Greater than the sum of its parts: Field Maneuvers 2025 review

If you’ve been to Field Maneuvers before, you know that community is at the core of everything they do. The festival invites club nights, venues, collectives and labels from across the UK to curate stage takeovers at the festival’s five stages – The FM Tent, Lake Stage, Laika, The Packet Inn and Sputnik – six if you count ambient wind-down space The Sanctuary.

This year everyone’s favourite mindbending dome, Sputnik, had a glow up. We spent the majority of our time at that stage over the weekend. Initially there were a few teething problems with the sound in the new expanded space but once the festival found its groove, the sound followed.

Friday’s takeover by our good friends at The Gun – the late, great East London music boozer – saw landlord extraordinaire Nick Stephens and fellow pub mainstay Caspar Clark open up the festival with two hours of sludgy, punkish sonics before bringing it to a rapturous close with Elastica’s ‘Connection’.

A slew of FM and Gun family regulars – Tia Cousins, Daisy Moon, Vladimir Ivcovic and Lena Willikens – joined them underneath the lasers for an all night session of tasteful, esoteric selections.

The evening provided a slower pace than the rave spirit that’s normally channeled at FM but there was plenty of high energy fuel to come – Saturday afternoon’s House of Garage takeover for starters. Sheffield bassline veteran Big Ang gave us that shot in the arm we all needed after the first night, taking us from flips of ‘Lost In Music’ and ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy’ to Benga and Coki’s ‘Night’ – as my brother rightly pointed out: “it’s not a festival until you’ve heard [‘Night’].”

Fellow soldier of the scene Jeremy Sylvester hopped on with her for a B2B, interspersing his own productions including G.O.D’s ‘Watch Ya Bass Bins’ with classics like ‘Hackney Parrot’ and ‘It’s A London Thing’ while dancers in long green hats bopped about at the front of the stage.

That night another memorable Sputnik takeover was steered by the mighty Neighbourhood. Boss Tasha and MJK’s set was a masterclass in groove-driven techno while earlier in the evening Refuge Radio founder Richard Akingbehin had us locked in from the off with his signature blend of deep, tripped-out dub techno.

When it came to production, it wasn’t just Sputnik that had leveled up this year: the festival’s onsite pub The Packet Inn also felt more like a nighttime destination than ever before. By day a place to post up and enjoy a passionfruit martini slushie, get involved in the darts competition or try your hand at the annual pub quiz, at night it morphed into a dancefloor shrouded in a haze of smoke and lights.

There was euphoria courtesy of FAFF, Shoreditch nostalgia from Ambient Babestation Meltdown and a standout set from Redstone Press label boss and Field Maneuvers site manager Lewis Lowe, who got the pub brief with a set that weaved together Axel Boman, Eurythmics and nods to electroclash via Cousin Cole’s remix of ‘Metronome’ and Mercury’s remix of Le Le ‘Breakfast’, both of which had laid dormant in my mind for the last decade.

The pub wasn’t the only stage that hosted the festival’s nearest and dearest in the booth. On Friday in Laika, a tent you can get completely lost in, Toshiki Ohta, Aloka, Angel D’Lite and Joe NonLocal took the reins, while Sunday’s Lake Stage saw regulars like J.Aria, Shivum Sharma and Ryan Lovell set the tone for the day with high energy pop queen edits.

As is tradition, everyone dons their Sunday best on the final day of the festival, unofficially named ‘gay day’. People really go all out on the costumes, even the fancy dress-averse like myself choose to get involved.

A few favourites of note this year included a postman dishing out letters, the guy who was mistaken for fancy-dressing as Hulk Hogan, and the suited and booted team office away day who’d committed to carrying around a whiteboard all day.

Another annual custom is Hackney institution Dalston Superstore’s all day takeover, starting at the Lake Stage, home of Gary the infamous inflatable tube guy, and ending in the FM Main tent later in the day.

An ultimate celebration of queer joy from start to finish, the evening’s proceedings saw Smut Press and Someone Sunny warm up the tent before standout sets from Superstore boss Dan Beaumont and Hannah Holland, Maricas co-founder ISAbella and Midland, who closed the festival out with ABC’s ‘Poison Arrow’.

It was in the FM tent that we caught Parris’ rare FWD set on the first night of the festival as part of iona’s Low End Theory takeover. A time capsule, the two hour set had gun fingers flying and a whole lot of wooing, incidentally, during SX’s ‘Woo Riddim’.

That sentiment of taking us back in time feels akin to the festival’s mission as a whole. The free party spirit that inspired the organisers to start Field Maneuvers all the way back in 2013 remains strong to this day, and in turn there’s an authenticity to the party that can be missing at its festival counterparts.

That’s what marks it as a must in my diary every year – as well as its commitment to not taking itself seriously. In a music industry that can often feel chin-strokey, it’s refreshing to have a festival that prioritises the fundamentals: good people, good music and good old-fashioned fun.

More so than any other festival I’ve been to, it really is the people that make it. You won’t find a friendlier crowd than Field Maneuvers regulars; lose your friends; your belongings; your mind… you’ll be just fine.

Founders Ele, Leon and Henry, and the whole team who help them bring the festival to life, have built a safe haven where everyone is free to be their authentic selves and that’s why every year feels like a homecoming.

Pre-sale tickets for 2026 have already sold out but you can still get a piece of the action when general on-sale tickets go live on 26th September. Visit Field Maneuvers site for more info.

Photo credits: Celine Antal, Khris Cowley & Courteney Frisby.