Rock N Roll Circus - Friday – The Streets, Babyshambles and a Rock ’n’ Roll Riot in Sheffield
- Desh Kapur
- 8 hours ago
- 7 min read
Don Valley Bowl, Sheffield – 28th August 2026
IMAGES / WORDS DESH KAPUR
There are festivals, there are gigs, and then there is Rock N Roll Circus, which seems to have looked at the traditional festival blueprint, laughed hysterically, thrown it in the nearest bin and replaced it with tightrope walkers, fire breathers, trapeze artists, monocycle riders and enough theatrical madness to make you wonder whether you’ve accidentally wandered into a particularly well-organised fever dream. And the remarkable thing is that, despite all the apparent chaos, this thing is seriously well organised. Everything runs like clockwork, the stages work, the production is huge, the circus performers are seamlessly woven into the evening and there is always something happening somewhere. It’s slick without ever feeling corporate, spectacular without losing its sense of danger. Rock N Roll Circus has figured out something that plenty of festivals seem to have forgotten: sometimes you just need to give people a fucking good time.
I arrived at Don Valley Bowl on Friday 28 August with the usual expectations of a day of live music, but within minutes it was obvious this wasn't going to be a conventional festival experience.
Above you, somebody could be walking a tightrope.
Somewhere else, somebody was most likely breathing fire.
Then there was a trapeze artist swinging through the air and a bloke riding around on one wheel as if the laws of physics were merely a vague suggestion.
And underneath all this madness, the music was kicking the whole thing into another gear.
First stop for me was the smaller stage and Ellur, the stage name of Halifax singer-songwriter Ella McNamara.
Ellur is one of those artists who can make vulnerability sound enormous.
Her songs come wrapped in infectious, feel-good instrumentation, but underneath that surface are deeply personal lyrics, the kind of confessional songwriting that makes you feel like you've accidentally opened somebody else's diary. There are traces of 80s synth-pop, 90s indie rock and alternative folk running through it all, with echoes of Sam Fender, Fleetwood Mac, The War on Drugs and Sharon Van Etten.
It's a strange combination on paper.
Live, it makes perfect sense.
There is a confidence about Ellur that belies the emotional weight of the material, and her soaring melodies give the songs enough muscle to carry across a festival environment. She doesn't need to scream for attention. She just gets on with making good songs and lets them do the shouting.
Then I headed over to the main stage.
And there they were.
Babyshambles.
Led by the mythical, beautiful, perpetually fascinating Peter Doherty.
This is the point where nostalgia can become dangerous, because Babyshambles have accumulated so much mythology over the years that it would be easy to spend the entire set looking backwards.
But then they smash into the first song and the room detonates.
Necks snap forward.
Every dormant Shambles fan cell in the building jolts awake.
And for a band with a reputation for chaos, they sound dangerously tight.
Mick Whitnall and Drew McConnell lock in with machine-like instinct. Adam Ficek drives everything with crisp, unfussy force, while Doherty—focused and vocally strong—conducts the whole beautiful mess with that familiar poetic intensity.
There is something almost surreal about watching Babyshambles in 2026.
For years they've existed somewhere between memory, mythology and the accumulated debris of British rock'n'roll folklore. But standing in front of them tonight, none of that matters.
This isn't a museum piece.
This is a fucking rock band.
And a very good one.
Doherty still has that ability to look like he might wander off into the night at any second while simultaneously being completely in control of the room. He has always possessed that strange alchemy where fragility and swagger exist in exactly the same body.
Then comes “Fuck Forever.”
Inevitably.
And the crowd completely loses its mind.
Voices crack. Arms shoot into the air and suddenly the whole place feels like it might levitate. It's chaos in widescreen. The beautiful kind of chaos. The kind that people will lie about later to make themselves sound braver.
Doherty hangs around for a moment, arms open to the roar, before slipping backstage with a small salute. His Epiphone chimes behind him. A sound that Babyshambles fans could probably pick out of a hundred guitars in the dark.
After eleven years away, Babyshambles haven't simply returned. They've reminded everyone why they mattered in the first place. The songs were always there. The guts were always there.
And, underneath all the folklore, the talent was always there too.
Then, because this is Rock N Roll Circus, I get to watch a tightrope walker doing his thing before taking a short break and heading back to the smaller stage.
