Teenage Ukrainian punk band performs at Glastonbury Festival 2023

A Ukrainian teenage all-girl punk-rock band, The Sixsters, said it was “super incredible” to perform at Glastonbury Festival 2023.

The five-piece punk rock band, featuring teenage girls aged 13-18, took to Glastonbury’s Woodsies stage on Friday morning.

Drummer Kateryna said afterwards: “It was simply amazing. The crowd was wonderful. The stage was wonderful.

“Every person who works there is just doing everything that they can to help the artists’ performance. Super, super incredible.”

The band started in 2018 in a small town in the Kyiv region in Ukraine, when the girls were as young as seven years old, and has released two Ukrainian albums and one English-language album.

From 2019, the band performed throughout Ukraine, with help from New York-based non-profit Kids Rock for Kids, which allows tweens and teens to perform on stage while raising money for charity.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the girls fled the country and moved to Essen, Germany, where they are still based.

Gary Fortune, band mentor and board member for Kids Rock for Kids, said the band makes “music beyond their years”.

He said: “We’re just looking for opportunities for them to help them along the way.”

Mr Fortune said he first reached out to Glastonbury to attempt to book a slot for The Sixsters eight weeks ago and secured a slot on the Woodsies stage.

He said: “We got the pleasure of sending the girls down while they were in the studio in Germany and telling them the news and they were just ecstatic.”