Tyler, The Creator opened his All Points East headline set in London by expressing gratitude that Theresa May is no longer Prime Minister — with a few expletives thrown in. Beef between the pair goes way back: May famously barred the L.A. native from the U.K. back in 2015 for allegedly “posing a threat to public order.”
A lot has changed in the decade-plus since, not least the fact that Tyler is a rather different person to who he might have been deemed by some back then. His music is just as different too.
Tyler’s career has, in fact, been marked by constant reinvention. Ever since his early, button-pushing days in rap troupe Odd Future, his music and artistry has blossomed to mercurial levels, weaving between the sun-kissed neo-soul of Flower Boy and iconoclastic pop-funk of IGOR to the high-energy experimentation of 2025’s Don’t Tap the Glass.
Fittingly, the bill for the first of his two nights headlining Victoria Park on Friday (Aug. 28) followed that same genre-blurring instinct, a line-up reflecting not just the variation in Tyler’s own sound, but in his fans’ tastes too.
On the rap front, Vince Staples brought potent, sardonic West Coast hip-hop, alongside Clipse’s laser-sharp technicality, Sexyy Red’s club-ready Southern bangers, the Spanish drill of BB Trickz and fakemink repping the U.K. underground.
For the more melodic crowd, there was Rex Orange County — a key Flower Boy collaborator making a rare recent U.K. festival appearance — along with Mariah the Scientist’s atmospheric R&B, Houston dream-pop act Love Spells, the introspective tones of Memphis singer Yebba and supermodel*’s lo-fi shoegaze, each echoing a different soulful corner of Tyler’s catalogue.
Turnstile, meanwhile, held down the harsher end, as did Melbourne’s Ecca Vandal, Sydney’s Shady Nasty and the Brockhampton-approved Jean Dawson — hardcore and rock acts all mirroring Tyler’s own push-and-pull between hard and melodic sounds.
As Tyler kicked off his first day at All Points East, these were the seven best moments.
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U.K.’s New Class on Display
U.K. acts were well-represented at Victoria Park on Friday, with Rex Orange County, Sade Olutola, Hutch and Saam Sultan all peppering the bill. But it was perhaps the East London-born, Essex-raised fakemink, making something of a hometown appearance, that local fans might have been most excited to see. He’s part of the same burgeoning U.K. underground scene that’s already given us Jim Legxacy and EsDeeKid.
At APE, the palpable buzz around fakemink’s set was plain to see from the scores of youngsters packing into the North Arena tent. If Reading Festival is the cathartic rite of passage for U.K. teens fresh off their GCSE results, then this was the place for all the kids who didn’t get a Reading ticket but still needed to let loose. He might have only just released his debut album this past May, but he already counts Drake, Frank Ocean, Tyler and U.K. street-culture aficionado Timothée Chalamet among his fans. From this performance — messy, raw but exhilarating — it’s easy to see why.
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Clipse Delivered a Masterclass
Clipse’s comeback has been nothing short of triumphant, and their All Points East set served as a victory lap — the penultimate date of their European festival run. Their first album in 16 years, 2025’s Let God Sort Em Out earned the reunited Virginia duo a Grammy for best rap performance and four more nominations, its Pharrell-produced sound giving Pusha T and Malice’s caustic bars a more grand, cinematic edge.
In a live setting, the urgency of the album was on full display. Lead single “Chains & Whips” opened, before the pair reached back for a clutch of favourites from seminal LP Hell Hath No Fury, like “Keys Open Doors” and “Mr. Me Too,” as well as their era-defining 2000s anthem “Grindin’.” But the new cuts competed shoulder-to-shoulder with the classics, the brilliant “So Be It” and “Ace Trumpets” serving as highlights, before the brothers took a moment for reflection near the end with “The Birds Don’t Sing,” a heartfelt meditation on the loss of their parents, bringing to a close a set that celebrated a comeback without ever letting it calcify into nostalgia.
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Rising to the Occasion
“I’ve never seen the sun come out in London,” Mariah the Scientist told the All Points East crowd during her early-evening set time, before adding, “But I’ll take it.” Late-summer sunshine is the best pairing for the Atlanta singer’s brand of hazy and silky R&B, but sadly the weather gods weren’t favourable for too long. A couple of songs later though, Mariah had the perfect number for the dark clouds: the twinkling and glossy “Rainy Days.”
