07 July 2023 (gig)
13 July 2023
Heading South of the river for the first time in its six-year existence, Community Festival lived up to its name in the Crystal Palace sun as it blended scene stalwarts with up-and-coming stars for a showcase of first-rate indie bangers.
The exception to a male dominated line up, Baby Queen opened proceedings and brought a slick set of grunge-soaked pop-punk to the park, with the crowd already noticeably large despite the early weekday start time.
Sea Girls then followed with one of their high-octane, energic live sets that has drawn them a cult following. The clear blue-sky cascading over the four-piece, they are perfectly suited to festivals and now appear truly comfortable on main stages with their distinctive riffs, cathartic choruses and propulsive rhythms.
The Vaccines frontman Justin Hayward-Young joined Sea Girls for ‘Do You Really Wanna Know?’ – a song he co-wrote with them, before his own group took to the stage later on. The Vaccines name may not have aged well, but the band’s song writing has managed to evolve and retain relevance in what has become a saturated market since their inception.
One of the now five piece’s first London gigs in a while and the first without founding member Freddie Cowan, the band looked in their element and came armed with a huge selection of career-spanning hits that borrowed from all five of their records. Despite only playing for 45 minutes, they managed to fit in a huge number of infectious choruses and melody-infused riffs, with Young’s vocals maintaining their unique vibrancy throughout and stopping any of their compositions from feeling homogenous.
The first of the two headliners then took the stage and the Wombats thrived under the setting sun with a wave of multi-coloured visuals and life-sized wombats taking their place to ecstatic approval. The Liverpool band are one of only a few from the ‘indie sleaze’ era that have managed to maintain their relevance with their long-term millennial fan base and picked up a new Gen Z audience along the way. This was obvious in the crowd with no clear age range or demographic on show. A testament to the longevity and broad appeal of the band.
The group delivered over an hour of early classics intertwined with some of their newer tracks, with the likes of ‘Lemon To A Knife Fight’, ‘Pink Lemonade’. And ‘Let’s Dance to Joy Division’ garnering the biggest reactions.
In the shadow of the Crystal Palace Transmitter, Two Door Cinema Cub entered the stage at the perfect point at a festival where the South London sun was fading to showcase a stunning backdrop for their enchanting and gripping form of indie-dance.
The Bagnor-trio are a band that that truly shines in a live setting, with the endless vigour, technical aptitude, emotional intensity, and versatility of their compositions really coming to life in gigs. Keeping in-between song chat to a minimum, the group manged to fit in nine of the ten tracks from their debut record alongside selections from each of their other four other LPS and as the sun went down and temperature decreased, the limbs-flailing jubilation only increased in Crystal Palace as Two Door closed it in style.
If there’s one thing to take from the festival, it’s that both headliners are still capable of commanding serious attention and relevance when their former contemporaries would now be sheer afterthoughts.
