Fox Reviews Rock

We believe that Yungblud took inspiration from Ozzy Osbourne “OzzFest” and the Cures protest on unnecessarily high pricing of music tickets, while putting together BLUDFEST. This festival was £49.50 + fees for 8 hours of live music over two stages, a fairground, museum of Yungblud, food, beer, merch and more!

Although a cause we believe in (music should be affordable and accessible for everyone) we actually hadn’t heard of it, or Yungblud before! We stumbled across the festival because NOAHFINNCE had made an Instagram post saying he was performing.

so we thought we would go.. And here’s how it went! 👇

It was a 2 hour drive to Milton Keynes for us, and we arrived at 12.15 thinking this would give us plenty of time to find the queue and get in not long after the doors opened at 1pm. We were very very wrong. We started off in the wrong queue as there were no signposts at all, luckily it wasn’t long until a fellow festival attendee mentioned we were stood in the vip queue instead of general admission, so we, as well as a few other people, joined the correct queue.

Optimistic that the queue would go down quite quickly once the doors opened we chatted to our fellow queue mates, and the atmosphere was very positive despite the direct sun with very little shade. It got to about 1.30pm before we saw any movement from the queue, and even then it was an incredibly slow shuffle forward.

The National Bowl is a 30,000 people venue and we were definitely not anticipating the lack of organisation to get people in the venue, as the hours passed by our enthusiasm was drained, the heat got more intense, and the tiny water bottles we were told to bring were empty.

After almost 3 hours we finally made it inside! We missed the first 3 bands play, and from the videos we saw not a lot of people were inside for them either, as the last entry was 5pm,we are unsure if people that came not long after us even made it in! The organisation was abysmal.

Although a horrible start to what should have been an amazing day, we got some pasta and headed over to the second stage where we saw our first act of the day, Hannah Grae. Hannah sang ‘Screw Loose’ and ‘It Could’ve Been You’ and during her set she was asked to swap a setlist for a bracelet which she happily agreed to once the set was finished as she needed it.

Although the crowd was small we believe it would have been so much fuller had everyone in the queue been in the festival, we thought her voice was incredible, and her interaction with the band and crowd was great to see! She finished her set announcing to the crowd her guitarist and bassist were debuting their new hairstyles that day (we think they looked great!) We would definitely go see Hannah play live again as we enjoyed her pop punk style, stage presence and vocals. Her new album ‘Nothing Lasts Forever’ is definitely worth a listen.

We then headed over to the main stage for the first time, which was huge in comparison to the tiny second stage tucked away behind all the food stalls.

We missed the first couple songs of pop rock Nessa Barretts set, the first song we caught was ‘PASSENGER PRINCESS’ and although we are fans, we didn’t believe she sounded great, this was most likely due to the sound system rather than Nessa herself, as the set went on it got a lot better! We couldn’t get ourselves very far forward in the crowd as a lot of people were there to watch her, (some people came from Poland just to see her!) We also heard there were a lot of people still not in the venue that where there to see Nessa, but were stuck in the queue still!

We took the opportunity to to have a wander around the ‘mini Camden’ in the centre of the main area. The main area consisted of a few bars, food stalls, a miniature The Hawley Arms pub, the B.R.A.T shop, a tattoo parlour, a buskers corner, and a guitar shop. We didn’t actually go inside any of these as the queues were huge, although we do believe they could have been a bit bigger to help accommodate the amount of people at the festival wanting to go inside.

As we were walking back to the main stage Yungblud walked past us to go and visit the pub, take some photos and grab a beer. We could hear where they were as we were walking due to the screaming fans! I’m sure he made a lot of peoples day by wandering around the grounds and taking photos with fans!

We used this opportunity to get close to the main stage for The Damned for the Legends slot. The band wore some interesting outfit choices, such as Captain Sensible; the guitarist, wearing a red beret which is the same one he wore on Top Of The Pops in 1979 part way through the set, and the lead singer Dave Vanian (known for wearing dark outfits) dressed looking like Judge Doom (the bad guy in Who Framed Rodger Rabbit) in our opinion.

The Damned played a lot of their hits such as ‘Love Song’ and ‘Beware of the Clown’ which went down incredibly well with the crowd, the atmosphere was amazing for this old school punk band. Towards the end of their set they gave us an incredible performance of ‘Neat Neat Neat’ where Dave was running around near the crowd. It was great to see the first UK punk band ever to release a single!

