Reading Festival

Approaching 50 and I attended my first Reading Festival. I did feel like a fish out of water, despite having been to 10 V Festivals and several others. If you think of it as a music festival you are over-emphasising the music element. Its really a teenage party where middle-class youngsters of the Thames Valley can escape their parents with their mates and hang out with vast numbers of other teens and just have a good time, fuelled by truly prodigious quantities of alcohol and, as far as I could see, drugs.

Its an interesting contrast to V festival which I usually attend. Sure there is alcohol there too, but at Reading you can just walk to the site from the station and the streets are literally lined with booze. The little shops don't even take the risk that the kids might not come into the store - its all piled high on the streets outside. And I didn't see anywhere selling individual cans or even 6-packs. These were packs of 20 at least, and some kids were coming along with trolleys. Obviously the drugs were a little more surreptitious (although the sign warning of adulterated ketamin on the site was as large as the entrance sign, so it was fairly obvious. I certainly saw quite a bit of pill popping, and a fair amount of dope was about.) I was one of a very tiny minority of real adults, so the kids are much more open and relaxed about things.

But don't get the idea that its a scene of debauchery. Of course teenagers are perfectly capable of looking after themselves (apart from the ones who aren't - but hey that's natural selection) and they have to, because there are so many of them; the place is pretty much self-regulating. Sure they have security, but its done with a much lighter touch than at V. I have never really thought about it before, but at V, although obviously packed with youngsters, you still sort of feel the adults are in charge. Here it is the kids. Imagine a senior version of Lord of the Flies!

I will give you one example. At V, getting up on someone's shoulders to watch a band is treated as the second greatest sin to stabbing someone. The security at the front will immediately scream at you to get down, and you don't want to mix with these guys. They look tough. At Reading they don't mind at all, so the kids are doing it all the time. I think its banned at V partly as a health & safety issue, and partly because its not particularly fair on those who want to see the stage. But at Reading its not about the bands, but the having a good time, and getting your girlfriend (or your mate) up on your shoulders is just part of the (mildly macho) fun.

Similarly crowd surfing, which is more of a pain. There are signs warning against persistent crowd surfing but frankly its completely tolerated. I did suffer from this on the Saturday. I have always prided myself on being okay with the buffeting you get at the front, and I knew it would be lively watching Enter Shikari! on the Saturday but to describe it as mental would be understating it. I had the bruises to prove it, including one on my forehead, not from the boot of a crowd surfer directly, but indirectly as the bald bloke in front of me avoided a boot by nutting me backwards! The irony of this was that I didn't even want to see Enter Shikari! (on account of them being a pile of crap - not that I am judgmental you understand), but just the bands either side of them - the Shins and the Vaccines. And I lasted the mayhem while the band was on, but wasn't prepared for the fact that it continued after they stopped. Hence my point, the music is an irrelevance. This was a bunch of teenage lads who wanted to let off steam.

But they are by and large a nice bunch. So I often got asked if I was alright, and when in the melee people actually lost their footing and fell down, we weren't crushed in the morass, but helped up. As I say the teen crowd is all self-regulating. But, without wishing to sound patronising, they can get a little over-excited. After all they are away from mum and dad. And while at V the security wouldn't let things get quite as out of hand, similarly, without being snobbish, there is a better class of teenager here than V, which is more working class and, well, Essex. One of the plus points of Reading for me was just how posh the kids were. After 2 days at V you really get to hate the Essex accent!

So to the Acts. As the festival covered 3 days rather than two, I won't do a blow by blow account as I did for V. Nor can I offer quite the comprehensive photographic diary on account of the crowd being too bouncy, the rain on Saturday and generally not getting quite as much to the front (there are just SO many kids!)

I spent a significant amount of the early afternoon each day in the comedy tent, because the earlier bands didn't much interest me while among the comics were some absolutely top-notch acts like Adam Hills, Stephen K Amos, Reginald D Hunter and Jason Byrne. These were the best known comics and each was really good. Adam Hills, an Aussie comic who was born without a lower left leg is presenting the paralympic late show for channel 4. He did the same for Australian TV at the Beijing Paralympics. He did a great routine about a Chinese disabled swimmer. He also noted how he was censored by Aussie TV. He tried a quip on seeing that the Chinese paralympic team was led out by a bloke with no arms. "And there is the Chinese team led out by the one drummer who f****d up in the Olympic opening ceremony." It wasn't aired.



Adam Hills



Ronny Chieng

Chris Cox (A funny mind-reading act)



Stehen K Amos



Katherine Ryan

Jeff Leach

Nathan Caton

Lots of the comics played up on how young and posh the audience was, notably the wonderfully bizarre Jason Byrne who picked on a bunch of 17 year olds in front of me.

