Western alum, Loud Luxury, and multi-platinum producer, Murda Beatz also performed at the six-hour long day festival during FOCO last Saturday in London, Ont.

Clad in a ski-mask with four bags hanging off of his shoulders, Lil Uzi Vert performs in the on-campus parking lot turned festival venue. Photo / Benjamin Hargreaves

By: Benjamin Hargreaves

The sold-out festival at Western University went off without a hitch last Saturday, but that might not have been a good thing.

The concert, organized by Western University’s Student Council, sold out of its 12,000 tickets with the Western WSC stating that, at its peak, there were over 11,000 in attendance.

Purple Fest was a mid-day music festival organized by Western’s USC in a bid to draw unsanctioned partiers off residential streets.

The consensus of the crowd was that Grammy-nominated recording artist, Lil Uzi Vert, was the performer attendees were looking forward to most. This seemed to be the case as the crowd broke apart into scattered mosh pits upon his entry.

Before Uzi took the stage, Chicago rapper, Juice Wrld, performed his explosive hits Lucid Dreams and Lean Wit Me. He also covered the late XXXTENTACION’s Take a Step Back.

Other acts included Maestro, Drezo, WISE, Matt Royal and Toronto based rapper, Jordon Solomon.

With only one unspecified non life-threatening injury reported by the Western USC, they consider Purple Fest a success, but it might have caused problems in other ways.

The concert was meant to give students an alternative to partying on streets, but it might have magnified the problem, according to John Pare, London’s police chief at a news conference addressing FOCO on Tuesday.

In 2016, the university decided to move homecoming to late October as a way of deterring the illegal street parties. But the student body’s response to this decision wasn’t what the university expected.

With the new date of homecoming plagued by midterms and colder weather, the students took to the streets on Oct. 1, 2016, for the first ever “fake homecoming” or FOCO.

London police estimated that about 10,000 people showed up in 2016 and that increased to 11,000 in 2017.

But this year was by far the biggest turn-out for FOCO with the LPS announcing Tuesday that they estimate the number of partiers to have been 20,000.

Details are still emerging about FOCO but the LPS reported that there were 134 charges, over 3,000 warnings and 28 people taken to hospital. The costs of policing alone are expected to be in excess of $100,000.

When the dust settles around FOCO we will have to wait to see if Purple Fest will make an appearance next year.