After a week of deciphering his scribbled notes, digesting what he saw, and sweating out the booze, DiS’ editor ponders why this year’s Reading Festival felt a little different. Plus he shares his personal highlights and two favourite discoveries...
By 18:43 on Sunday, the fists that were once punching the air are beginning to suffer from a form of erectile dysfunction. The circle pits still rage but hearts are beginning to sink as the sun's shadow begins to elongate. I’ve been here - quite literally, right here, right now - thirteen times before, and those ‘end of summer’ thoughts never become any easier to drink away. Tomorrow, the light green tent footprints, poorly bin-bagged detritus and the clank of stages being dismantled will be all that’s left of Reading 2013. A small tent-town will be packed up for another year. But at this very moment, FallOutBoy are rollicking through their catalogue of pop-songs-with-guitars. Row upon row of grinning teenagers and not-so-sober twenty-somethings are stomping the terra firma and flinging their limp arms in the air; lapping up every last morsel of misery-begone pomp.
It’s been a hectic three days of riffs and beats, downpours and “can I borrow your after-sun?” queries. There have been screams of joy and yelps of pain. Things in baps have been washed down by 1000s of Tuborgs. All of this has conspired to help create a sea of handclaps. After three days, it's almost too much hand-clapping. Bands wouldn’t have had that back in my day. This clap-a-long-athon is just one obvious signal that the festival has changed from the one I thought I knew: an annual event on hallowed turf, attended by a disparate bunch of slightly freakish outsiders. It's become this smorgasbord of "fun" before me... I'm surrounded by swarms of well-groomed younglings enjoying a televised entertainment feast. The evolution of the event has been gradual, but this year the faces of a very different crowd gawped back at me when I took a look around.
Part 1: The Changing Face of Reading Festival (1998-2013)
Slinking through the crowd on Friday afternoon to catch my first act of the 2013 weekend, a hardcore band who introduce themselves as PAAAARRGGH-AAAARRGH-RM REEE-DAAARRGGGH!!!! aka Palm Reader, who have already turned the Lock Up tent into one circle pit long before 1pm, I notice that there are 400 times more Heisenberg t-shirts on show than Slipknot, System of a Down, Nirvana and GreenDay combined. More short-shorts and bras than hoodies and black jeans with Offspring patches on the knees... These band logos haven’t been usurped by a new set of names, they’re just barely there at all.
Up until a few years ago, the Reading crowd I knew was riddled with bad facial hair, beer guts, laddered fishnets and ornate make up (usually featuring Marilyn Manson lightning bolts or a peacock plume of colour covered in glitter). Trench coats weren’t uncommon. Every backpack was covered in tippexed names. In the middle of the last decade, there was an influx of straightened hair and the EMO/‘MySpace’ look. Now, however, it’s identikit chaps (who could be in Friendly Fires or Palma Violets or in the video for some chart-topping Ibiza-friendly dance act) dressed from head to toe in H&M, Topshop and River Island, with tattooed muscles and fresh haircuts, eyeing up bottle blondes who seem to be confidently wearing as little as possible. It’s a scene that’s no different to your average commuter belt town on a Saturday night - complete with men in dresses or matching outfits sloshing down lager on a stag do. Gone are almost all the “Jesus is a Cunt” Cradle of Filth t-shirts (I did see one!), the unruly hair, and the awkward looking indie kids in charity shop cardigans muttering to themselves as they count their coins to buy a cider. There are still a few potential Pulp fans and Terrorizer readers hanging on to the look that - to me at least - is part of the festival’s heritage, but it takes 15 minutes of watching young rugger-buggers and on-trend ladies walk on by to spot one of these endangered creatures: the sub-cultural die-hard.
