Mogwai at South Facing Festival, Crystal Palace Bowl, 07.08.2025

As I was walking through Crystal Palace Park – and sadly missing the famous dinosaurs – on a gorgeous early August Thursday evening, I could hear the sounds of Caroline, the second band on the line-up, through the trees. It was the first day of South Facing, a festival taking over the Crystal Palace Bowl for a string of August afternoons and ensuring its legacy lives on. There is a blue plaque on the side of the stage (which is surrounded by an actual moat!) to commemorate that Bob Marley & The Wailers played their largest – and last – London show here back in June 1980, and the venue has played host to music festivals for well over 150 years! And the Thursday evening gathering of music lovers could sense the great vibes as if they were permeating through the soil, and the rich music history of the place was its fertiliser.

The Twilight Sad

I got there in time for The Twilight Sad, the Scottish outfit that has been great friends with Mogwai for decades. I have seen them on a bill together back in July of 2014, when they performed Koko during a tribute gig to the life of Julia Brightly, an iconic sound engineer. Their sound veers seamlessly through elements of post-punk, shoegaze, industrial and synth-rock, and they have been called Glaswegian miserablists. James Graham’s vocals, with their trademark thick Scottish accent, carry emotion that’s so intense that it cannot possibly be contained in one human body, so it has to be expelled through convulsions, frequent dropping to his knees and twitches. All that emotion carried across the moat and hit me right in the gut.

Opening with a live debut ‘Dealing In The Dark’, they performed a magnetic and powerful set spanning the few of their recent albums, with ‘Shooting Dennis Hopper Shooting’ and ‘[10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs]’ from 2019’s It Won/t Be like This All The Time and ‘There’s a Girl in the Corner’ and ‘Last January’ from 2014’s Nobody Wants to Be Here & Nobody Wants to Leave. The themes of isolation, despair, mental health struggles and complexities of human relationships cut deep, but are just as deeply relatable and walking through the crowd I can sense how we all resonate.

Lankum

This couldn’t have been a better warm-up for Dublin’s Lankum, whom I was not so secretly the most excited to see that night. Their 2023 album False Lankum was very universally lauded as one of the albums of that year and – as anyone who has ever received my impromptu Lankum TED talk would know – it didn’t click with me at first, but I persevered to the point that it now simply runs in my blood. It became one of those records that organically feel like home to me, and subsequently also deliver a sucker punch of emotion. They also manage to blend folk with disintegrating noise reminiscent of Sunn o))) in a way I have never heard before, and I don’t want to live in a world where that blend doesn’t exist. Daragh Lynch, Ian Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada and Radie Peat have a way of making their violins, violas, Uilleann pipes, concertina, harmoniums, and guitars sound austere and hollow, and their vocal harmonies add a haunting layer of witchiness.

Their set weaned between 2019’s The Livelong Day, an album inspired by traditional Irish folk songs arranged into droning, winding epics, and False Lankum. The opening ‘The Wild Rover’ was followed by ‘The New York Trader’ from False Lankum. Ian Lynch segued to ‘The Rocks Of Palestine’, a reworking of a traditional folk song ‘The Rocks of Bawn’ with a powerful speech calling for freedom of Palestine – a recurring theme of their live performances. Returning to False Lankum with ‘Netta Perseus’ to finish on ‘Go Dig My Grave’, the opening track from the album and my standout. My heart, as the kids say, was full – and simultaneously wrung out.

Mogwai

Then the time had come for Mogwai to close out the evening, and they did so in a spectacular fashion. Spoken as someone who has seen them multiple times across the past decade or so – this was by far one of the best times I’ve seen them play (and the aforementioned Koko show in memory of Julia Brightly back in 2014 would come a close second). They came out to a stage decorated with a trans flag on the left and a Palestinian flag on the right, and their set was balanced perfectly to include new material as well as all the greatest hits.

They launched into ‘God Gets You Back’ followed by ‘Hi Chaos’ – the opening sequence of their most recent album The Bad Fire, just to jump back to 2011’s Hardcore Will Never die But You Will with ‘How to Be A Warewolf’, and then even further back to 1999’s Come On Die Young with ‘Cody’. It was a true feast for the Mogwai fans, and many of us in the crowd have been lifelong Mogwai devotees (myself included – I’ve been hooked since I saw Woof Wan-Bau’s video to ‘Friend Of The Night’ during a film festival circa 20 years ago). Every iconic album had a shout out with an iconic track – Mr Beast with ‘Auto Rock’, Young Team with ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’, Rave Tapes with ‘Remurdered’ – all seamlessly intertwined with tracks from The Bad Fire, making them fit right in among the rich tapestry of the Glaswegian icons’ discography.

‘We’re No Here’ from Mr Beast was possibly the perfect finale to a truly spectacular evening of music. All acts delivered gut-punching, powerful performances to a receptive audience full of genuine fans in an iconic South London venue. If you ask me, I cannot imagine a more perfect Thursday evening.