A very good Friday: Leeds Fest Day 1

Leeds Festival 2026 is back, with six new stages, a new layout, and a crowd that turned up for every minute of it.

Thursday made history without us. Kasabian took the festival’s first-ever Thursday night headline slot, and people were still buzzing about it as we came through the gates on Friday. Fair to say the bar was set.

It cleared it. Blossoms and Notion got the afternoon moving, Violet Grohl pulled a proper crowd into The Canopy, and The Clause and The K’s did what they do best to tents that had clearly been waiting all year. Come the evening, it was Florence and the Machine on The Grid, back at Leeds for the first time since 2012, Kneecap closing out The Gallery, and Chase & Status shutting down the main stage.

Bramham Park had that particular feeling you only get here, forty-odd thousand people deciding at once that this is the one they’ll be talking about in October. The site feels different this year. More room to move, better sightlines, less of the bottleneck between stages that used to eat half an hour of your day. But the thing we kept coming back to was the crowd itself. Bucket hats, borrowed flags, sunburn, someone’s mate on someone’s shoulders. These are the faces that made our first day. Two more to go.