This shift in aesthetic is a clear sign that something more fundamental has changed beneath the surface. Reading, like most festivals, is becoming less an event for dedicated music obsessives (the sort who spend hours arguing about the best b-side on a music forum, or those who stand on the barrier for 10 hours, peeing into a bottle, diligently sitting through music they're not particularly keen on, just to see the headline act from as close as possible) and increasingly about a weekend’s entertainment after picking up your A-levels. It’s a little sad that Reading - one of the homes of rock history - has become interchangeable with any number of other (and perhaps lesser) summer events and 'cool experiences' from Ibiza to Blackpool to watching Breaking Bad. It's just another thing on the 'to do' list before entering adulthood. Another rite of passage. Another 'relevant' thing to post on your Facebook/Tumblr/Instagram that's synonymous with and makes you a part of global youth culture.
No-one's to be blame. It's more of a cultural shift. I guess it’s partly because modern music fans these days proudly proclaim to ‘like a bit of everything’. With the addition of 1Xtra and a dedicated Dance Tent, Reading now caters for a plethora of tastes and mood swings (fuck, am I just being a snob thinking that all festivals mustn't be pleasurable for everyone? Even one that was known as "Reading Rock" and sold out every year because of its reputation? I'm not gonna go on some Crusade for "Real Music". Not in a hurry anyway. Not until I find out what people mean by "Real Music" and what a "proper haircut" looks like).
Of course, rather than expressing yourself through what you wear, today's young fans are already self-defined by what they choose to publish on their social media profiles. How they dress is less about an affinity to one ‘clan’ (and it is kinda amazing how this year you can switch from the bowels of one modern folk culture like 'hardcore' to 'grime' to 'rap' to '90s grunge revivalism' in just a few steps). Worryingly, when I look around, all I see is conformity, which was the antithesis of why I went to Reading. It seems to me that in an age of online abuse that a lot of these kids now simply want to fit in. With everyone. All the of the time.
Going to a music festival is now part of what ‘you do’ to ‘belong’ and it’s your mission to not stand out, at least not too much, and if you do, you better be dressed as a crab or a Mario brother or be so covered in day-glo body paint that you clearly don't take yourself seriously in the slightest... Perhaps the threat of bullying is why half these kids look photoshopped as they take their selfies (and fuck me do they take a lot of these), rather than the podgy scruff-bags that I used to be surrounded by, who were relieved to spend a weekend away from the thugs, surrounded by like-minded individuals. On the plus side, I welcome this new breed of affluent M&S munchers (at £175 a ticket, perhaps there are a lot of the kids I once recognised being priced out or opting for more niche events - well, there are about 100 more festivals a year worth going to than the slim-pickings around my A-level-results-piss-up-athon o'clock!), because not once did I see a pile of burning cups, nor a single pizza box bonfire, which is a definite sign that some of these changes aren’t terrible.
This is a totally different generation (I'm not going to label them Generation SnapChat or whatever shit the broadsheets are currently using), and you get a sense - especially from their eagerness to clap their hands, even during slowies from Villagers and Frightened Rabbit - that they’re here to act out a role and to be entertained by some of the songs they’ve checked out on YouTube. They understand that they are a key part of the spectacle that the cameras will capture. They have seen that a festival crowd claps along, as a symbol of appreciation and as some kind of primitive act of communication with the performers. What a lot of them don’t appear to realise is that they shouldn’t be chatting about getting a burger whilst doing it...
These easily-pleased young'uns have grown up seeing oodles of noodle-less coverage on TV. They've grown up with Reading and Glastonbury on the BBC, and have access to a trillion hours of live footage on YouTube, so they know what a festival crowd acts like. They know where their favourite bands get their clothes or at least where their nearest Urban Outfitters is. When a camera is turned on them, they look away from the stage and wave wildly at the camera whilst shrieking, hoping to make those that didn't make it jealous, whilst also confirming that they are having fun (even if they have no idea who's playing, and just remarked to their mate that they don't particularly like this band). Previous generations (like mine... shit, I’m over the hill at 31) had only little glimpses of UK festivals like Reading, which were aired at 1am in the morning on Channel 4 or a three hour highlights package of Glasto - that was our training camp. If you were lucky, you saw a few concert clips thrown onto a Deftones or Nirvana VHS that you'd taped from a brother of a friend. Me and my small town crew, we knew punk kids pogo’d and spat. We vaguely knew it was a good idea to dodge a circle-pit. That was about all we knew - except for what we’d seen on Wayne’s World (the crowd-surfing pizza trick definitely doesn't work!) and what we saw when we arrived.