The Dublin-born alternative rapper comes onto the stage carrying enough energy to power half of Sheffield and proceeds to throw every musical rule he can find straight out of the window.
Hip-hop?
Absolutely.
Jazz?
Yep.
Punk?
Why the fuck not.
House, indie rock, electronica?
Chuck them all in.
KhakiKid's sound has evolved from a jazz-tinged hip-hop foundation, with influences that stretch towards Mac Miller and Tyler, The Creator, into something much more eccentric and difficult to pin down. His own description of an “Ice Spice and U2 combination” sounds like the sort of sentence that should be illegal, but somehow makes perfect sense once he's on stage.
And the Irish identity is right there in everything he does.
The accent stays.
The humour stays.
The self-deprecation stays.
His bars can jump from classic braggadocio to brutally honest self-awareness in the space of a few seconds, and the result is an artist who feels completely comfortable being ridiculous one moment and vulnerable the next.
He bounces around the stage like somebody has plugged him directly into the mains, and by the end of the set it feels like the smaller stage has been hit by a musical electrical storm.
Then it's back to the main stage.
Because now it's time for The Streets.
And this is where the evening goes from festival to full-blown communal experience.
Mike Skinner and The Streets have always understood something about British life that plenty of supposedly serious songwriters never quite got. You don't need to write about presidents, wars and existential crises to make something feel important.
You can write about getting pissed.
Getting dumped.
Losing your money.
Going out.
Trying to get home.
Trying to pull.
Trying not to fuck everything up.
And somehow, make it sound like the entire country is contained inside the story.
Tonight The Streets are playing A Grand Don't Come For Free, the 2004 classic that turned ordinary British life into something approaching epic poetry. And they have even recreated the bus stop from the album cover on stage. It's a brilliant touch.
Then the band launches into the record and suddenly the Don Valley Bowl is full of people singing words that have been lodged somewhere in their brains for more than two decades.
“Dry Your Eyes.”
“Fit But You Know It.”
And all those other songs that have somehow become part of the national furniture. Thousands of voices rise up together. It's huge. But it's not polished in that soulless stadium-rock way.
The Streets have always been grubby, funny, awkward, honest and unmistakably British, and tonight those qualities are amplified rather than scrubbed away.
Skinner is backed by two backing singers and one seriously tight band, and the combination gives these songs a bigger live punch than their original recordings might suggest. The beats hit. The guitars cut through. The backing vocals lift everything. And Skinner stands in the middle of it all, delivering his stories with that unmistakable spoken-word flow that helped redefine what a British frontman could be.
Then “Fit But You Know It” hits and the place erupts.
A few songs later, “Dry Your Eyes” brings a completely different reaction.
This is what The Streets have always been brilliant at. One minute you're laughing. The next you're remembering somebody you haven't thought about in years. That's the trick. The jokes make the sadness hit harder. The sadness makes the jokes funnier. And somewhere between the two, Mike Skinner found a voice that belonged entirely to him.
By now, Rock N Roll Circus has become exactly what its name promises. The circus performers are still doing their thing. The lights are flying around the site. The music is pounding out across Don Valley Bowl. Thousands of people are singing. Somebody is probably on fire. Somebody else is probably hanging upside down from something. And I'm standing there thinking that somebody has finally worked out that music festivals don't have to choose between spectacle and substance.
You can have both.
You can have Ellur's vulnerability. KhakiKid's glorious genre chaos. Babyshambles' beautifully damaged rock'n'roll. And The Streets turning two decades of British life into one giant communal singalong.
And thank fuck for that.
Because somewhere along the way, live music became obsessed with being sensible.
Tonight Sheffield remembered that it doesn't have to be.
Rock N Roll Circus isn't just a festival.
It's a fucking circus.
And when the music is this good, the performers this fearless and the whole operation this brilliantly put together, you don't want the sensible option.
You want the tightrope.
You want the fire.
You want the noise.
You want Babyshambles smashing into another song while somebody swings above your head.
You want Mike Skinner telling thousands of people that they might as well sing along because, let's face it, they've all been there.
And when the final notes disappear into the Sheffield night, one thing is certain:
Rock N Roll Circus isn't just putting on shows.
It's putting the fucking rock'n'roll back into the circus.
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