Metallica, Guns N Roses, Ozzy Osbourne Expected to Headline New Power Trip Festival

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UPDATE: All of the information below was confirmed Thursday morning in the Power Trip festival’s official announcement.

While an official announcement is not expected until later in the week, multiple sources tell Variety that Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Ozzy Osbourne, AC/DC, Tool and Iron Maiden will headline a new festival called Power Trip from Coachella founders Goldenvoice.

The sources say the festival will take place at Coachella’s home base, Empire Polo Field in Indio, Calif., in October. The news was previously reported by Hits, Desert Sun and the music blog the Scenestar, and via a remarkably unsubtle teaser campaign, apparently from the organizers.

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Despite the Coachella connection, the festival is more like a hard rock version of Goldenvoice’s 2016 Desert Trip festival, which featured a classic-rock dream team of Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, the Who and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters.

The “teaser” campaign — if it even can be called that — began earlier this week with a video posted on a new website and Instagram account called Power Trip that features iconic metal images including a Gibson SG guitar, a stack of amplifiers and cactuses creating the “devil horns”; the video was shared on the accounts of several of the above artists.

The teasers suggest an announcement is coming on Thursday (March 30). Scenestar says the festival will take place the weekend of Oct 6-8; according to Hits, Guns N’ Roses and Iron Maiden will perform on Friday, AC/DC and Osbourne on Saturday and Metallica and Tool on Sunday.

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The acts are all multi-decade veterans and most have been actively touring in recent years. The 74-year-old Osbourne’s health has been an ongoing concern and he even announced his retirement from touring earlier this year, but he usually finds the stamina to deliver when the moment calls for it, and a one-off concert may be less of a challenge than a full tour (he also made his first “retirement tour” in 1992). The other acts either hit the road recently or have tours already lined up for 2023.

The artists also have performed together many times — in fact, in their rough-and-tumble days, Guns N’ Roses were kicked off of an opening slot on an early 1988 Iron Maiden tour because of what one might politely term their nasty habits, not that it caused any harm to their career. But Metallica and Guns N’ Roses toured stadiums as coheadliners in 1992 and GNR lead singer Axl Rose even filled in for ailing AC/DC singer Brian Johnson for North American dates in 2016, with generally impressive results.

Variety will have more on this news as it develops.

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