Don’t get me wrong, Reading 2013 was a good year (perhaps not the finest vintage, but a review follows this 'think-piecing' by the way, down below - I’m nearly done...), and it’s still - despite how it might sound - one of my favourite festivals, but I can’t help but feel that something quite fundamental has changed at the core of what it is and who it’s for. Or rather, what it represents to the youth of 2013 and why some people choose to attend it. Over the years, I’ve seen legendary bands (Led Zep’s Page & Plant, The Beastie Boys, Metallica…) and hype sensations bands like The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys and Queens of the Stone Age, who had their shows upgraded to avoid crowd control issues. I’ve been fortunate enough to see the likes of Muse and Kaiser Chiefs play the small tents, graduate to the bigger tents, and rise all the way to headline status. And that’s not to mention how seeing bands like Idlewild, Arab Strap and At the Drive-In did something to my body chemistry that has changed the course of my life. It’s an important festival to me for these reasons and very many more.
Reading is an internationally renowned place because it secured acts their place in rock music history. It helped them find their place in a global alternative culture, leading to acts playing festivals in Australia and US-arena tour support slots. It was a festival that could change careers and create a legend. This year however, I couldn’t help but feel that this counter-culture that I’ve long treasured and believed in has withered. Something sacred is becoming endangered. The bands who write songs that you might grow old with have become a side-show that is being buried not so much underground, but slung on the bill as window-dressing, to give a hint of depth, beneath an overwhelming sense of choice that features all the right flavours of the moment. And what’s in its place? An awful lot of quick-fix entertainment from radiofriendlyunitshifters, with a bill dictated by the Radio1 playlist (which in led by data from YouTube plays, which are often only be generated because of massive marketing budget, that helps to fuel word of mouth). What you get as a transient audience, where tents fill with people rushing to the front, dancing and then leaving once that song they like has finished. They don’t seem to care if the band might have three or for more corking tracks or play something that might surprised or confound, because they’re already rushing off to pull shapes in the dance tent, and then leave when a band comes on. What this also means is that a lot of acts are going to struggle to be around long enough to 'do a Biffy' and rise over a decade from the New Bands tent, to opening the main stage to headlining. They might be a new band one year, headline the next, and be a Darkness like joke before next summer... but it seems like a lot of these kids will have moved on before that joke is even possible.
It guess my heart isn’t simply heavy for the end of summer this year, but for the truly alternative festival I once held dear. The Reading Festival of 2023 might end up being more like a Kardashian Pool Party or an air guitar contest than somewhere that Muse might reform to headline. Maybe I’m nostalgic for something that didn’t really exist. Perhaps my heroes of yesteryear who had three album careers were hollow freaks and geeks who were caught up in the latest trend; as dressed up and soulless as Skrillex in a tank pushing buttons. Then again, maybe it's all just a blip and perhaps Azealia Banks and Disclosure (who played to a packed tent whilst NiN were on) are just the Rocket from the Crypt's and Apollo440's of the current genre-trends, which still leaves me confused why young people would come to Reading to watch The Lumineers, Kodaline and Bastille, as I can't really see the parallels in Reading history... But I digress…
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Part 2: The Quickfire Highlights
Deftones
It’s strangely not all that busy for their set. Not as busy as they deserve, but then a lot of these mallrats were 4 years old when Adrenaline and Around the Fur changed the DNA of rock music. They’re incredible tho, obviously. They never disappoint, and probably never will. It’s as if no time has passed since the first time I saw them here at Reading ‘98. Chino still leaps like a man possessed by the serpents that glide out of his mouth. He still owns the stage with that mixture of aggression and a sexual tenderness. The riffs are still brutal enough to crush a family car (if not quite loud enough to break its windows this afternoon). Everything snarls like it should, shaking the piñata in my brain, sending dust clouds of memories of Reading’s past gushing to the fore of my mind... Sure, they’ve aged a bit, I've aged a bit, but the maturity to the newer tracks gives the set a totally different euphoria. It’s just a shame they’re not headlining a tent so that their full sound and intensity can be felt.
