Seventeen: The K-pop band making Glastonbury history – BBC News

The biggest act on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage this year isn’t Coldplay or Dua Lipa. In fact, you might not even have heard of them.

The act in question is Seventeen – a K-pop boyband that boasts a whopping 13 members, and which sold more than 10 million albums last year.

The only act to sell more? Taylor Swift.

But despite K-pop’s global success, the UK has remained frosty towards the genre.

Even though bands like BTS, Blackpink, Stray Kids and Aespa have broken out, their biggest hits have tended to come in collaboration with Western artists like Selena Gomez, Lady Gaga or Coldplay.

Seventeen don’t do collaborations. Unlike most Korean pop acts, they also write and produce their own material. Now, they’re making history as the first K-pop act on Glastonbury’s main stage.

The scale of the honour isn’t lost on them.

“There’s a great sense of responsibility,” says Choi Seungcheol, aka band leader S Coups.

“We’ll keep coming back to that feeling and do our best to prepare, so that we can blow everybody away… Not just our fans, but every other member of the audience.”

Seventeen play the festival in a year that sees it moving further away from its rock roots than ever.

Reflecting the audience’s evolving listening habits, they’ll be joined on the Pyramid Stage by Afrobeat icons Burna Boy and Ayra Starr, while pop star Dua Lipa and R&B sensation SZA gain headline status.

Seventeen play shortly after lunchtime on Friday afternoon. It’s a far cry from the late-night sets they play in Asia but S Coups is unfazed.

“The time of day doesn’t really matter to us,” he says.

“It’s actually even better that we’ll be performing in the afternoon because the audience can see us better under sunlight.”

That positivity will be familiar to anyone who’s listened to Seventeen’s music.

Lemonade fresh and full of zing, songs like Shining Diamond and Very Nice are a welcome reminder that pop can be fun.

The band’s origins lie in the pistachio green basement of South Korean entertainment company Pledis.

That’s where members were selected, rejected, coached and pruned over a long and gruelling apprenticeship.

“It lasted maybe four to five years,” says rapper Jeon Won-woo, known to fans as Wonwoo.

He was one of the first recruits back in 2013 and survived several rounds of auditions, all of which were documented in the online series Seventeen TV.

The show was unscripted and unedited, often running for hours at a time. Fans on the livestream could choose the camera angles, watching as the teenage trainees ate meals, faced evaluations and, on one notorious occasion, were scolded for fooling around.

At one point, the series vanished for eight months, leaving fans wondering if the group had been dropped.

Looking back, S Coups says that hiatus – during which three members were replaced without explanation – helped Seventeen take control of their destiny.

“Our deal was pushed back a little and Woozi, one of our members, thought we could debut earlier than planned if we made our own music.”

Woozi, real name Lee Ji-hoon, turned out to be the band’s ace card.

A classically-trained musician, he has co-written and produced the majority of their output – more than 140 songs to date.

“He inspired the other members to take an interest in making their own music, so they started to learn song-writing and lyric-making, too,” says S Coups.

“Being engaged in our creative process goes a long way towards making our music more authentic. so we take great pride in it.”

“That’s the great weapon we have,” adds Wonwoo.

It seems improbable that Pledis would surrender creative control after four years of moulding their young recruits – but the band say the relationship is based on mutual trust.

“Sometimes we’d make something and it would come out differently than the company had planned,” says S Coups, “but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a fight”.

“It’s more like convincing them to come over to our side and understand our vision.”

Seventeen finally made their debut in May 2016, with an hour-long live showcase on South Korean TV, followed by the release of their first EP, 17 Carat.

At that point, the line-up was settled as (deep breath) S Coups, Jeonghan, Joshua, Jun, Hoshi, Wonwoo, Woozi, DK, Mingyu, The8, Seungkwan, Vernon and Dino.

From there, they’re divided into a vocal team, a hip-hop team and a dance team. The band’s name is derived from tripartite set-up: 13 people + 3 units + 1 band = 17.