More about: Parklife Festival

Retro football shirts and bucket hats galore, Parklife 2022 was the return to normality we’ve all been waiting for. Boasting arguably the most impressive festival line-up of electronic dance DJs, sprinkled with massive pop headliners, this year’s edition was just as chaotic as we might’ve expected.

The people of Manchester have been patient over the past two years. They’ve been through a lot, just like the rest of the UK, only to be told over and over again to wait just a little longer before they can celebrate properly. The twelfth edition of Parklife was their opportunity to do just that, in the only way they know how.

Perfectly timed to mark the beginning of summer and the end of exam season for the student-heavy population, the return of Parklife to its usual weekend spot at the beginning of June saw a combined total of 160,000 people rammed into Heaton Park. This made it hectic from the very second you passed through security to enter the site.

Four Tet and Chloé Robinson set the tone for a sunny Saturday with their 3pm back-to-back DJ set. They managed to interest a growing crowd on the Repercussion stage at a relatively early set time, and injected a much-needed energy into a stage that struggled throughout the weekend to compete and gain the crowd numbers of its neighbouring stages.

Up next was DJ of the moment Peggy Gou. Located on The Hangar stage, there were high expectations for her set and this was reflected by the thousands of sweaty men and women packed in like sardines (if sardines were into house music). There’s always the fear in situations like this that a DJ who has learned their trade playing in small venues but broken into the mainstream will cater to expectations and play to the crowd’s music taste rather than their own. Unfortunately, this set was the perfect example of this as Gou played repetitive, predictable house loops that exhilarated the 19 year-olds around us who believed Greater Manchester was the new Ibiza, but disappointed many of her more loyal fans with higher expectations.

Credit: Sam Neill

The only way to overcome this disappointment was to head to the exotically named Casa Bacardi stage and see what that had to offer. The answer was: a lot. Suspiciously strong cocktails, bright decorations and talented DJs, this was definitely the best stage of Parklife 2022. Throughout the weekend it hosted the best underground electronica DJs on the scene, and was infectiously plagued with that ecstatic, drug-like sensation where the visual field is interlinked with the emotional tone of the music. Everything about Casa Bacardi was delicately designed to let the people of Parklife retreat and get lost in the intimate euphoria the stage had to offer, and it worked perfectly.

As the weekend went on and more underground favourites such as Chaos in the CBD and Overmono took the stage, the age-old debate of the mainstream vs the underground became an evident subplot of the festival. This underlying battle between the mainstream and the underground was won with a knockout blow on Saturday night delivered by none other than 50 Cent, who saw crowds flocking to his performance on the main Parklife Stage in masses. 1-0 Mainstream.

50’s performance lived up to the excitement and his New York bling impressed the on-watching Mancunians. Whilst it was difficult to catch a good view of the man himself amongst the tens of thousands crowding the stage, the camera crew did a good job of zooming in on the plated gold chain with “50” on it, just in case we weren’t sure who it was up there. Despite playing his classics such as 'In Da Club', the song that got the crowd roaring and singing along the most was his rendition of the Power theme tune 'Big Rich Town', written and performed by 50 himself. A notable mention must go also to 50’s accompanying band and in particular the drummer elevated about 10 feet into the sky. Nobody was quite sure why this was, but it looked cool and sometimes that’s all that matters.

Sunday saw more varied weather which only added to the mayhem of the weekend as a whole. The heavy rainfall during Jayda G’s set at The Valley prompted her to express her appreciation to the crowd for sticking with her, and she went into full entertainer mode when she left her decks to come to the front of the stage and will the crowd on to dance as hard as we could.

Arlo Parks took us through the sunset and into the final chapter of Parklife 2022 with her heartfelt acoustic lyrics, and it began to dawn on all of us that we were into the last hurdle and Monday was only a few hours away. Megan Thee Stallion, joined by her usual crew of dancers, tried her best to lift spirits dressed in an explicit outfit that probably matched the general festival dress code, while Joy Orbison’s continued love affair with UK hip-hop mixed with tech-house in a bubbling Parklife FM tent confirmed tent stages will always attract the most dedicated ravers.

Bicep’s closing set was tailor-made for a nostalgic end to the weekend, as thousands of phone flashlights lit up The Valley to capture one final dance hosted by the electronic duo. Meanwhile, Folamour gave the Repercussion stage a groove-inspired farewell which saw trippy background visuals leaving the already-drained crowd feeling dizzy by the end. Right on the 11pm mark his set ends abruptly, almost confrontationally, and that marks the end of a weekend for 160,000 ravers.

All in all, Parklife was a hectic weekend that had just about everything: a marriage proposal (yes, really), pyrotechnics, some sun, some rain and some great music. If we agree to blame the £6 cans of beer on inflation, and accept that two hour-long waits for Ubers are part of the festival experience, then its fair it was a job well done by Sacha Lord and co.

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More about: Parklife Festival