Credit: Raph Pour-Hashemi

A perfect day at All Points East ends with The Strokes

Sat 26 August 2023 15:04, UK

With the lingering nag of a stag-do hangover, I wandered through the pleasant Victoria Park with my psyche rendered a little trepidatious. Festivals, after all, can be fairly triggering events. Thankfully, All Points East, with its comforting surroundings, manageable crowd size, and wholesome vibe, is not like that. And amid this boon of the smaller-scale festival, what we were blessed with was a wallop of nostalgia for a scene that changed the world.

“Everything was shit,” Warmduscher’s Clams Baker Jr tells me backstage about the late-90s / early-00s in New York City. “It was a weird time because when I was in New York at that time everything was bad.“ So, he put on a festival of his own, fronted by Suicide, in order to “celebrate people’s inspiration through struggle“. This seems particularly pertinent today, too.

In truth, what bands like The Walkmen, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Strokes – all of which were on the line-up – achieved was something akin to a renaissance period for indie coolness. And here they were, about to allow us to reconcile that in a sunny, stormy park in London, basking in both nostalgia, sustained brilliance and a sudden unexpected downpour.

On the day, the pick of the bunch may well have been the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Karen O’s magnetism and energy blasted ‘Sacrilege’ out over the masses with World Cup montage glory. Even the lone stragglers who had strayed from their friends decided to stop battling with non-existent signal to feel the full slap of the benevolent indie force. All of them picturing the old indie dive bars of their youth – now gentrified into gastropubs – where your feet would stick to the sodden carpet like the wrapper to a warm Chewitt while people made out to ‘Maps’.

Nostalgia is usually tinged with a touch of novelty value. The word itself implies that we imbue the past with a rose-tinted hue, however, when you listen to the best drum beat of the century with Walkmen’s ‘The Rat’, you realise that on this occasion, you aren’t revelling in rose-tint, but rather recalling the grips of a cool revolution. One where your straight fringe and skinny jeans would stride to the bar to the backbeat of everyone in the club yelling the chorus to some new masterpiece like ‘All My Friends’.

Julian Casablancas had seemingly been enjoying this trip down memory lane, too, as the mass flocked to the main stage for The Strokes headline set. He was pumped, his pipes warmed to a golden grumble, all the hits dusted off and ready for service. And strange, rambling inter-song patter that even flummoxed his bandmates, ready to keep the audience guessing. Aside from the audience’s utterances of ‘is he alright? I don’t know, they sound great,’ was a chant that said, ‘Turn it up’.

And that leads us to the only drawback of the whole, wholesome, energised thing: the headline set was simply a little too quiet. With everyone frenzied, considering whether to bring rolled-up skull T-shirts and Chelsea boots back into fashion, the amplification of the main stage simply couldn’t quite rattle the eardrums of those in attendance in the way that the basements where they misplaced their youth in a haze of vodka trebles could. Alas, this was a minor asterisk to an otherwise perfect day that, if anything, only served to highlight the majesty of what The Strokes have produced over the years.

As Clams Baker Jr of Warmduscher – who themselves put on a masterful show as people sheltered from the storm – reminded us, people do a lot of great things with their backs to the wall. The times might be tough, and these great bands turned that toughness pro, a pertinent point in our far shoddier status quo, where it is worth remembering that perfect days like this can still be enjoyed.