Offie Mag

Welcome to Review with Lou, a regular journal from Offie Mag’s first-ever intern, Louis Rowland. Known as Wachuwan when producing music or spinning tracks with Offie Mag DJs, Intern Lou can be found on our socials with a mic in hand — or right here on the blog, documenting the nights out, last-minute gigs, and everything in between.

He’s been spotted at AVA in Belfast, DJing and Gussy’s Ice Cream Parlour, as well as various other gigs and club nights.

This time out he’s in south London for RALLY Festival.

The bank holiday weekend started in a familiar fashion. Waking up slightly hungover on the editor-in-chief's sofa after an Offie Mag Social, I gazed out the window to see the rain pouring onto the street below. I knew getting back to London was going to be a chore.

As always, we had a real night of it down at Alphabet. Pizza was eaten, drinks were drunk and dances were danced, all in the name of supporting an independent multimedia powerhouse. You must come to the next one, which will be our final party of the summer on 18th September.

But before we can throw down one last time, there were more pressing matters to deal with. Yes, we’ve come back to Rally.

Of course, I wouldn’t choose to take a late-morning trudge through Seven Dials while the heavens let loose their wrath upon me, but I had no interest in wearing yesterday's outfit, and I can’t think of anything worse than bringing an overnight bag to a day festival.

So back on the Thameslink I went, more than slightly soggy and with a brain equally as foggy, listening to Blood Orange’s Negro Swan, which remains, in my opinion, one of the best bodies of work ever made. Dev Hynes has always held an enigmatic place in my mind. He made art that my impressionable teenage brain was instantly enamoured by, and now, excitingly, for the first time, I was finally going to see him.

After managing to get home, have a quick change and watch some Cundy and O’Hara clips, I got out the door to meet my friend Ella at a Riverside pub near Southwark Park. I have an unfortunate habit of almost always being late to meet her, but for once I had everything sorted and might actually be early.

Of course, I am an idiot.

You realistically only need three things every time you leave the house, and you should pretty quickly realise if you’ve forgotten one. But yes, I left my wallet at home, only discovering this when I was almost at my destination.

So yes, I was an hour late.

Usually, I would brush this kind of thing off. I have a firm belief that my charm and charisma are well worth the wait. However, I had promised I would be on time, and having someone wait around for an hour by themselves, with no games on their phone, did make me feel awful.

Of course, I didn’t admit this.

Once I did finally arrive, I promised that we would still have the best time. And unlike my first promise, I wasn’t going to break this one.

So, after a couple of pints in the Mayflower, a beautiful 17th-century boozer built onto the south bank of the Thames, whose garden has to close when high tide brings murky water right to its back door, we made our way to Rally, a festival we had penned in for months.

I had attended last year, where the vibes were considerably more “networky”, but today we were there purely for musical enjoyment. I vowed not to be lured into any backstage area or spend too much time making content. East has got that juice.

Southwark Park is on the smaller side of the temporary party-town locales, but that does make it very easy to navigate. Standing by the Pagoda, you can pretty much see all the stages, bars and food stalls with little more than a turn of your head.

However, our first stop was right by the entrance gates at the Skehans tent, curated through a collaboration between LEX Records and Adult Entertainment. Immediately, we bumped into James Massiah. I’m not too sure what he was talking about, but I overheard him listing off “sex, cocaine, Valium and cigarettes” like he was giving a tiny mic loser his 4 guilty pleasures.

And speaking of tiny mic losers, this was where we ran into Archie (tiny) and Bricky (mic loser), who were doing some boots-on-the-ground journalism, asking the punters of Rally what brings them joy. No spoilers, but it’s a lot of loving music and loving friends. I wonder where they might have gotten that idea from.

LEX had brought some heavy hitters with them, with Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon and Vayda both on hand. We caught Vayda upon arrival, and she especially lit up the tent. Standing beside everyone’s favourite hip-hop savant Kierandotwav, who was on DJ duties, she unleashed tracks that got asses shaking, booties clapping and Brickcellphones twerking, with the temperature rising after every song.

After picking up a Joey Biggs, now with considerably less hair than the last time he featured in one of my jaunts, we took ourselves to a DJ set from Nabihah Iqbal. She made the inaugural Radio Wan Top 20 back in 2023 with ‘This World Couldn’t See Us’, and much to Ella’s disappointment, she didn’t play any of her own music. She was, however, playing some real bangers, getting us firmly into a dancing mood.

I had planned to see James K in Brighton the following day, but due to unforeseen circumstances, the show was cancelled. It’s always better to see an artist at their own show, but it did mean that she was someone we couldn’t afford to miss now. It was a pleasure to witness her perform alone on the NTS stage, which definitely featured the most unique design of the festival, offering a more or less clear 270-degree view of the artist on stage.

James K makes some of the most angelic and ethereal music around, and it translates exceptionally well live. The only thing more entertaining was Joey dropping his triple-mango Lost Mary into his pint. And yes, it did still work, but it was… different.

After half an hour of bumbling about, drinking, smoking and thinking, we found ourselves properly at the main stage for the first time. We had passed through earlier to catch a little bit of Mark William Lewis, but Norwegian electronic duo Smerz were playing next and were a priority watch for us.

Their mix of left-field electronics, fusing Western classical tradition with modern production techniques and their characteristically deadpan, dry vocal style, had appealed to me ever since Ella showed me them months before. They were definitely one of the catalysts behind our decision to attend.

Their live performance, joined by two additional band members, was sensual and intense. As the day turned into night, the focus was drawn more and more into the music, the musicians and the crowd that had come to experience it all.

There was no reason now to leave the main stage. I’m well aware of the talents of Daniel Avery and James Massiah, but there was only one place for me to be. Blood Fucking Orange.

Words cannot explain the waves of emotion that washed over me, again and again, as Dev and the ridiculous collection of talent he had assembled played the songs that had made me fall in love with an entirely different side of music. This was the music I discovered after years of listening almost exclusively to Travis Scott and Playboi Carti, and hearing it all performed in front of me felt almost surreal.

Tears filled my eyes during the refrain at the end of ‘Saint’. It felt as though every time I had ever listened to that song came back to me all at once, each memory so vivid that I was completely transported. ‘Jesus Freak Lighter’, ‘Charcoal Baby’, ‘Jewellery’ and ‘You’re Not Good Enough’, to name just a few, followed swiftly.

I haven’t been this engaged with a live performance in years. The set simultaneously felt like it was lasting an age and disappearing in the blink of an eye. I wished it would never end. I wanted to bottle the feeling up and experience it again and again. That might be what they call nirvana.

For a festival that had started with me forgetting my wallet and leaving Ella stranded for an hour, this felt like a pretty remarkable way for the day to have unfolded. Music has always had this strange ability to transport me somewhere else, but there are very few times when you actually feel yourself being moved by it in real time. Standing there, surrounded by thousands of people who had all come for their own reasons, hearing music that had meant so much to me at a completely different point in my life, I felt incredibly lucky to be there.

Rally is a festival that is truly different. It isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t try to be. They don’t load the lineup with talent purely to sell tickets; there’s real care tied into the curation of the artists they book. Yes, it probably is a little pretentious, and there’s no reason on God’s green Earth that a slice of pizza should cost me £8.50, but as a day out, it’s really up there with the very best.

My night ended at the Sun in Camberwell, having a pint I probably didn’t need and looking forward to a two-hour journey home. It can’t all be glitz and glam, can it?

Thank you to Rally for having us, Matt and Arch for holding it down in the Artist Area, Joey for his insane impressions, and Ella for waiting an hour for me. It will definitely happen again.

I will be back.

Words by Louis Rowland