London’s festival season is officially under way, and the starting gun for summer is the independently run Gala Festival taking place each year over three days on the late-May bank holiday weekend in Peckham Rye Park.
Now in its 11th year, Gala has reaffirmed its place as one of the capital’s most vital celebrations of underground dance music. Community-led, sustainable and culture-first, the 2026 edition was framed by the theme “The Floor is Ours”, a statement of collective ownership.
I attended Gala on the first day of the festival, co-curated by the founders of the storied Deviation club night, Benji B and Judah, who were also in charge of the main stage. Friday’s selection was the most diverse of the weekend, with Deviation accompanied by stage hosts NTS, Rinse FM, HVYWGHT, and BORN N BREAD. Saturday and Sunday featured huge underground club names, including Seth Troxler, Todd Terje and the legendary Gilles Peterson.
I was lucky to catch up with Benji and Jude this week to reflect on the first day and on their outstanding curation of the main stage, which featured a set by them and slots from South African DJs DESIREE and Shannen SP, the rap heavyweights Giggs and Casisdead, and cult London DJs BokBok, Lil Silva and Ikonika.
This is the third time Deviation has played Gala, and their takeover of the pleasure dome in 2024 remains one of my happiest memories.
Deviation is now in its 19th year, and as Benji’s and Jude’s reputations have been established as London’s finest, they have graduated to Gala’s main stage.
Not only has Deviation hosted some of the most legendary DJs, including Mark Ronson, Joy Orbison and Honey Dijon, but both founders also have much-loved radio shows on BBC Radio 1 and NTS, respectively, and have widened the culture’s understanding of the social and architectural scaffolding of music.
Benji has been musical director for Burberry and Louis Vuitton, and Judah’s High Hopes listening room sessions at 180 Studios have achieved cult status. Deviation has also been a mainstay of sound system culture, and they will play alongside Killerwatt in August in the 60th edition of the Notting Hill Carnival.
Despite the accolades, they have managed to sustain and translate the community feel and intimacy of their sets to the 10,000-strong crowd around the main stage. The Gala crowd is the capital’s most discerning, so this is no easy feat.
“There’s one thing me and Benji do not like. We do not like main stages,” says Jude. “We like small [and] intimate. So if we had it our way, we would have been playing at the dome for the past few years. Because of the energy of the room, how it feels, the fact that we are eye-to-eye with the club guys and the people there.”
But their confidence and level saw them smash the main stage in delivering the uncompromising quality Deviation is celebrated for.
“Sometimes there’s a very real possibility that in order to perform on the ‘main stage’, the [Glastonbury main] pyramid stage, the big room, it involves compromise or changing what you do or adapting or watering down,” notes Benji. “I think it’s full credit to Gala Festival, it being an independent festival, that it was incredibly natural and felt completely normal for us to be able to go and do the main stage without one degree of compromise and still bring our sound and the people we like.”
This meant their approach to the curation of the main stage was completely authentic. “We just put the music we love, that’s it. That’s the concept,” Benji says.
To carry a main stage authentically for more than eight hours, as Deviation has on a premium platform such as Gala, also requires skilful crowd management. They apply a quite scientific approach to their warm-ups, with Jude emceeing the day with amazing stamina to sustain the energy and flow.
For me, a further special aspect is that South African music has always been one of the core planks of the Deviation sound, and apart from the artists featured at Gala, I have been lucky to see amapiano DJs such as Thakzin and Vigro Deep at their club nights.
I confess to Benji and Jude that much as I love Deviation, I did slink off to the Rinse FM stage for the Novelist set. “It was really going off, though,” I proffer. “They had smoke machines and stuff.”
Benji jokes: “Was it during my set, though? That’s the question. Was it during my set? If it was during my set, you’re not forgiven. No, I’m just kidding. She wants a Novelist, like everyone else. Fair enough. We co-sign that one.”
Novelist is one of London’s most beloved grime artists and the energy during his sets is emblematic of the culture, with the crowd rapping along to every word, fists pumping.
It was hard to choose a favourite stage. But with the day carefully curated and running like clockwork to set times, it was possible to at least accurately arbitrage the opportunity cost of an amapiano boogie here against a quick sesh in the drum and bass tent there.
“I feel like more than other places, the Gala crowd is much more aware of set times, and that’s very much governed by the flow of things,” Jude notes.
Benji agrees: “It’s such a proper music-head crowd that it’s not really about the size or fame of acts and more and more about people’s specific tastes. So even though it was relatively early in the day and the sun was still out when Bok Bok and Silva played, the crowd showed up for that. They weren’t there by accident. I could feel it wasn’t just floating people; it’s people who were making a point to be there for the particular sets.”
Gala is a perfect day out, and Deviation was the cherry on top. Hopefully next year I can have the stamina to attend all three days. Besides the amazing music on offer in the verdant splendour of Peckham Rye Park, there are food trucks and drinks that are not extortionately priced. Loaded chicken katsu fries on a hay bale, listening to DESIREE in the sun, daydreaming of the summer ahead? Yes, please; 10 out of 10, no notes.
Wanted
