Review: YO1 Festival

Everything about this year’s YO1 festival was bigger. Glowing with the success of 2013 and the absolute triumph of booking Rudimental what must of been hours before they blew up, expansion was clearly on the mind. Bigger bands, bigger line-up, bigger tents and, perhaps most significantly for its largely student fan base, bigger ticket price. Where last year’s festival could be accessed on the shallow side of £20, this year tickets cost punters the cool sum of 32. As much as performances from Subfocus and De la Soul rendered this reasonable, whether it would seen to become a steal rested largely on whether certain wrinkles could be ironed out. Fun abounded in 2013, but so did beer and toilet queues. The beats pounded, but so did our ear-drums as we walked out of the acoustically vicious main tent. Expansion was clearly on the mind, but so too was an appreciation of the finer details.

 The YO1 that stretched out ahead of the main entrance was largely similar on first glance to last year. The same acreage of race-course, the same collection of wholesome foodstalls and the same shaggy terriers trotting around the punters, sniffing curiously. If this cute little duo were, as seems likely from their high-vis wearing owners, drug detection dogs, they were either oblivious, or just none too fussed by the beguiling haze that drifted over the Irie Vibes tent throughout the afternoon.

 In these early stages the atmosphere was yet to reach the extremities of tranquil and fired up that would come with the evening; the small, sparsely distributed amount of slightly yawny people already arrived allowing the bare bones of the set up to be exposed. Seen through sober eyes, the thin wire fence that separated the festival from the vast sprawl of flattened land beyond did little for the atmosphere. The effect was not too cagey, but made festival escapism a little harder. Witnessed several shy of enough, the lager soaked 1pm lads that roared in local grime-man Tiktak were firmly bemusing. Yet as his loose tongue faded into mere memory, “the mean streets, like Green street” became just another bad rhyme and the analogue portion of the festival tuned up, so did the day.

 Made up of 2 double denim wearing men, one on guitar, one on drums, Dead Bird lifted a crowd largely made up of smiley parents and kind-of-bohemian looking children. Sponsored by the Heslington Road cafe, the Bison Coffee Stage hosted not only this Midlake reminiscent duo but locals Boss Caine and La Petite Mort: both of whom offered a particular shaggy haired charm. Always doing their best by York musicians, Bison Coffee was a firmly pleasant place to be throughout the day with a perfect ratio of sound mixing, awkward stage moves and grass to sit on achieved.

 Equally as enjoyable was the southside of the festival. A little pocket of smooth, reggae infused rhythms and up and coming talent, the patch of grass surrounding Irie Vibes, the BBC Radio York Stage and the graffiti wall became a little enclave for the thoroughly spaced out. Ceiling Demons brought a weird yet brilliant display of alternative hip-hop and a truly great moment when the DJ dropped a Peter Postlewait Brassed Off speech, threw off his skeleton mask and laid down a ferocious anti-Thatcher rap; all on the bed of some serious strings provided by his skeletal bandmate.(Check out our Ceiling Demons interview here) The 8 piece Dandy & DeLions were similarly energetic, offering crowd pleasing ska and Dan Whitmore; a man clearly pleased to be blowing his own horn.

 The attractiveness of the area was not only achieved by the eclectic mix of artists, including the university and Campus Tale of Terrors’ own Misa D’Angelo, but its relative distance from the other stages. An unfortunate case of sound bleeding permeated the Please Please You and Aspire TV Stages, melding their two wildly different sounds into one. Similarly affected were the closely situated Ministry of Sound and Flux, causing Pickalo and Aartekt to fuse into an odd underground techno/house amalgamation. It is perhaps fortunate that the few people in the right place to be hit by this effect were going so totally baleric that nothing beyond wearing wellies and dancing like Kevin and Perry seemed to matter to them at this point in the afternoon.

 The NightVision stage was faring a little better. Having already housed the sensational Renegade Brass Band first thing it was clearly primed for the fantastically energetic Abstract Hip Hop Orchestra. (For our interview with the band, click here) In bands by numbers terms, they do well. 8 – the number of jiving brass musicians. 2 – the number of sequinned women fronting the band. 3 – the number of guest rappers. 1 – the number of toddlers that waddled through the crowd, stumbled to the groove, raised his hands in the air, fell over and looked sheepish.

 Such strong performances from both Brass Band and toddler were matched later in the same tent by The Mouse Outfit. The 9 piece lilted onto stage at 3 pm and seemed to coincide both with the festival crowd noticeably thickening out and the mood vamping up a couple of notches. The band are just about to embark on a UK wide tour and are most definitely worth seeing. Not only because of the syllable smashing rapping of their two front men and the outrageous groove laid out by the rhythm guitarist, but because their keyboard player genuinely seemed to be on a permo.

If brass instruments were the recurring theme for the first half of the day, two things stick in the mind from the second; a musical monopoly of the digital and house music. The former was championed by the supered Grinny Grandad.(Check out our interview with Grinny Grandad here) Mixing in the Monty Python theme tune with epic A Skillz beats, fish tank vocals and smooth guitar, the four piece guilded an electro sound with an elegant touch of the live and out of control. Less overwhelming was the largely respected Paul Bailey Hauge. Whilst the flatness of the performance could be put down to a case of the wrong place, wrong time, his frankly confusing pop remix of 99 Problems invoked little more than one man to absolute loose his nut. It all got a bit Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents title sequence.

 These two contrasting performances sum up the musical side of the festival relative well. A brief walk around the perimeter would encourage encounters with the hot, unexpected little treasures YO1 is making a habit of digging up and the rather cold, let’s-go-fucking-mental bass droppers that just seem out of place under an ailing York sky. The mix is good, but perhaps did little for an otherwise positive general consensus.

 Such disparity in enjoyment should have been overcome with the big names yet to perform. Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip characteristically gave it everything, opening on ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’, thrashing through the new album and ending with a patent pending le Sac freakout. Yet as much as they excelled, Night Vision’s sound system let them down, rendering Scroobius somewhat inaudible. De La Soul‘s performance didn’t suffer too much at the same hands, the Long Island trio taking time over the classics and giving a taste of what’s to come from the soon to be released ‘You’re Welcome’. To offer a real sense of closure was arguably the day’s biggest act and irrefutable chart favourite Subfocus. Freeing himself of his recently re-imagined live setup, the Surrey born Nick Douwma perfectly fit the image of a man who has headlined the Reading and Leeds Dance Stage and supported Pendulum. Big, big beats, barely diminished by the odd sight of children rubbing hectic shoulders with visible jaw clenchers.

Including criticism of this sort is by no means to suggest that YO1 was anything but brilliant. Certainly the wrinkles were still present, but largely irrelevant in the presence of acts hyped up beyond their setting and by a Yorkshire crowd willing to indulge in this yearly treat. It may not have been perfection and ears may still be slightly ringing, but for a relatively new festival built on the notion of expansion, it delivered.

Photo credits: Oliver Brassell, Lilith King-Taylor and Luke Sheard.