Pal Norte Festival 2019: on stage and backstage with The 1975, Arctic Monkeys, Good Charlotte and more

Oh look! It’s the party people at Pal Norte, the huge festival that took place in Monterrey, Mexico on March 22 and 23.

Alex Turner and co headlined the Friday night at the two-day festival, and they were on absolutely blistering form. The setlist included ‘…Dancefloor’, ‘Teddy Picker’, ‘Brianstorm’ and a smattering of ‘Tranquility Base’ highlights.

Turner’s look for the occasion was strong. Top half: safari, bottom half: Carnaby Street dandy. We like.

Here’s Good Charlotte practising their game faces backstage at the festival. Those hardworking Madden boys played two separate sets at Pal Norte: one amped up, one acoustic. If you’re wondering what the latter is like, they had stools and acoustic guitars, like a gnarly Westlife.

Kings Of Leon closed the second day of the festival with a 22-track setlist that covered most of the hits.

Here’s Matthew Followill cracking out opening track ‘Crawl’.

It’s 25 since Kurt Cobain’s untimely death, so it’s nice to see Jared Followill channeling his style on stage. Grunge is back.

LA band LANY played to a huge and devoted crowd, finishing their set with ‘ILYSB’. Here’s frontman Paul Klein visually interpreting the giant steps his band are making right now.

It’s LANY chilling backstage.

When Carlos Santana plays his haunted guitar, it conjures a large apparition Carlos Santana to appear behind him, which he’s never able to see because he’s concentrating so hard.

OK, that’s not true, but the Mexican-American axeman did conjure up some ‘Black Magic Woman’ for the adoring crowd.

Here’s The 1975 chilling backstage. For the curious, they don’t normally sit like this, we made them.

Here’s Matty Healy’s pre-show workout.

Who’s a little teapot? Yes, Matty is. The frontman threw some funky and sassy shapes on stage…

This one is funky…

…and this one is sassy.

The band played an hour-long set, a condensed version of their recent stadium tour, that left no room for slack.

Bassist Ross plays it cool.

Keyboardist Adam Hann knows all the notes.

And here’s drummer George Daniel. The 1975, ladies and gentlemen.

Ever-reliable festival stalwarts The Hives brought their crowd-pleasing show to Pal Norte. Here they are backstage trying not to spill anything on their whites.

Here’s Hives frontman Howlin’ Pelle getting festive in the local fashion.

Fact: Howlin’ Pelle was the only man wearing a sombrero at Pal Norte.

You know when you can’t work out if you wanna wear the white suit or the black suit…?

Florida emo-metalcore-pop-punks A Day To Remember were an explosive force in their first gig back on the circuit for some months.