Mariah the Scientist’s latest album, 2025’s Hearts Sold Separately, has seen the performer, a recent recipient of the Rising Star Award at the Billboard Women in Music Awards 2026, take center stage. Its big hit, the irresistible “Burning Blue,” has been one of the biggest R&B chart hits of the past year, alongside her show-stopping Kali Uchis duet “Is It a Crime?” Both tracks were clear highlights at All Points East, but the set overall showed her star power in considerable amounts.
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Turnstile are Adored
“London is a second home for us. It’s good to be back,” Turnstile told the All Points East crowd during their West Stage set on Friday. It wasn’t just platitudes either — the mutual love was palpable. Guitarist Meg Mills hails from London, having previously played in U.K. hardcore bands Chubby and the Gang and Big Cheese, and judging by the manic, die-hard fans projected onto the big screens during the band’s set, the feeling was very much reciprocal.
The band entered to a play-out of Dolly Parton’s “Islands in the Stream,” a nod to the country singer’s recent passing, before launching into the ferocious “BIRDS” from 2025’s Never Enough. They kept the pace going throughout too, with the setlist picking from mostly Never Enough and Glow On (2021) cuts. Faye Webster joined the band onstage for a rendition of their song “I Care,” before they later covered the Stone Roses’ “I Wanna Be Adored,” a track that frontman Brendan Yates has previously described as “one of my favourite songs of all time.”
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“Jump, Jump”
“London, I need you to do one thing tonight,” Tyler, The Creator announced to the All Points East crowd at the start of his headline set, before launching into “Big Poe,” the all-energy opener from his latest album Don’t Tap the Glass, which begins with a sample of the famous “jump, jump” refrain from 2002’s “Pass the Courvoisier, Part II” by Busta Rhymes. It was a fitting way to kick things off, given that Don’t Tap the Glass was designed especially to get people dancing.
Tyler has described his entire ethos for the record — written and recorded while touring his previous effort CHROMAKOPIA — as being a way of getting people off their phones, for them to become more present and be more comfortable having fun in public again. He might not be able to eradicate the sea of raised screens from festivals, but he did his best to get everyone living more in the moment. For the first of his back-to-back two-day takeover, Tyler went full throttle, pulling out all the stops with pyros, dancing and blistering renditions of tracks like “Thought I Was Dead”, “Noid” and “Rah Tah Tah.” Viral hits “Sugar on My Tongue” and “Sticky” gave reasons to move and he even sparked the odd mosh pit along the way.
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Going Underground
With his recent stage designs, Tyler has generally gone big and maximalist. His Call Me If You Get Lost tour setup in 2022 was Great Gatsby by way of Wes Anderson: a pastel-blue Victorian-era mansion looming in the backdrop with a mint-green 1930s Rolls-Royce. 2025’s CHROMAKOPIA tour, by contrast, turned more industrial, with Tyler performing from a giant green shipping container.
His latest stage show is just as entrancing, and his All Points East set brought his Don’t Tap the Glass character to a U.K setting, Tyler dressed in a red leather jacket and trouser combo, matching red baseball cap, white vest and thick gold chain. The stage matched the ’80s hip-hop/dance theme too, with decor revolving around the theme of the London Underground. There was a station entrance, graffiti, a full-size model tube carriage and plenty of signage for nearby Hackney Wick and the (a bit fictionalised) tube stop of Victoria Park. Tyler roamed among the props like it was a stage play and, at one point, even performed inside said tube carriage.
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Tyler Made Up for Lost Time
“This is where it all started,” Tyler said two-thirds into his London festival set, reflecting on his relationship with the city. You could perhaps forgive Tyler for having conflicting feelings about the U.K due to his aforementioned visa ban, but it appears to be all love, and he told the crowd at All Points East that he was looking to make up for a bit of lost time by playing some older cuts.
Explaining to the crowd that he wanted to take things back and perform songs that he wasn’t able to play in those four-plus years that he was banned for the U.K. between 2015 and 2019, Tyler dove into a smattering of fan favourites. These included “IFHY” from Wolf, “She” from Goblin, “Who Dat Boy” and closer “See You Again” from Flower Boy, the breezy latter track being a highlight for many at Victoria Park, or at least appearing so from the mass singalong it spurred on. Ten years after being banned, Tyler spent Friday night proving exactly what the U.K had been missing.
