2024 will go down in Leeds festival history as the year of Storm Lilian. High winds mean the Friday opening is marred by three stage closures, cancelled buses, huge queues to get in and the surreal spectacle of punters’ airborne tents landing in other people’s back gardens. With a decimated musical line-up, a vast crowd forms for headliner Liam Gallagher, who turns up dressed for a deep sea fishing expedition and drily quips “this one’s for the tents” to introduce Oasis’s Up in the Sky. In the 30th anniversary year of Definitely Maybe, a setlist consisting entirely of his former band’s early classics unites the field with epic singalongs, the perfect tonic after a taxing day.
The TikTok stars’ Aux stage and the Radio 1 tent (with a gaping hole in the roof) remain closed all weekend but Saturday brings sunshine and something approaching normal service. This year’s eclectic bill stretches from nightingale-voiced Rachel Chinouriri’s charm and vulnerability in the Festival Republic tent to Spiritbox’s gothic metalcore or Raye’s jazzy soul, string section and ballgowns on the main stage.
Global events also bring a political undercurrent to the usual post-GCSE party vibe. Fiery Lambrini Girls singer Phoebe Lunny plants a Palestinian flag high up the tent scaffolding and Welsh pop-punks Neck Deep urge “it won’t always be like this”. Belfast (mostly) Irish language rappers Kneecap have been called the most controversial band since the Sex Pistols but are as funny as they are provocative. They pull off the surreal feat of getting a field in Yorkshire to rap along with Get Your Brits Out, although there’s no sign yet of their DJ’s tricolour balaclava among festival merch.
A returning breeze means Fontaines DC’s Sunday teatime set initially suffers sound issues, but the Dubliners suddenly erupt with a killer double whammy of Boys in the Better Land and the brilliant In the Modern World, from new album Romance. With no eye-popping visuals and nothing more than a mumbled “How ya doin?” from singer Grian Chatten, it’s a performance which, like their career, delivers entirely on their own terms.
Lana Del Rey’s British festival appearances have been marred by late arrivals, prematurely stopped sets and sound problems, but there are no such difficulties here. With the only extraneous noise coming from the hordes of teenage girls singing every word, the American delivers an exquisite performance worthy of one of our greatest contemporary singer-songwriters. Summertime Sadness, Young and Beautiful and the rest speak to an indefinable longing, sounding hauntingly elegiac under the fading sun.
Despite opening 24 hours late, the high-tech new Chevron stage reflects the growing imprint of dance and electronic music on what was (like its older counterpart, Reading) a staunchly rock event. This makes for an epic dance v pop-punk face-off as simultaneous Saturday night veteran headliners the Prodigy and Blink-182 knock seven bells out of each other at opposite ends of the festival with, respectively, tunefully juvenile anthems/penis jokes and demonic grooves/skull visuals. The Prodigy remain a fearsome live act, and a pointedly vocal-less Firestarter – with late singer Keith Flint appearing on screen in silhouette – is surely the weekend’s most powerfully touching moment.
Finally, on Sunday night, breakout producer Fred Again makes history when he becomes the first electronic act to headline the main stage, delivering a laser-enhanced closer that hurtles between showmanship, crowd-pleasing grooves and heartfelt emotion. “You’re the biggest set of troopers we’ve ever played to at a festival” he cries as even a torrential downpour doesn’t stop the dancing, and a festival that started in disaster ends in drenched but defiant style.