Jason Byrne

Holly Walsh came out with one of my favourite lines. She has just turned 30 now and her friends are starting to show her photos of their new babies. She responds by sending them photos of herself having a lie-in. "Don't I look sweet in this one? And its 2pm." (I can relate to this!) She also ended up with the longest bit of banter with the audience, and was the act which most descended into improvised free form. I can't exactly remember how it started, but it finished with a tubby bloke coming on stage and stripping naked. As she said, just goes to prove that a woman stripping is sexy and a bloke stripping is hilarious." She was right.

Holly Walsh

There were also some slightly dodgier comics including the son of the sports presenter Jim Rosenthal. He was really weak. Not sure if he was aiming his material at his teenage audience, but it largely centred on masturbation and how crap his dad was at computers. Even the kids didn't laugh that much - they are a discerning bunch. (Would also note that the three comics I mentioned at the top are all about 40 but went down far better with kids than the younger comics, not just because they were better full stop, but also because they related better to them.)

Tom Rosenthal

But the other thing I guess the teens liked about the comedy tent is that no attempt was generally made to tone down the material. Lots of x-rated stuff, or put another way, they were being treated like grown ups, and somewhat naughty ones at that.

And even the some of the weaker comics had some enjoyable stuff. Like Australian Asian comic Ronny Chieng explaining how it takes a while to pick up all those Australian phrases like "Fair Dinkum" and "Get out of our country."

OK, some music. I got to Reading bright and early on the Friday and headed to the NME tent (which is vast) with the aim of catching Hadouken.

To be at the front I did endure the Future of the Left first. If your dog yelped like this lot you would have him put down.

Hadouken by contrast were very good and went down well with the teenage audience, who voted with their feet at the next act, Friends, of whom I had never heard. I soon followed the exodus for my first bite of comedy.

Spent the evening in front of the main stage, starting with You me at Six, who are ok ( I do even own an album), but are rather polite posh boys trying to be rockers. And their lead singer got the lads to do the same trick as Tinie Tempah the previous Saturday and take off their t-shirts and whirl them like helicopters. Only he attributed this manoeuvre to another rapper, Drake. Clearly a bit passe now.

Then Bombay Bicycle Club who I had seen at Ally Pally earlier in the year. Nice enough but I don't feel a real festival band.

Then American group Paramore, whose main claim to fame is the shocking orange of their female lead singer. Well two unusual features, a female rocker and orange hair.

And then finally the headline act -  the Cure. Their set was truly interminable. Well it was for me as I left before their encore. They don't believe in the less is more maxim. For Robert Smith, more is more, with a bonus of more more on top. A bloke next to me said they had played for four hours at a Scandinavian festival. And they didn't stick to a diet of their best known tunes either. Took a little while before they played the inevitable song for their Friday night headline, the classic "Friday I'm in Love". Was the first time I had seen the Cure for nearly 30 years and what surprised me was how popular they were among the young audience, given they never really achieved more than cult status in my day.

Saturday included my unfortunate experience during Enter Shikari, but the acts either side, the Shins (my first time seeing them) and the Vaccines were very enjoyable.

 

We were much luckier with the weather than I anticipated. It only really tipped down during the penultimate set on the main stage on Saturday night. This was Florence & the Machine's set, and the close-ups on the big screen showed the water literally dripping from Florence Welch's dress. But apart from that it wasn't too bad. And the ambient temperature at the front of the crowd was far higher than outside. I couldn't help feeling that there was a green energy trick being missed there. The heat generated should have been enough to light a town the size of Reading.

Which left Kasabian to finish the night off. Obviously, having seen them less than a week ago, it didn't seem that fresh to me, but they really are a band for the big stage. Plenty of swagger on big tracks like "Fire".

On Sunday I dodged between main stage and the second, seeing Kaiser Chiefs on the main stage first. Another stadium band, but they could do with some new material. Then I opted out of the Black Keys in favour of another band I had on disc but never seen, the Horrors. Touch of the Goth about them (no surprise given the name) but they played a good enough set.

They were followed by Two Door Cinema Club who have really moved up in popularity since I last saw them at Brixton Academy. Very enthusiastic audience. Justly so.

 

After which I vacated my place at the front to one of the few who seemed to want to stay for Justice (which in hindsight I regret doing as they might have been worth hearing - the problem with not really being plugged into a young scene). Instead I went back to the main stage, and the back of the audience to catch the Foo Fighters. I sort of reasoned that I wouldn't be keen enough to see them on their own so should pick them up at a festival. Must admit the atmosphere at the back is much less fun than at the front. Much more diluted. So I just made sure I got my last train home. A long weekend indeed, with a lot of commuting.

Good stuff all in all, but I did feel very old surrounded by such a young audience. I really didn't see anything that I would describe as bad behaviour though. Streets of London or any football match are far worse. I think I only saw two or three kids passed out (out of 80,000!). But of course they will be civil servants, lawyers and accountants in a few years.