All Points East took place over two weekend at the end of August 2026. We made it down on Friday 28th.
America’s most eccentric and eclectic rapper, Tyler, The Creator, opens his All Points East headline set with fireworks and ‘Big Poe’, a track that introduces him as a bulletproof, unbothered life force. He has arrived at a fictional Victoria Park Underground station, complete with full-size train carriage, 50,000 people in front of him and a snarling swagger that has no interest in easing us into the evening. Within seconds, the place has become his.
He tears through his catalogue from She and Earfquake to Noid and See You Again, disappearing into his Underground carriage and re-emerging on the runway as fireworks repeatedly detonate around him. At one point he stops to tell London about his early relationship with the city, remembering that XL Recordings was the first label he signed to.
It’s an explosive hero’s journey and an absurdly good piece of festival theatre, but also a useful demonstration of what All Points East has finally become. The big-ticket spectacle is obvious. What’s less obvious, and more impressive, is everything happening around it.
Friday’s bill is nominally a Tyler, The Creator show (he’s also headlining Saturday too), but it doesn’t feel like one big gig with increasingly enthusiastic support acts. Rex Orange County, Mariah the Scientist, Clipse, Rochelle Jordan, Ecca Vandal and Turnstile occupy distinctly different corners of the musical universe, yet somehow the day hangs together.
© Khali Ackford
Turnstile are the obvious anomaly. Last year they headlined Outbreak, occupying this same stretch of Victoria Park as the centrepiece of London’s hardcore weekend. Now they’re the only real alternative-rock band on a bill otherwise dominated by hip-hop, R&B and electronic music. It shouldn’t make much sense.
And just as it was in this same spot last year, it’s bucketing with rain. They open with Birds and then spend the next hour making people jump, jump, pogo bounce, jump, fall, get up, wipe your face, jump. There are the Outbreak faithful, obviously, but there are also plenty of people who appear to have arrived for Tyler and accidentally found themselves in their first mosh pit.
Earlier in the day Ecca Vandal provides another neat bridge between worlds, her bedroom-punk snarl and enormous choruses sounding like someone fed an entire history of alternative music into a Gen Z content machine and somehow got a banger out the other end.
Over on the X Stage, Rochelle Jordan looks like she’s stepped straight out of an 80s disco club, combining sleek R&B with the restless electronic language of Kaytranada and the more experimental end of London’s club underground. Despite her American twang and immaculate presentation, she reveals to the crowd she was actually born in High Wycombe (very glam). She closes with her Mariah Carey collaboration: a neat demonstration of how an artist can move from the margins to the mainstream without necessarily abandoning either.
@BEN_AWIN
Kind of like APE itself. After eight years, the festival has stopped feeling like a series of large outdoor concerts and started feeling like an institution. The footprint is now second nature, but the programming has finally caught up with it: enormous headliners surrounded by genuinely interesting artists rather than token support. It is beginning to compete with the country’s major festival weekends not through camping, mud or a sense of temporary civilisation, but through the quality of the actual day.
All Points East has historically had a slightly unfortunate reputation for making brilliant bookings sound worse than they should. This year, the sound is finally excellent. The East Stage screens have had a major upgrade, and the whole production has the kind of scale you’d expect from an AEG operation with Coachella and BST Hyde Park in its extended family..
It may never have the mud-soaked mythology of Reading or the temporary civilisation of Glastonbury. It doesn’t need to. The park is familiar, the production is finally world-class, and the bookings now have enough depth to make the day itself the event. All Points East, finally, feels like the festival it always promised it would be.