South Facing 2025: Mogwai & Lankum

Rarely is a five-band bill as well curated as the first night of Crystal Palace Bowl’s 2025 South Facing Festival, with headliners Mogwai and Lankum topping the August 7th lineup, and The Twilight Sad, caroline, and The Yummy Fur rounding out the day. 

Crystal Palace Bowl’s pleasant grassy field created a beautiful backdrop for the first day of South Facing festival, with weather just moody enough to set the scene for a lineup dominated by Scottish music, but just warm enough if you stood for a dance. Long set changeovers for caroline (who stylise themselves in lowercase) and Lankum with their extensive arrays of instruments felt simply like opportunities to enjoy the grassy surrounds, with many people sprawled across the field, some with books and blankets, others taking advantage of various food stall offerings, and led to huge payoffs as everywhere in the bowl, the sound was exquisite.

Reformed Scottish band The Yummy Fur opened the day while it was still sunny with songs to match, playing a tight set of rock that might have once been classified as Britpop but now finds itself at home with post-rock and indie. A 3:20pm Thursday beginning meant a sparse crowd, but fans were nonetheless engaged, one calling out song requests as members of the later bands watched the set from the wings.

The crowd held their breaths as caroline began an exquisite performance. The band members played together in a manner that surpassed rehearsed to feel innately human, often seeming to forget the crowd as they wove together ambient sound using a variety of instruments to create evocative soundscapes. The only English band of the day, they noted that some of their members lived so nearby that they had even walked to the venue. 

Watching as two members stood facing each other and responding to each other’s every note, perfectly in sync, felt as intimate as observing a first dance between newlyweds beginning a lifelong partnership. Magdalena McClean’s voice oscillated beautifully between pitches using autotune in a way that, juxtaposed against the more traditional instruments, made the technique feel timeless, like electronic life breathed into ancient statues. 

The Twilight Sad treated the audience to several new songs, opening and closing with live debuts, “Dealing in the Dark” and “Waiting for the Phone Call.” Many people in the crowd wore old Twilight Sad tees, while a handful wore shirts from a stripped back mini-tour vocalist James Graham and guitarist Andy MacFarlane had embarked on last December, where the duo had first tested two other songs they debuted with a full band for us here at Crystal Palace. With crisp basslines and Graham’s passionate delivery, these new tracks were as easy to sink into as old fan favourites like “Last January” and “There’s A Girl in the Corner.”

Through some magical stage design, the modern Crystal Bowl stage appeared to float with a small pond between the stage and the barricade, and at some moments during the performances, the bass was powerful enough to cause water to gush from beneath the solid stage base. “We’ve never had a moat around the stage to protect ourselves,” Irish folk band Lankum quipped, before singing a few lines of a traditional Irish song: “thank God we’re surrounded by water!” 

Lankum’s blend of avant-garde and traditional Irish music felt fresh and modern, the drums in particular vibrating through the audience in a unifying manner. Vocalist Ian Lynch’s few lines speaking against the genocide of Palestinians were sincere and intense, describing song “The New York Trader” as being about “why it’s always a really, really, really bad idea to help people when they are engaged in the murder of innocent people.” He called upon the audience to remember that the British government is currently complicit. The song moved seamlessly into “The Rocks of Palestine,” the band’s reworking of Irish folk song “Rocks of Bawn,” before a performance of a song written by concentration camp prisoners at Börgermoo.

“No electric guitars on stage,” the gentleman next to me had texted his wife before the set began. “Probably not for me.” Yet by the end of Lankum’s resounding performance, he and everyone in the crowd cheered endlessly for the fantastic musicianship, pounding rhythms, and the rousing way the group had created camaraderie, proving bands don’t have to sound identical to capture an audience.

Yet Mogwai’s headliner status was never in question. Each note reverberated across the bowl clearly and pristinely as they began their set with the opening two tracks of this year’s new album, The Bad Fire, which blended seamlessly into old favourites like “Mogwai Fear Satan,” the cinematic atmosphere calling to mind different worlds.

The band barely needed to speak to have South Facing’s crowd captivated. The mostly instrumental set expertly curated climaxes and falls, bringing the crowd’s energy higher and higher and creating their own odysseys. A rare performance of “Cody” was especially rewarding for long-term fans, Stuart Braithwaite immersing us in a sonic blanket as the quiet lyrics cut through the noise: “And the way it is, I could leave it all / And I ask myself, would you care at all?”

Keeping energy high, the penultimate song “Ritchie Sacramento” from 2021’s As the Love Continues was arguably their most radio-friendly, a song which has, in a vast back catalogue filled with gems, has already solidified as a staple and a favourite of the mostly relaxed crowd who were on their feet, heads bobbing before “We’re No Here” closed out a phenomenal day.