Edinburgh’s Summer Sessions goes heavier and, thanks to a rogue East Coast haar, considerably frizzier — but Idles and a Deftones crowd twice the size of their last Hydro show leave no one in doubt who owns the night.
There’s a particular kind of Edinburgh evening that decides, somewhere around teatime, that it fancies being May again. Tonight was one of them, a proper east coast haar rolling in off the North Sea, dropping the temperature about five degrees and turning every attendee of a sensitive hairsuite disposition into an even wilder-looking version of themselves. This is science, or possibly a lack of suitable product, but either way there was a lot of hair flexing on display tonight, in an impressive range of colours, none of it behaving.
It’s week two of the 2026 edition of Summer Sessions’ – The Cure played this same patch of grass last Sunday with a support bill of indie royalty and while there’s a good few thousand fewer bodies in tonight for an early-doors school night, it’s still a proper multi-generational gathering of the tribes: punks, metallers, emos, goths, and the odd 6 Music dad clutching a plastic pint like a very expensive talisman.
Idles are no strangers to Ingliston, they headlined one of the Connect Festival reboots here a few years back and the crowd that’s built up by the time they hit the stage is already wound tight and ready to go off. They oblige immediately, detonating into Levitator, and let’s be honest: pretty much everything Idles do is angry, just angry in the constructive sense – the targets tonight, as ever, being fascists, racists, the monarchy and those prosecuting genocide in Palestine. There are precious few bands left willing to actually say the quiet part out loud from a festival stage rather than mumble something vague about unity, and in Joe Talbot they have a genuinely eloquent conductor, forever breaking from the chaos itself to check in with the crowd and remind everyone that this; whatever “this” is, right now, together, is the actual point.
They know exactly how to work a field this size, and it isn’t long before a steady stream of crowd-surfers is riding a wave of goodwill towards the barrier, the usually stony-faced security team looking almost onboard about it. Jon Beavis’s drums and Adam Devonshire’s bass lock down the foundations while Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan duel it out on guitar, both periodically abandoning their posts to go walkabout in the circle pit before surfing back to the stage on the same wave of love they sent out. Never Fight a Man With a Perm turns the whole field into a single moving organism, Mother and Danny Nedelko land exactly where you’d want them to, and there’s a genuinely deranged detour into a full-band cover of All I Want for Christmas Is You that nobody present will be able to satisfactorily explain to anyone who wasn’t there. Rottweiler closes things out the only way it knows how – flat out bedlam. For the Idles virgins in the crowd, and there were a fair few young ones nearby your correspondent, who went from wide-eyed terror to unfiltered joy somewhere around song three — this is as good an introduction as you’ll get. Watching them back in a field, rather than the sterile expanse of the Hydro. It’s like seeing a wild animal returned to its natural habitat.
Forty-five minutes and a costume change of weather later, Deftones amble out to a field that has grown into a very sizable crowd. That they’ve shifted somewhere in the region of 25,000 tickets for tonight, less than six months after selling out the 13,000 cap Hydro in Glasgow tells you word has very much got round, even if the band’s name still doesn’t ring many bells outside the circles that worship them. Tonight is effectively another stop on the tour behind last year’s private music, and it opens, fittingly, with one of their biggest hitters, Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away).
The public face of Deftones remains, indisputably, Chino Moreno, who at 53 continues to give a masterclass in the frontman’s craft that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with commitment, launching himself off the monitors at every opportunity when there’s a suitable spike in intensity, and there are a lot of those. The rest of the band, mercifully, aren’t trying to compete for the spotlight, they’re laying down the rich, detuned, endlessly layered sound that Deftones do better than almost anyone, no bar-chord thrashers required. Around the Fur and Korea land early and heavy, but it’s the epic run through Rosemary that best captures what makes this band worth 25,000 people’s Thursday night: warm keyboard and guitar arpeggios doing quiet battle with a wall of detuned bass and drums that never once tips into noise for noise’s sake. The private music cuts; my mind is a mountain, locked club, infinite source sit surprisingly comfortably next to two-decades-old favourites like My Own Summer (Shove It) and Sextape, proof that the new material isn’t just there to be politely tolerated between the hits.
None of this would land half as hard without the lighting design from Brian and Brad Palmer, whose visuals on the backdrop screen work in genuine synergy with the sound rather than as decoration, never more so than during the encore, when Change (In the House of Flies) floods the whole arena in red as the last of the light drains out of the sky, simple and devastatingly effective. Lotion and a closing 7 Words send everyone home properly wrung out.
Twenty tracks, ninety minutes, and anyone who caught The Cure here last Sunday might reasonably have felt short-changed on quantity — but then, that’s what most mortal bands do. What you won’t forget is a night that gave you both ends of the alternative spectrum at full volume: one band spitting fury at the state of things, another turning detuned guitars into something that felt, by the encore, almost like holy experience. The haar had cleared by the end. To be replaced by rain. Every cloud an all that, at least it’ll have calmed down some of those unruly hairdoos.
Words and pictures: Calum Mackintosh @ayecandyphotography