The show was the first of two headline performances at London's All Points East festival.
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.
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.
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.
