More about: Community Festival

Adam Collard’s on Love Island, Two Door Cinema Club are headlining Community Festival – you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s still 2018. Four years and a pandemic later, what’s new?

Sandwiched between Sam Fender and George Ezra performances, it’s been a busy weekend for Finsbury Park. Community Festival, a staple of the indie music scene, satisfies expectations to a fault. Whilst indie fans undoubtably relish the opportunity to return after three disruptive years, the lack of risk-taking in the headliners is starting to show. 

Earlier in the day, however, fans were rewarded for their early arrivals by a standout set from Merseyside four-piece Crawlers. They bring high energy for their first time performing on a main stage at a festival, though their recent arena tour supporting My Chemical Romance will have got them comfortable with large crowds. Vocalist Holly Minto proves one of the day’s best mid-set talkers, convincing the crowd that they would be ‘besties by the end of this set’ and dedicating recent single ‘I Can’t Drive’ to ‘bitches with their provisional licenses’. Other standouts include the powerfully written ‘Fuck Me (I Didn’t Know How To Say)’, a TikTok favourite ‘Come Over (Again)’, and an unreleased track ‘Feminist’. With tickets to their upcoming London show apparently running low, it seems they left with several new fans. 

The N4 stage sees a variety of smaller acts earlier in the day, including rising South London band Bears in Trees. Their a huge increase in listenership over the last two years shows in the reliable group of superfans at the front, who sing along to ‘Good Rhymes for Bad Times’, dance to ‘Ibuprofen’, and high-five Callum Litchfield during ‘Heaven Sent is a Coffee Cup’ when he runs down the front. Their love for each other and the audience comes across vividly, and they have such a good time on stage it’s difficult not to join them.

Pale Waves are the first of the headliners to play the main stage, and lead vocalist Heather Baron-Gracie knows how to command it. They deliver an even mix of tracks old and new, starting with the double-bill of ‘Change’ and ‘Television Romance’. After ‘She’s My Religion’, a badly timed mic issue when Baron-Gracie asks if ‘there are any gay people in the crowd’ means that she is left baffled that she is playing ‘to a crowd of straights’, though this is quickly remedied when a crowd member gives her a lesbian pride flag which she wears during ‘There’s a Honey’. Their latest single, ‘Jealousy’, closes the set, with a mosh pit as good as any.

The Wombats bring in audiences in their droves, as soon as the opening guitar twangs of ‘Moving To New York’ play. It’s a reliably good set typical of the Liverpool festival veterans, evenly spread across albums, and the band celebrate their new number one album. Frontman Matthew Murphy reveals ‘If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You’ to be a quote from his wife, in a nice personal touch during a set focused on the music than the talking. Otherwise, all the highlights – ‘Techno Fan’, ‘Kill the Director’, ‘Pink Lemonade’, ‘Greek Tragedy’, and ‘Turn’ are played, and the enthusiastic crowd reception to the whole set is a testament to their both their musicmaking and festival experience.

As N4 headliners, Circa Waves pull enormous crowds. They move through recent hits including ‘Movies’, ‘Sad Happy’, and the classic ‘Fire That Burns’, with one plucky festivalgoer scaling a tree for a better view. Notably, the opportunity to perform ‘Lemonade’, a collaboration with Alfie Templeman who had an earlier slot on the main stage, was passed by on both occasions. A shorter set due to technical difficulties, they make up for lost time through the audience choice of ‘Stuck in My Teeth’ over ‘Be Your Drug’. No prizes for guessing their closing song – Community wouldn’t feel quite like Community without at least one rendition of ‘T-Shirt Weather’.

To close, Two Door Cinema Club’s headlining set was popular if predictable. The classics ‘What You Know’ and ‘Undercover Martyn’ remain universally loved through dance floors to festivals, and were each met with a round of confetti. Nevertheless, they played fifteen of the eighteen tracks on their setlist in 2018, and did not reach as far into their more recent discography as The Wombats. Arguably, it’s somewhat of a catch-22 for the Northern Irish band, whose latest album False Alarm reflects greater experimentation in aesthetics and genre but is not as well-known to Finsbury Park fans hoping to hear their 2010 album Tourist History. 

By the time people start to trickle out, it’s hard to imagine that anyone was dissatisfied with what they came to see. Nevertheless, the sense of stasis is palpable, with many attendees having seen these bands with these sets before. The earlier acts offered some notion of potential lead acts to come, but the headliners aren’t representative of the indie scene either. This begs the question of why the same few bands continue to dominate particular festival line-ups. Will next year conform to the same trend, or will the festival expand its remit towards newer and more diverse forms of indie music? Either way, the fanbase is out there.

See photos from Bethan McConnell below:

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More about: Community Festival