More about: All Points East

It was the sound that held All Points East back from winning Best London Festival in the eyes of the people back in 2019. This year, it’s the lighting. When the sun goes down on Victoria Park this August Bank Holiday, it’s very dark indeed. Finding friends is difficult enough on a site with same-size, near mirror-image stages. Throw a lack of lighting in too and you've got an alcohol-fuelled madhouse situation. Thankfully, the still-young festival came through, as it always does, with its line-up.

London Grammar on Friday, Jamie xx and Kano on Saturday and Foals on a throwback indie Bank Holiday Monday brought the crowds and the energy where, despite the excellence of the music, other acts didn’t. A muted vibe seems to plague Victoria Park this weekend…though less so on the Friday, at which the average age looks to be around twenty. For Jadu Heart, a young crowd receives a set of electronic-tinged accessible shoegaze with the kind of enthusiasm unseen in non-indie crowds for quite some time. Kelly Lee Owens and Kojey Radical give it their all to make Friday the strongest of three days in East London, while Jelani Blackman gives one of the best shows of the weekend with all the aplomb of a soon-to-be-star. On the same day, Celeste draws in one of the biggest crowds for her tender set of songs from Not your Muse.

Saturday dawns a day of queues, with lines taking hours to run down to the entrance and waits for the loos and bars overlong too. It’s lucky that today is the most star-studded of the weekend. Pa Salieu and Little Simz both deliver unsurprisingly good sets, while Slowthai picks the crowd up out of the mellowness that has descended from treks back and forth to stages East and West and several sets—including Tom Misch’s—which are either too quiet, too lacklustre, or both to properly animate the festival. Kano is the king of day two, his performance as electric as ever and easily eclipsing a charming but bloated Jamie xx performance.

To Monday, and a day of throwback indie favourites on a line-up that could be straight out of 2013 if it weren’t for some dashes of newness: Maisie Peters continues her seemingly endless run of shows with a popular slot, while Working Men’s Club don't let temporary sound problems dampen a spectacular set. Arlo Parks (in her second appearance of the weekend) and Lianne la Havas are both enviably good live, though the gentleness of both translated rather quietly for such a big stage.

Those 2013 throwbacks are, if you're wondering, still delivering too, with Ghostpoet in particular better than he ever has been before. Bombay Bicycle Club make it look easy as they conduct a chilly crowd, though again the sound isn't fantastic towards the back. 

All in all, it's not only the cloudy weather that makes the return of All Points East a slightly disappointing one: lack of light, interminable queues and sets with a tendency towards the mellow make it a fairly subdued affair, though the assessment certainly won't be shared by everybody. At every few metres, people are revelling in the festival sphere, and even though that might not translate into a wider sense of euphoria, there is the feeling that people are definitely enjoying themselves. With a line-up like this one, how could they not?

More about: All Points East