Review: Leeds Festival 2022, Day One

Sure as night follows days, rain follows summer when it comes to the August Bank Holiday home of Leeds Festival.

Already, this opening day has been forced to weather headline cancellations; it would be par for the course for it to be forced into combat with the actual elements once again. But in a rare twist of late-seasonal fortune, Rage Against the Machine’s absence through injury – and that of Maneskin, who skipped out to play the MTV VMAs with nary a shrug – are ultimately the biggest blows it must face.

The rain is at bay, the skies are blue, the glitter is out and over 70,000 punters on a late-teenage rite of passage are out to party.

In years gone by, this Yorkshire-centric shindig on the grounds of Bramham Park – and its sister site at Reading – catered near-exclusively to the white rock crowd in terms of bills, and while a healthy majority still dominates this year’s slate, there’s a case to be made they have never employed such variety before. It is a veritable Spotify pop-and-hop playlist – Mallrat’s Aussie electronica overcomes technical difficulties to bleed into into fuzzy Newton-Le-Willows four-piece The K’s and their swaggering bravado, before the quasi-pop-punk rebirth of Willow seizes hold, the daughter of Will Smith still mononymously flying beneath her first name, like Cher, or Prince, or Bez.

SoundCloud rap touchstone Denzel Curry is one of the afternoon’s more explosive presences, the sort of artist that would have had bucket hat veterans spitting cornflakes out if he had burst onto the stage during their late breakfast in the Nineties.

Ditto Bru-C, or the latter Bad Boy Chiller Crew, whose tongue-in-cheek basseline beats might not pack a similar wallop, but nevertheless prove energetically shambolic entertainers in their chunky red ties, at least until the Bradford favourites overrun their slot in front of the biggest audience of the day so far, and are unceremoniously shepherded off to drunk-uncle dance elsewhere, resulting in an apparent scrap with security and reported arrests within their party.

Pale Waves’ pivot from dreamy, The Cure-inflicted hooks into early-noughties Avril Lavigne suggests another bow to the Dirty Hit proliferation songbook, though their widescreen angst is nevertheless an effective confection, powered by a standout performance from drummer Ciara Doran.

Antipodean Britpop revivalists DMA’s meanwhile provide a nice counter to the ultra-buff anthems of Bastille and the spaceship-aesthetic floorfillers of late addition Charli XCX, though all three feel outshone by the thrillingly urgent hip-hop of Run the Jewels, even if the latter’s sparser crowd suggests disagreement.

Already a proven draw stateside, American singer Halsey arrives for likely her biggest British show to date, alighting on the back of last year’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, complete with quasi-industrial bona-fides via producers Nine Inch Nails. Her presence as both the festival’s first solo female – with Saturday’s Megan Thee Stallion – and arguably out-and-out pop headliner should well be a watershed moment; pleasingly, despite a dearth of out-and-out hits, she packs enough pyrotechnical effects and canny picks, including a cover of Kate Bush’s current retro-zeitgeist classic Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), to deliver a show that tempers the naysayers and justifies her billing.

Few would envy the poisoned chalice handed to The 1975. Parachuted in after RATM bailed at short notice due to frontman Zack de la Rocha’s reported Achilles blow, the Cheshire pop-rockers are chalk and cheese to the California rap-metallers, though closer as incisively observe songwriters than their critics give them credit for. Despite the online backlash, the former bill-toppers are far more in-line with modern-day R+L tastebuds anyway – and their effervescent greatest hits performance, from the bubblegum-tinged singalong of Chocolate through euphoric, Joy Division-tinted closer Give Yourself a Try is a bullish, surprisingly earnest triumph, a handy high-note finale of a rescue package that might just reaffirm their place as stone-cold headliners.