All Points East review, Victoria Park, London: Lorde, Stefflon Don, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Björk steal the show

At All Points East, women aren’t just being booked as an exercise in box-ticking; they’re given opportunities to thrive on main stages and in headline slots where they belong

Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Jordan Curtis Hughes)

Each year festival lineups are revealed to music fans – and each year music fans let out a collective sigh of disappointment as women are suspiciously left missing from the top of the schedules. Yet again.

It’s a systemic problem which seemed to come to a head last year when analysis of a decade’s worth of events branded Reading and Leeds as the worst offenders, with 95.5 per cent of its main stage lineups across a 10-year stretch reportedly dominated by men. This year, they responded to the criticism by booking Kings of Leon, Kendrick Lamar, Panic! at the Disco and Fall Out Boy; marking the fourth year in a row without a female-identifying headline act.

At the inaugural All Points East, however – a brand new, 10-day event in Hackney, east London - women aren’t just being thrown scraps or being booked as an exercise in box-ticking; they’re given opportunities to thrive on main stages and in the headline slots where they belong.

Women featured at the top (or close enough) of the main stage lineup every single day of the festival. On Friday, Karen O brought the Yeah Yeah Yeahs back to London after a five-year hiatus, proving wrong any detractors who thought she might have missed a step by throwing herself around the stage with the kind of gusto that only comes from the pure, unbridled joy of doing something you really love.

Frontrunners of the post-punk revival NME tried to repackage as a “new rock revolution” in the early 2000s (their debut Fever to Tell came out 18 years ago), Yeah Yeah Yeahs were so ahead of their time, and so greatly outstripped their peers in their particular scene – that tracks like “Sacrilege”, “Down Boy” and “Gold Lion” still sound bombastically alien, whereas thousands of people arm-in-arm in a field, collectively singing the iconic refrain from “Maps” – “they don’t love you like I love you” – will never fail to draw a tear from even the most hardened of ageing indie kids.

While the dreamy shoegaze of Glass Animals, the slickness and undeniable charm of Phoenix and the infectious funk and world-class musicality of LCD Soundsystem ticked all the boxes – hits, hits and more hits, oh my! – and while it feels like a fairytale come true to see James Murphy and his troupe take their rightful place as festival headliners, the day and arguably the weekend belonged to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

The momentum of female visibility didn’t stop after day one, however, with rap, indie and electro-gloom-pop all spilling over to take centre stage on Saturday. Over on the main stage, hometown girl Stefflon Don shook loose any first-day hangovers with her unique and incendiary brand of hip-hop, while at All Points East’s only indoor stage – the West Arena – Lykke Li teased her anticipated forthcoming album of sad-bangers (ie certified pop bangers which are melancholy in tone) like “hard rain”, “utopia” and “so sad so sexy”, alongside beloved staples like “Gunshot”, “Little Bit” and a roaring rendition of “I Follow Rivers” almost drowning out her vocals.

While her set might have been a little lighter on fan faves than you might hope for at a festival, Lykke did what Lykke does best and left her devoted audience undoubtedly wanting more while teasing for bigger and better things to come later this year.

The main stage featured a headline set – and homecoming, of sorts – from The xx, the highlights of which included a Jamie xx souped-up reworking of debut album track “Shelter”, the inevitable cacophony of light and sound that accompanies “Loud Places”, and a hauntingly beautiful solo rendition of “Performance” from Romy Madley Croft.

The xx perform at All Points East festival in Victoria Park, London (Jordan Curtis Hughes)

But as mesmerising and hypnotic as The xx were, they were perhaps a little too sharp of a comedown from the triumphant, joyful exuberance oozing from Lorde on the festival’s secondary stage just an hour prior. Tightly choreographed and tightly produced, complete with a troupe of backing dancers, the New Zealander is as charismatic, charming and undeniably likeable as she is tone-perfect, filling Hackney’s Victoria Park with charming and powerful pop bangers like “Homemade Dynamite”, “The Louvre” and, of course, “Green Light”.

In the wake of Time’s Up and Me Too, a Lorde concert is more or less a seminar of empowerment and a safe space for women, LGBT+ people and allies alike – and in 2018, when an artist like Lorde flourishes, we all flourish.

We need to talk about Björk and expectation management. If you’re going to a Björk show in 2018 and expecting to hear “Hyperballad”, “Army of Me” and “Declare Independence” – henceforth known as “the hits” – you’re going to be disappointed, as some people leaving All Points East after her Sunday night headline performance were. But if you’re going to a Björk show expecting something truly unique from a world-class artist who stands alone, peerless, then you’re going to leave knowing how important and special a no-nonsense performer like Björk truly is.

She would go on to describe her All Points East headline set as a “utopian flute experiment”, and while some of her less-familiar fans might curl their lip at the thought of paying upwards of £60 to bear witness to an “experiment”, if you stand back and see her performance for what it really was, you’ll realise what you were really paying your entry fee for was a masterclass in artistry and integrity, a show which ebbed, flowed and blossomed from a one-of-a-kind performer who will never even come close to being equalled, let alone surpassed.

Bjork performs at All Points East festival (Santiago Felipe)

And while it was mostly made up of tracks from her “Tinder album” – 2017’s Utopia - she still threw in “Isobel” and “Human Behaviour” for good measure. Plus, her set came with the added exclamation mark of a picturesque lightning storm piercing London’s skies. And we don’t think there’s anything “more Björk” than Mother Nature herself putting on a spectacular light show for a performer who’s dedicated her art to the beauty in the life and nature around us.

And besides, if you wanted a crowd-pleasing, hit-laden, feel-good festival set – basically, exactly what it says on the tin – you had Father John Misty for that merely an hour or so before. Special commendation to Friendly Fires on Sunday, though. One of the most underappreciated bands from indie’s late-2000s second wind, “Paris”, “Kiss of Life” and “Jump in the Pool” are still as infectiously joyous as ever.

The inaugural All Points East then has proven to be a welcomed triumph, putting other “bigger” festivals to shame with the integrity of its lineup, while giving London a festival which mirrors the diversity of the city itself. And with St Vincent, Patti Smith, Warpaint, Cat Power, Courtney Barnett and more still to perform at next week’s APE Presents shows, there’s still plenty more opportunity for the women to take their long-overdue, deserved seat at the table.