Frightened Rabbit
It’s strange to discover that this is their first appearance at Reading festival. Their strummed folk-gone-stadium-rock is perhaps better suited to the likes of Latitude and Glastonbury, and headlining tents at T, but the Scottish chaps pull off one of the sets of the weekend. The R1/NME tent is rammed and a good third of the crowd know almost all the words to the latest singles. A smattering of tracks from Midnight Organ Fight, including a version of ‘Backward Walk’ that teeters on Springsteen anthemics when it erupts, make this a joyous half an hour of boys done good, sharing their tales of love and pain.
Villagers
At one point during the climax of ‘Waves’ Conor O’Brien growls like Deftones' Chino Moreno. It’s a heavy moment in a glorious set of vivid lyrics and charming melodies. The tracks from the new album ({awayland}) sound special in a live setting, especially at a festival, rumbling away with the bright lights. However, it’s the songs off of his debut that kick you in the gut the hardest - stronger men than I could easily find their hearts slightly buckled after this.
Quicksand
“WE DON’T CARE WHO YOU KNOW!” and bam! I’m back at my desk, downloading their tracks from Audiogalaxy and clicking play for the first time. That heavy-Pearl Jam / Jane’s Addiction gone hardcore sound judders from the skinny men on stage and billows into a rock pool that Rival Schools drank plenty from. The guitars sound wonderfully rusty, but the mid-afternoon set is almost insultingly short, but sated, a very appreciative audience could happily head home and listen to the rest of their back catalogue for the rest of the weekend.
Phoenix
The half-empty tent sung every damn word of the French-electronic legends pop-as-hell compilation of 'the hits'. 'Love Like a Sunset' was immense. 'Entertainment', well, watch for yourself:
Foals
Incredible.
Parquet Courts: On record you get all the Pavement browns and monotone Sonic Youth static in the guitar SQUAAAALLLSS!!! What you don’t hear is how strangely Ramones they are. Or how they leave people like me thinking “I think they might be this year’s Hot Hot Heat, which is a shame, as they deserve a better crack at it.”
Festival Republic Stage DJ: I don’t know who you are lady with the blue hair, but thank you for cranking some incredible tunes all weekend. The double-whammy of Les Savy Fav and Liars before Parquet Courts set my weekend on the right course.
Merchandise: It’s a surprise to see them on the bill, so perhaps less of a shock that their lengthy and dissonant Television-ish tunes are blasting into another half empty tent. The set is perhaps a little lacklustre, which is a shame because their set at Primavera earlier this year was one of my highlights of the summer.
Part 3: DiScoveries
As Elephants Are: Glimmers of the Walkmen, Maccabees and some band from 1997 that I can’t quite put my finger on. A BBC Introducing stage discovery.
King No One: Another surprise discovery on the BBC Introducing stage. They sound a lot like Grammatics fanboys, which is no bad thing (admittedly, they are most probably a bunch of Muse fans, but don’t hold that against the young 'uns).
Part 4: Errr….
Fidlar: Did they really say “this song is called Cocaine, because we love cocaine”? Live. On a stage. In front of hundreds of people. And on the BBC? Hopefully some poor bastard managed to edit that out before the band spend a large chunk time on the road, sitting in airport security.
Is Tropical: Walk on stage to a rammed Dance Tent. DJ stops. Crowd stops dancing. Crowd starts clapping along. Waits for a chorus. Waits for a drop. Crowd begins to thin.
Haim: I once called them "Fleetwood Wack", and I'd like to publicly (amongst these 3500 words) take that back. They were far more interesting and scuzzed up than their recordings suggest. However, the 200 kids who left after they played 'Forever', you probably shoulda stuck around, it's just rude.
