Y Not Festival – Pikehall, Derbyshire – 31/07/25 – 3/08/25

This is a festival that answers the big questions. Why gather 40,000 people in a rural Derbyshire field for the weekend? Why not? Why start the day with the conga-conducting Lancashire Hotpots and end it with the flare-igniting, raucous energy of the Prodigy? Why not? Why kick a football at my tent all night and unpeg its guy lines? Well, I couldn’t tell you that one.  

Y Not Festival, plonked at Pikehall just outside of Matlock, is a four-day music event that doesn’t shy away from the sing-alongs and the crowd-pleasers. The festival was split between eight stages, from bigger tents like The Quarry and Giant Squid to the alehouse Hog and Barrel and the Club Malibu party tent. With festival goers camping on the uneven slopes of the Peak District each night, the main stage (Big Gin) was opened every morning by acts with a very necessary expertise: audience reanimation.

On Thursday, the pin-striped Lancashire Hotpots rattled off a slew of parodies centred on either drinking, eating, or, unsurprisingly, Lancashire. Their songs are just the right combination of recognisable melodies, cheeky-chappie wordplay and uninhibited revelry, leaving the listeners with a pep to be stepped and a thirst to be quenched. Mr Motivator led the Saturday morning stumblers in some midday moving, his gang of neon motivators bringing the sunshine with feel-good classics and an infectious positivity, and King Pleasure and the Biscuit Boys brought a heavy dollop of rich swing on the rain-speckled Sunday, grooving the clouds apart with big band classics.

At times, however, the festival fell foul to a case of indie bloat. The term ‘indie’ is a bit of a nonsense term, a word originally defined on the independence of an artist’s label, which is now a bit obsolete in this era of imprints and grassroots closure. Nowadays, it has widely come to denote two types of guitar rock: mid-2000s riffs with lyrics about sticky floors and romantic misgivings; and the slicker, jangly guitar/keyboard music of the 2010s (think debut-era The 1975 or Two Door Cinema Club). 

Now, this is by no means an attempt to dismiss all bands of this genre, nor do all indie bands necessarily adhere to these two categories, but it is a helpful rule of thumb. Take The Pigeon Detectives, for example. They are quite possibly the exemplar of the mid-2000s indie bubble, and would be placed in the former category. They also played a blinder of a set on the Sunday, charming the Big Gin crowd with catchy anthems, punchy drumbeats and danceable guitar hooks. The lead singer, Matt Bowman, was doing cartwheels on stage, donned a rubber pigeon mask, and manned the stage cameras for some crowd-cam action; it was everything you would want a festival set to be, and they were not the only providers of such energy. 

On the other hand, some of the other indie bands felt as though they were lacking a certain edge to differentiate themselves. The Crooks seemed to be more of an Oasis tribute than Noasis, from the almost unbelievably similar chords and guitar tones (‘All Isn’t as it Seems’ dodges the ‘Wonderwall’ copyright automation by a hair’s breadth) down to the dodgy hairdos and the waterproofs. Sunbeam, who have ‘captured the ears of indie diehards’ according to their Spotify bio, had their lead singer boast that their song about mental health (‘You’re Not Alone’) made people cry, but beyond the chorus being a repetition of the song’s title and some platitudes without attitude, it lands more as lighter-in-the-air box-ticking than as a genuine attempt to raise awareness. And if I hear another song about someone’s hometown, I might weep from exhaustion.

You just can’t help but wish that Y Not pushed the boat out with some of their acts. All-male headliners, all-male indie special guests; for a festival that’s had Snoop Dogg, De La Soul and Dizzee Rascal, how is Professor Green one of the only servings of rap that you’re offering? Some of the festival’s highlights for me were the more pop-orientated acts: Pixey opened Big Gin on Thursday with a rich, sunshine-laden breakbeat sound; Terrianne played a BBC Introducing slot on the Sunday, wowing the gathering crowd with her powerful vocals and intimate lyrics, underpinned by an authentic, bubbly personality and a pink tutu to match; and Hard Life delivered a set of slick pop/hip-hop crossovers which went some of the way to scratch that rap itch. 

That’s not to say the festival was a disappointment, though, and it was a great weekend overall. The Prodigy and Madness are at either ends of the spectrum of popular music, and both headlined exactly as you would hope: lasers and carnage from one; irreverence and singalongs from the other. The Courteeners created a huge buzz around the festival, although I can’t help but feel tension between Liam Fray’s righteously angry songwriting of their debut and the softer, more placid sound of their newer work; it created the age-old problem of half the crowd swaying through songs they don’t know and the other half impatiently chatting in anticipation of a St Jude tune. The Wombats seem to have solved this, as while their early staples (‘Moving to New York’, ‘Let’s Dance To Joy Division’) provided the biggest surges in excitement, their newer electronic work (‘Greek Tragedy’, ‘Turn’) was still met with, at times equal, enthusiasm. Perhaps The Last Dinner Party, with their eclectic mesh of Kate Bush-esque theatricality, operatic vocals and consistently powerful and unflinching (and, at times, erotic) songwriting and instrumentation, should have been swapped for the Saturday headline slot. 

All in all, it was hard not to enjoy Y Not. Plenty of great bands and artists, big and small, as well as comedy, karaoke and late-night DJs. The organisers should keep in mind the festival’s old motto: ‘Small Fresh and Loud’. They’ve kept the loud, and eschewed the small. The most important question is, can they keep it fresh? 

NB: On the matter of freshness, I would suggest having more than only 24 urinals accessible by the main stage of a 40,000-capacity festival. 

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