Fox Reviews Rock

When we Were Young is a fairly new festival currently in its 3rd year, at Las Vegas Showgrounds – Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s a day festival but it has two dates, on both days the line up is the same and are ticketed as individual events. We got the chance to go last year, in the second year of the festival, and we managed to snag tickets to both days as we found one day is not enough for this huge line up!

We stayed at Circus Circus; the worst hotel on the Las Vegas strip, however it was the closest to the Showgrounds and we were incredibly thankful for that! The hotel was actually fine despite the horror stories we heard about it, but in comparison to the other incredibly grand hotels on the strip it definitely looked and felt very run down. We didn’t mind too much about the hotel as we spent very little time there on our trip, we even flew out to San Francisco during the week before the festival, where Rex managed to break her toe while on a cruise under the Golden Gate Bridge on the second day we were in America.

After spending the week exploring Las Vegas, San Francisco and visiting the Grand Canyon, we were really excited for the reason we were there, the festival! As we were so close to the Showgrounds we could see them setting up the stages and bars over the days leading up to it, only making the excitement bigger!

We had only booked tickets to Saturday at this point, so we spent a lot of time planning the day and how to see as many bands as we possibly could as the schedule had only been released a few days prior. Luckily the merch stand was open from 9am and outside the gates so we were able to grab some merch and head back to the hotel for a huge buffet breakfast before the gates opened at 11am!

We got in early and were able to wander around the grounds just as the first bands were starting. There was plenty to do, with photo booths, loads of cool props, cooling mist stations, a skatepark (where Tony Hawk did a performance during the day) and plenty of food and drink stalls, we tried to mentally map out as much as we could as we knew that even though we could move around freely to begin with, it wasn’t going to be the case all day.

The first band we saw was Games we play while they performed ‘I Hope You’re Happy’ on the Striped stage  we only got to watch the first half of their set before heading off to the Ghost stage to catch the end of Magnolia Parks set, we are glad we caught ‘Misfits’ as its one of our favourites from the band. We did it this way as next on the Ghost stage was Zebrahead. Even though we were sad about not being able to see any of  these bands for long, we will be going to see them again soon! (keep an eye out for our reviews on here) At this point in the day the sets were only 30 minutes long so you really had to be there and waiting to catch a full set.

We headed over to the Striped stage to watch the Veronicas, Rex’s toe was hurting a bit at this point so we watched them from quite far back on the fake grass where we could sit down and cool off a little. Despite it being October, Vegas was still having summer temperatures of around 38 degrees celcius, which is fairly warm for those that live in the desert, never mind for us; that live in the puddle we call England!

The Veronicas put on an incredible performance, singing songs from when we were young such as ‘4ever’ and ‘Untouched’. The sisters said they thought they were the most punk band there due to their outfit choices of latex and leather. They did make an interesting choice for a concert in the desert, even for Australians!

We then headed over to the Green stage to watch New Found Glory, they kicked off their set with ‘All Downhill From Here’, creating an amazing atmosphere, they then  played ‘Let It Go’ from Frozen and the crowd went crazy, finally finishing their set with ‘My Friends Over You’. We stayed over by the Pink and Green stages for the rest of the day as they were right next to each other and as one band was finishing the next was up straight away.

Yellowcard was on the Pink stage and  it was absolutely incredible to see ‘Ocean Avenue’ live, the whole crowd went wild, hopefully we will experience it again when we see them in November! They put on an incredible performance with ‘Lights and Sound’ and ‘Only One’ performed with Cassadee Pope, truly making the nostalgia hit hard.

Straight after on the Green stage was All time Low, they played ‘Weightless’, ‘New Religion’ with Teddy Swims, followed by their new song ‘Fake as Hell’ featuring Avril Lavigne, and she came on stage for a surprise set even though she wasn’t performing at the festival at all. It was an incredible experience, only made better by them also performing ‘sk8r boi’! They finished their set with ‘Dear Maria, Count Me In’ which we think perfectly set up the atmosphere for the next band.

Sum 41 came jumping on stage, Deryck Whibley always brings so much energy to his performances and this was no exception, St Jimmy has seen them before, but this was Rex’s first time, we have since seen them at Download and will be seeing them again on their last UK tour later in the year. As always they performed their biggest hits ‘In Too Deep’ and ‘Hell Song’ , as well as playing ‘Still Waiting’

At this point Rex was really struggling with her broken toe so we decided to see if we could get some discount resale tickets for the Sunday, and we did! So we ended up calling it quits after 8 hours in the sun and having such an amazing day! We made the short walk back to the hotel as the sun was setting and Rise Against were playing, we could actually hear them all the way back to our hotel room before Rex instantly fell asleep!

Check back tomorrow for part two of When We Were Young, and who we saw next!

St. Jimmy & Rex 🖤☠️

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