Festival Review: Tyler, The Creator At All Points East
Tyler, The Creator brings fire, chaos and a Tube carriage to Victoria Park as All Points East delivers a day of great music and questionable timekeeping.
All Points East is a strange beast these days. What was once a really fun festival has gradually turned into something of a corporate mess, the UK’s answer to Coachella, if you will. But, to give it its due, the music on Friday was actually pretty solid. The stuff we actually managed to see, anyway.
This year, my cousin came down from Manchester and we both headed to Victoria Park for the first of Tyler, The Creator’s two headline shows, arriving in time to catch Vince Staples. We spent a good chunk of his set laughing about the time he called Still Listening out for giving him a negative review and joking that his entire performance was therefore fuelled by a personal vendetta against us. It wasn’t, obviously. His show was actually great. Standing there in the blistering sun, Staples was sharp, funny and effortlessly commanding, and it ended up being a pretty perfect start to the day.
Next up was the guy with the haircut, Fakemink. His show was okay, nothing particularly wrong with it, but nothing I’ll be writing home about either. One of the stranger moments came when he launched into a remix of Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Time After Time’, instructing everyone to think about “the one ex that got away”. Fair enough. After that, my cousin and I went our separate ways. He headed over to see Clipse while I stuck around for Sexyy Red and, like everyone else waiting for her, ended up waiting a hell of a long time. I think she eventually came on about 30 or 40 minutes after she was supposed to, which was particularly annoying because I could have gone to see Clipse and still made it back for 20 minutes of her set. Still, once she finally arrived, she didn’t disappoint. Any irritation pretty quickly disappeared and I was soon going hard dancing in the crowd. Sometimes that’s all you really need from a festival set.
Afterwards, we arranged to meet near the medical tent, but my cousin was taking his time. Everyone else we were with headed over to Zack Fox while I waited around so the two of us could go and see Turnstile together. Eventually reunited, we headed over to what we thought was the Turnstile stage. For some reason, we had convinced ourselves they were playing the main stage, so we found ourselves a spot and waited. And waited. Another 40 minutes or so passed and, funnily enough, we weren’t even the only people standing there waiting for Turnstile. Eventually, the stage started to rumble, the anticipation built and out came… Tyler, The Creator? It was at this point we realised we’d fucked up. Turnstile were playing the West Stage. We had just spent the best part of an hour waiting at the wrong stage.
Thankfully, there are considerably worse consolation prizes than accidentally getting a great spot for Tyler, The Creator. His set was the obvious highlight of the day, with the stage transformed into a fictional slice of East London, complete with a full-scale Tube carriage, station signage and a long runway cutting through the crowd. Pyrotechnics exploded almost immediately as Tyler emerged with ‘Big Poe’, taken from his latest album, Don’t Tap the Glass, before launching into ‘St. Chroma’, ‘Rah Tah Tah’ and ‘Noid’. It was a pretty ridiculous opening run and set the tone for a show that barely let up for the next hour and a half.
The set pulled from pretty much every corner of Tyler’s career without ever feeling like a greatest-hits victory lap. Newer tracks like ‘Sugar on My Tongue’ and ‘Tweakin’’ were thrown in alongside Chromakopia cuts ‘Sticky’, ‘Thought I Was Dead’, ‘Darling, I’ and ‘Like Him’, while ‘She’, ‘IFHY’ and ‘Who Dat Boy’ reached further back into his catalogue. ‘LUMBERJACK’ and ‘WUSYANAME’ represented Call Me If You Get Lost, while the run of IGOR favourites was predictably enormous, particularly ‘EARFQUAKE’ and ‘NEW MAGIC WAND’. For an artist with so many different eras and versions of himself to squeeze into a festival headline set, it all felt surprisingly coherent.
He was in typically mischievous form between songs too. At one point, he encouraged the entire crowd to boo him, gleefully admitting that it was a kink of his. Elsewhere, he reflected on his relationship with the city and the role London played during the earliest stages of his career. “London, London, London, London,” he told the crowd. “It’s weird, I was bigger in London for a second. I have a special relationship with y’all.” He went on to recall signing to XL early in his career, joking that it once made him and Adele labelmates. It was one of the few quieter moments in a show otherwise built around movement, bass, fire and Tyler sprinting around a Tube-themed stage like he’d personally been given control of the Central line.
By the time ‘EARFQUAKE’ had turned into a massive singalong, ‘NEW MAGIC WAND’ caused another explosion of energy and ‘See You Again’ finally brought the night to a close, Tyler had more than justified his place at the top of the bill. He has spent the past decade growing from cult rap provocateur into one of the biggest artists in the world, but the scale of the production hasn’t swallowed the personality that made him interesting in the first place.
The whole day was a lot of fun, even if we spent a frankly embarrassing chunk of it waiting around for artists who either hadn’t come out yet or were performing on an entirely different stage. But who cares? We danced to Sexyy Red, accidentally missed Turnstile, accidentally got a great spot for Tyler and, for once at All Points East, the sound was actually good.
