Shania Twain is swapping stadiums for a 250-capacity London venue
Good luck getting tickets for this one
Just weeks before helping Harry Styles conquer Wembley Stadium for 12 nights, Shania Twain is doing something arguably even more intimidating: playing a tiny pub venue in East London.
The country-pop icon has announced a one-off show at The Shacklewell Arms on the 6th of June, giving fans the chance to see one of the biggest stars on the planet in a venue small enough that somebody will almost certainly spill a pint on their trainers during the encore.
This is a woman who headlined BST Hyde Park last summer, smashed Glastonbury’s legends slot and has spent the last few decades operating almost exclusively at “massive field full of screaming people” level. And now she’s rocking up to a 250-capacity venue in Dalston where people usually discover bands three years before everyone else starts pretending they liked them first.
The show comes ahead of Twain joining Harry Styles for his enormous Wembley run later this summer, as well as her own huge headline date at Thomond Park in Ireland. It’ll also act as a warm-up for her upcoming seventh album, Little Miss Twain, which lands on July 24 and follows 2023’s Queen Of Me.
Fans hoping to get in will need a combination of luck, speed and probably divine intervention. Tickets are being allocated through a ballot system, with successful applicants getting the chance to buy tickets via Dice for £25. Considering some people would probably pay triple that just to hear “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” shouted in a room above a pub, demand is likely to be absolutely ridiculous.
Anyone who misses out in the ballot will get a second chance through Twain’s social channels later the same day, though realistically this has all the ingredients of one of those London gigs people talk about for years afterwards in increasingly exaggerated terms.
There’s something very fun about massive artists suddenly deciding they want to terrorise tiny venues again. Now it’s Shania Twain’s turn to descend on East London and create the sort of ticket scramble that’ll have group chats moving like Oasis reunion announcements.
The best part is how genuinely small The Shacklewell Arms feels for somebody of Twain’s stature. This isn’t one of those “intimate” shows that still somehow takes place in a 5,000-capacity theatre. This is properly intimate. The sort of gig where you can actually see facial expressions instead of relying on giant screens and blind optimism.
With a new album on the way, there’s every chance fans will get a mix of fresh material alongside the kind of all-timer hits that basically transformed 90s and 2000s pop culture. Which means somebody is almost certainly going to lose their mind the second the opening notes of That Don’t Impress Me Much kick in.
Shania Twain plays The Shacklewell Arms on June 6.
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