Pop goes the line-up as a packed and hot Leeds Festival turns into a giant party
Sometimes the hardest part of Leeds Festival is leaving it.
And that’s not just about saying farewell to the feast of live music on five stages over three days in the rural splendour of Bramham Park.
No, I mean navigating the right exit, the right bus, the queues and the waiting, then finally beginning your real journey off site back home to whereever you came from.
In bad weather, it’s a scenario that can be akin to grabbing the last helicopter during the fall of Saigon.
On a sunny weekend, like this year’s festival, it’s like being thrown out of paradise, irrespective of who’s playing.
Whether you were impressed by the line-up at Reading and Leeds Festival 2025 depends at least partly on what age you are – 17 or 30, 21 or 55.
This year’s choice of headliners tells its own story – Travis Scott, Hozier, Bring Me The Horizon, D-Block Europe and Chappell Roan.
Looking to reach a younger generation makes sense, certainly in the long run, on paper, at least, though I do worry.
The vintage Reading and Leeds Festival posters dating from years gone-by pinned on the festival site’s giant fences tell a different story.
A story of Sonic Youth and Oasis, Beck and the Foo Fighters, Stereolab and Pulp, Metallica and the Chemical Brothers.
That sort of mainly, but not solely, guitar-orientated line-up of the 1990s and Noughties started to fade in the 2010s, in part because of changes in the real world.
The days when it was possible to bump into a member of Pavement or Ice T in a casual fashion, as I once did, are over, too.
Despite a smattering of T-shirts in the milling crowds sporting the sort of names of different bands which still matter to MOJO magazine and BBC 6 Music, the new kings and queens of the Leeds Festival bill hail from the modern world of pop, dance and rap, sometimes mixing all three at the same time.
Even the lesser known indie guitar bands on show; Good Neighbours or Royel Otis, both of whom shone on the main stage on Sunday; were pop, albeit with a quietly intelligent, tongue-in-cheek sheen.
Both built round duos, one from London, the other from Sydney, Royel Otis stood out more because they had better tunes, including the wonderfully catchy Car.
Looking like a Beatle, sounding like Phoenix, Otis Pavlovic and Royel Maddell, looking like a member of Nirvana or Fontaines DC, have a decision to make at some point in the future whether Royel Otis are a guitar band or not.
For the majority of the youthful crowd amid the blanched dusty atmosphere of the sun-kissed Leeds Festival such questions were probably way beyond the point.
For three days Bramham Park was a giant party with a musical background.
But, if this year’s Leeds Festival flirted with turning into Love Island, well, who would want to jump on the boat and leave?