All Points East festival have responded to complaints of poor sound during The Strokes‘ headline set yesterday.

The NYC icons topped the bill on the East Stage at All Points East festival last night (May 25). Joining The Chemical Brothers and Christine and the Queens as main headliners for the first weekend at London’s Victoria Park, it marked the band’s first UK show in four years.

But their comeback was plagued by sound issues as many fans complained the show was “ruined” and have since asked for their tickets to be refunded.


Responding to festival-goers, All Points East organisers have taken to social media to apologise. “Thank you to The Strokes for joining us last night for a truly incredible show,” the statement began. “The sound quality at our shows has been of a consistently high standard since we started All Points East in 2018 and we were disappointed to learn that there was a sound issue in some areas of the site during The Strokes’ set.”

They continued: “The sound engineers worked hard to address the problem as quickly as possible and, whilst it improved, we regret that a section of the audience didn’t have the audio experience that we expect for them.”

For any fans who have lodged a complaint, the festival added that they “will be responding to individual customers in the next few days.”

See the full statement below:

For this year’s All Points East festival stage times visit here.


Meanwhile, yesterday (May 25) saw Johnny Marr play a sun-soaked set at London’s All Points East Festival, filled with solo and Smiths classics.

Taking to the main East Stage late in the afternoon, Marr opened with ‘The Tracers’ from 2018’s acclaimed ‘Call The Comet‘, before tearing into The Smiths’ ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’. New single ‘Armatopia‘ landed like an old favourite, as did his renditions of Electronic’s ‘Get The Message’ and ‘Getting Away With It’, but the most fevered response was saved for ‘Easy Money’, ‘How Soon Is Now’ and a rare outing of ‘This Charming Man’.