Reading Festival

Auckland has The Big Day Out and England has a multitude of festivals (the joy's of vast populations!). One of the biggest festivals is the Carling Reading and Leeds Festival, which is actually two festivals, one in Reading and one in Leeds. Peter and I brought tickets nine months ago to go to the Sunday of the Reading Festival as it's just down the road from us. My goodness, what an amazing experience! Once again I was impressed with the crowd control here in the UK.

We arrived to a sea of thousands of tents of all the people that were camping, huge numbers of little dome tents with about two inches of space between them, don't think I could do it that's for sure. It was quite a mission to find the entrance to the festival and once we did get there we had to exchange our tickets for wristbands. Around the entrance to the festival were heaps of eating-places and the ground cover was something quite different. As it was day three of the festival the grass was replaced by rubbish and mud, pleasant!

Anyway, once we had made it in, we had a look round some of the many stages and just happened to catch a guy proposing to his girlfriend in front of everyone at the Rock up and Play stage, luckily she said yes! We then found a great spot in front of the sound tower of the main stage but behind the D barrier, to watch some of the main acts. These included Bullet for My Valentine, Slayer, My Chemical Romance, Placebo and the headliners, Pearl Jam!

I’ll be the first to admit that Bullet for My Valentine, Slayer, and My Chemical Romance are hardly my favourite bands but they were very good live, very loud, and quite heavy, awesome! Placebo even finished off with a guitar smashing session! The highlight for me was Placebo and Pearl Jam.

Placebo had some technical difficulties (the lead amp stopped working) so the cameraman had to keep the crowd entertained. This entertainment was finding women on people’s shoulders until they bared all, if you get my drift. After a couple of minutes of this the whole crowd (perhaps the male half) had got the drift and were even doing sound effects building up to the bearing, if the females would oblige then the crowd would cheer and if not they would boo! A scary amount of boobs to be viewed by all!

Pearl Jam totally rocked the place. Reading has been going for 15yrs and Pearl Jam have never played there. They got a very warm and loud reception and I think they were very surprised at the response they got. They even played for an extra 20mins. I think some of the highlights were the usual crowd singing moments, totally worth the £60 tickets! May even go again next year.