We then went back to the second stage to catch the end of Jessie Jo Stark, Dominic’s girlfriend. On our way we walked past the entrance and it was still full of people waiting to enter, we couldn’t believe how many people were still out there!

We caught Jesse Jo Stark mid set singing ‘Lipstick’ and put on a solid performance with her incredible voice (Maybe her godmother Cher gave her some lessons). With a very commanding stage presence she rocked the crowd.  We really appreciated how much this pop rock artist cared about the crowd, she kept reminding the crowd to drink water and she pointed out to the security when there was an emergency in the crowd. She continued her set with ‘Pussycat’ and a cover of ‘Ring of Fire’ and a shout out to Dominic, for putting on this festival.

We headed back down the hill to the main stage again, for the punk rock duo Soft Play (formerly known as Slaves), we caught a bit of thier set at Download Festival a couple months ago and were excited to see them again.

They were as good as we remembered and full of energy jumping all over the stage opening with their hit  ‘Punk’s Dead’ we were glad they also played ‘Act Violently’ again as we really enjoyed it last time! Soft Play are definitely worth watching live as it’s a party from beginning to end with Issac screaming lyrics whilst standing up, slamming down on a drum kit and Laurie running around playing some fantastic hardcore punk style riffs on the guitar!

We headed back to the second stage for the final show there, and it was to see NOAHFINNCE! Who we  first discovered  at Download Festival (you can read about it here in our download review) https://foxreviewsrock.com/2024/07/25/download-from-a-different-perspective-part-2/

There seemed to be a 20 minute delay between him going on stage and what time he was supposed to come on, it looked like there was something technical going on. Once everything looked resolved, the band came on stage and started playing, loud! So so loud! We are unsure why it was significantly louder than any other set of the day, but could have been to do with the delay?

Despite the volume, they sounded great! As usual Noah was chaotic and erratic in his pop punk stage performance, pulling faces and making jokes throughout the set. Opening up strong with one our favourites ‘GROWING UP ON THE INTERNET’! The set list didn’t disappoint playing ‘I KNOW BETTER’, ‘LIFE’S A BIT’ and ‘SCUMBAG’, It was a electric from start to finish, with a lot of jumping around and even a few mosh pits. We definitely felt that 8 songs and half an hour was too short of a set, but luckily we have tickets to their headliner show in November!

As the day was cooling down we were getting hungry, we had a look around the food stalls again and settled on some delicious Persian food, probably some of the best street food we have had and good sized portions despite it being festival prices (£12 a dish) We ate and wandered around the almost empty fair grounds where there were a few rides, nandos, the Yungblud gallery, and some props you could take pictures with.

It’s not a festival without churros, so we grabbed some before heading back to the main stage with plenty of time for Yungblud! An artist who doesn’t like to conform to a specific genre, they play everything from rock to hip hop. He has collaborated with many famous artists such as Travis Barker (Blink 182), Bring me the Horizon and Avril Lavigne.

We sat at the back at the top of the hill as by this point we had been on our feet all day walking and dancing, we watched the sun set behind the stage as Yungblud was performing ‘superdeadfriends’ and ‘I Love You, Will You Marry Me’. Once it was dark we headed down to as close to the stage as we could get and the atmosphere was electric, Dominic was gushing about how happy he was we were all there and you could feel the love back from the crowd too.

He bought a fan on stage to play guitar during the song ‘Fleabag’. At the end of the song Yungblud told the fan that she could keep the guitar! Memories of a lifetime for a fan from Spain.

We listened to their new single ‘Breakdown’ and then ‘Mars’ before heading back to the car an hour before the festival was supposed to finish, we were absolutely exhausted and the affects of the heat and sun was definitely catching up with us.

We think the festival could be greatly improved, but a lot of the problems we thought would be solved by a more organised venue and some shaded areas. A lot of fans fainted and got ill, whilst others didn’t even make it in. But it is just the first year, we look forward to seeing if the complaints of the masses are heard and hopefully there are improvements to next year!

St. Jimmy & Rex 🖤☠️

All the songs used in this review belong to their respective owners and this website does not claim any right over them.