# Rock N Roll Circus Sheffield 2023

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Rock N Roll Circus Sheffield 2023: Noel Gallagher, Happy Mondays and a Night We Won't Forget   We were there. Camera in hand, pit access confirmed, and genuinely one of the best festival lineups of the year about to kick off under a big top in Sheffield. Rock N Roll Circus is not your standard festival. You figure that out pretty quickly. The name gives it away, but nothing quite prepares you for what it actually looks like when you walk through the gates at Don Valley Bowl and see aerialists working above the crowd while a band soundchecks somewhere in the distance. It is genuinely unlike anything else on the UK festival circuit right now, and that is not a line pulled from a press release. For 2026, the circus really is coming to town. It's hitting Norwich this August, so we wanted total a little step back in time to Friday night, 1st September 2023, the opening night of that first Sheffield edition. The headliners were Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds and Happy Mondays. That is a serious bill on its own, but the rest of the night filled out nicely too, with The Cribs, The Joy Formidable and Somebody's Child all on the card. Don Valley Bowl Does What It Does Best Sheffield's Don Valley Bowl has a proper history. Tina Turner has played it. The Spice Girls. Arctic Monkeys. It is one of those open-air sites that just works. It's a good natural amphitheatre shape, the crowd wraps around the stage and the sound stays with you. For Rock N Roll Circus, the Big Top format adds another layer entirely. You are not just standing in a field. There is a roof, there is atmosphere, if it's typically British weather, nobody cares, because you're dry. There are circus performers doing things that make you genuinely stop  mid-conversation to watch. From a photography standpoint, the lighting at this event was exceptional. The production values were high. It felt like the organisers had thought hard about what it should look like as well as what it should sound like, and that made a real difference to what we could capture. The Festival has always been an incedible spectacle and even drawers in a few famous faces, including Thomas Turgoose, an international actor who has appeared in epics including the series This is England and blockbusters including Kingsman and Eden Lake. The Cribs Warmed It Up Properly at Rock N Roll Circus Sheffield The Cribs are a band that do not need a warm-up crowd. They bring their own. The Jarman brothers have been doing this for twenty years and they hit the stage with the kind of energy that makes you wonder what the headliners have left to prove. Happy Mondays: Still Got It This is where things started to get properly good. For a support act, you'd never dream of The Happy Monday's but that's exactly what happened at Rock N Roll Circus Sheffield. Happy Mondays have been around long enough that you might wonder how the live show holds up in 2023. The answer is: very well, actually. Shaun Ryder is a presence on stage that very few performers can match, not because of technical ability but because of something else entirely, something that is very difficult to put in words and much easier to show in a photograph. The crowd was loud for this one. People who clearly grew up with Step On and Kinky Afro letting go in a way that good live music allows you to. There is something about Happy Mondays that feels specific to a certain era of British culture, but they translated it well to that field in Sheffield and the response was genuinely warm. Bez was dancing, maracas in hand. The. audience were loving every second and thebans always make for some great music photography. If anybody was going to serious;sy warm up the crowds for Noel Gallaghers headline set, then the promoters did an incredible job when they booked the Mondays.   Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds: The Main Event at Rock N Roll Circus 2023 If you were there, you already know. If you were not, then the photographs will give you a sense of it. Noel Gallagher head

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