. The money from this pot goes towards the ever increasing yearly costs of running and hosting the site, and our "Writer Of The Month" cash prize.