Turnstile at Alexandra Palace (5.11.2025) with The Garden supporting.
Ally Pally is all a bit out of the way and considering it’s London, all a bit of a chore. I stayed in Wood Green which has little to appeal beyond The Nag’s Head and the tube line out of it, just opposite. It’s about 25 mins on the tube, north of central London. Then you have to get to the Alexandra Palace itself. It’s a mile walk or there is the W3 bus that goes from the stop, found if you turn left and round the corner from The Nag’s Head. The W3 bus drops you right outside the venue. The return is less straightforward as the buses are rammed and queues large. It worked though, as it did for my only previous visit to the indoor venue here, for Bauhaus in 2021. (The Bauhaus blog.)
That Bauhaus gig, in hindsight, was about half capacity. Turnstile was a sell-out. A massive gig and at approximately 10,000 capacity the place is verging on the inadequate.
There is a huge bar room before entering the auditorium. It is an old fashioned exhibition centre and feels like it. Cavernous halls. Drinks were absurdly expensive (£9 for 440ml can of cider/ £6 for a 330ml Neck Oil) and queues for drinks and bogs nauseous. Most of the toilets appeared to be up stairways packed with women in queues, so the gents were hard to access. Downstairs people queued for festival style plastic portaloos which capture smells so beautifully.
I’m here with gig buddy Keith who I was at school with and bumped into a couple of years ago. We liked the idea of exploring the much lauded Turnstile, fuelled by the excellent 2025 album Never Enough. We concluded that we were the oldest people here by some margin.
There were two support bands listed but we got in to find The Garden playing, and the only support we saw. They are twins from Orange County, California – Wyatt and Fletcher Shears. What a great noise they make, and have made for the last 15 years, apparently. Punky, drums and a guitar that sounded like a whole lot more was going on. Very mobile on stage – plenty to watch.
I thought it was full when they were on but that was nothing. An endless trail of groups of blokes mainly, curiously tall, making their way through to the front for Turnstile. This was a big one. A lot of anticipation and a real buzz. I ended up wide, near the right wall, as a position to point and shoot my trusty pocket zoom from, not that I bothered much.
Turnstile formed in 2010 in Baltimore and are labelled as hardcore punk. Listening to the new LP, Never Enough, I was dubious of this, but clearly the older material was more frantic and the live experience was a beautiful riot of sound.
Lead singer, Brendan Yates, doesn’t have to whip the crowd up. The band just plays and the crowd goes wild… I mean wild. The whole front centre of the crowd is mobile. This video of Fazed Out (from the 2015 Non-Stop Feeling LP) gives an illustration, with the crowd scenes beamed up on the backdrop screen.
While I preferred the familiar to me newest album tracks, they had four albums to build their setlist from and all went down well – real fans roaring on the older material, as ever. 15 of the 21 tracks were from the last two albums, the previous one being Glow On (2021).
Never Enough is the great title track from the album, and it is the Never Enough Tour, so maybe not surprising that this is the highlight for me. So much of the LP sounds great live though. This is LOUD but the sound is good.
The track they finished with was Birds. Something of a classic already, their performance of this has been nominated for a Grammy award, as best metal performance, along with the album as a whole. Some great live versions of this on YouTube with a lot of stage diving.
The track Never Enough is nominated for best rock song and best rock performance, Seein’ Stars getting nominated for best alternative song performance….another one they played tonight.
There were a lot of what I presume were just lucky fans, crowded around the wings of the stage. At a few points they were free to leap around or off the stage to increase the chaotic feel to what was a sharp, well drilled performance.
I just seem to hit this band at the right time. New album, UK tour and seemingly a key point in their presumably blossoming popularity. Really good to see a packed place, full of fans who were up for it. It reminded me of my early Ramones gigs. Energy and excitement at max.
Ok so maybe I would come back to Ally Pally again… for the right band. Big but better than an arena.
Gigs with Ivan 