George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic’s Mothership Will Return at ESSENCE Festival
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In 1975, George Clinton and Parliament boldly went where no band had gone before with the release of Mothership Connection, a pioneering Afrofuturist vision of a flamboyant and funky Black life beyond the stars. One year later, that far-off future invaded on the Earth Tour as fans across the globe witnessed the landing of the Mothership, an iconic prop that drifted down to centerstage and opened, through dazzling lights and pyrotechnics, to let loose Dr. Funkenstein, come to blow the cobwebs out your mind. Now, Clinton has formally announced when the Mothership will fly again.
50 years after they first played in New Orleans, Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic ensemble will return to the city on July 5 for the ESSENCE Festival, celebrating Black cultural history at the Caesars Superdome for Independence Day weekend. The band’s headline set on Saturday will mark the return of their Mothership stage show, previously forecasted in an interview with Billboard. In that feature, Clinton and his longtime production collaborator Vivian Scott Chew detailed that a recreation of the legendary prop was in the works at Lititz, Pa.’s Rock Lititz production campus.
“I’m loving the fact that it’s still that valid of a concept, and I’m still around to actually be part of this next journey,” Clinton reflected. “It’s a good thing; the first Mothership is in the Smithsonian, and here we are backing it up with a new version.”
The original Mothership, a 1200-pound aluminum UFO designed by Jules Fisher, currently resides in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which acquired it in 2011. The spacecraft graced stages until the early ‘80s, when it was sold off as the band wrestled with mounting debt. In 1996, following the release of Clinton’s P-Funk reunion album, The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership, the prop returned for a performance at New York’s Central Park and several other stops on the Mothership Reconnection Tour and later runs, including Woodstock 1999.
Find tickets and more information on George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic’s 2026 tour at georgeclinton.com.
