Canvas Yard brings the sunshine and beats

The Garden Party is Leeds longest running and most essential electronic music event. It has legendary status amongst those who know for being such a fulsome celebration across the May Bank Holiday weekend. 

This year it made an epic move to a new venue in the city centre, Canvas Yard. This new space is a brand new cultural collaboration between Moda Living and New Citizens and is officially the largest open-air events space in town. It was brought alive with some cutting edge technology and production and for the first time in Garden Party’s history it had three stages with well curated line-ups on each. A powerful sound system was on each stage to deliver the perfect soundtrack as well as an array of tasty eats and drinks in the food village and a relaxing chill out area. 

This epic new chapter was even blessed with great sun. It beamed down on the Saturday to make for lots of smiley faces and rather sunburned shoulders. But that didn’t stop the crowd going hard – Leeds is a famous party city and so it proved with young and old ravers alike all going wild, climbing on shoulders and yelping every big drop. 

There are so many sets on a huge scale that wherever you turn there is good music to be heard. Saturday got off to a good start with some superb local and upcoming acts setting the tone with Mitch B2B Holly Why a favourite on the Ruckus25 stage. When we got into the bigger names the vibes were off the chart with the likes of Bradley Zero dropping colourful mixes of house of all shades to a loving crowd. LF System were one of the standouts with their own summer smash from last year’s a real highlight before local hero Paul Woolford blew us away with his high impact, pine laced, feel good bangers on the same Solar stage.  Manchester tech house titans Solardo were given the honour of closing it down and they responded in fine style. 

The Solar Stage on Sunday had epic tech house from PAWSA to finish after wild bass, dubstep, techno and disco from Skream really got everyone mangled. Radiate stage meanwhile saw some colourful disco from Todd Terje and more dark and strobe lit techno from Daniel Avery. Drip was a more intimate affair that had local lads PBR Streetgang doing their disco house thing like no others and bass madness from Barry Can’t Swim. 

As it heads towards its 20th year, we cannot wait to see what The Garden Party has it store for us in future as this year’s might have been the biggest and best episode yet.