Shoulder Sitters: Yeah, just sit there on your friends shoulders. Don't mind me whilst I sling the last swig of my beer at you, you selfish, future-Conservative-voting clunge-clothes.
Skindred: My scribbled notes read simply “Welsh. Metal. Lolz.”
Savages: Also performed at Reading 2013.
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Part 5: Set of the Weekend
NINE INCH NAILS
”Can I ask you something / What did you expect? / So disappointed / With what you get / Do you ever want to / Just get out of here / So disappointed / Just disappear”
Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails ‘Disappointed’
Rarely has a man looked angrier. Hours before grimacing on stage, he hit twitter with expletives, frustrated that they wouldn’t be able to put on their full stage production. There was talk of “lying promoters” and yet here he stands, singing a new song (from forthcoming album Hesitation) and there’s an increasing lack of irony to lyrics (above).
Rage: Reznor wears it well, and through gritted teeth he seethes and rampages in a steady, maniacal genius kind of way through the band’s electronic-heavy set. Synths rumble and growl. It’s a truly menacing show and somewhat surprisingly, a large chunk of it comes from Year Zero (‘Me, I’m Not’, ‘The Warning’, ‘The Beginning of the End’, ‘Survivalism’) plus there’s plenty from their forthcoming record (the trio of ‘Copy Of A’, ‘Disappointed’ and ‘Came Back Haunted’ open the set. The dreamy-dub of ‘Find My Way’ appeared fifth in the set too.).
It’s unrelenting, but occasionally time stands still for those sensible enough to assemble in the eye of the storm of drums, filth and fury. ‘Somewhat Damaged’ takes the set into a totally different stratosphere, with Ilan Rubin playing the demented-jazz clusterfuck in such a way that the show rockets into a new dimension. It’s closer to a religious experience than a rock show, that totally steals the performance of the weekend gong, and yet it’s still the least best I’ve seen them.
“Fuck Rock & Roll, by the way” proffered Reznor half an hour into Nine Inch Nails’ set - most of which he’s spent using a tambourine to batter his chest in a bruised mess. It seems the catharthis of playing this intense-as-fuck show hasn’t alleviated his desire to rip off the heads off of the festival organisers, nor subsumed the pain of being sandwiched between FallOutBoy (Pete Wentz, pictured above, made a idiotic rant about what rock & roll “is” as part of their stage banter, which crowd-pleasingly proclaimed that their fans were rock & roll for just being at Reading! Which of course drew far more “wooooos!” than guffaws. Their cartoon version of rock gone garish pop was more entertainment product than life-changing musical feast, but it was diverting for 40 minutes nonetheless) and Biffy Clyro (“who the fuck are they?” asked Reznor on Twitter… which is a fair comment, as I’m not sure more than a few percent of the multi-million quid marketing push which has helped the Scottish Foo Fighters reach the headline slot of Reading has been spent stateside. They played a pretty solid set, with flame-throwers (OOOH! BRIGHT LIGHTS!!!) (FLAAAMMESSS!!!) and stuff, but it was hardly an era-defining set. It may be more fondly remembered than Black Grape headlining back in 1996 or The Wonderstuff in ‘92, but as someone who has seen them 17 times - from supporting Aereogramme at the Barfly and beyond - something about their Reading headline set felt forced and unreal, rather than a triumph. It was hideously overblown, which made it less beloved boys done good than it should have been, which is a shame as Biffy are a band who should be cherished by the British public, rather leading brow-furrowed conversations toward ‘who pulled out at the last minute’ and leaving people pondering whether they will ever really become an Iron Maiden-like cult British band… When Simon sung “this is not for your entertainment” my heart sank, but I soon remembered that you can’t thread a jaggy snake through the eye of a needle, because there is no such thing. Then I felt even more confused.)
The set NiN ends oddly, with the unrelenting thrash of ‘Burn’ from the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, followed by ‘Gave Up’ and ‘Wish’ from the Broken EP to close the set rather than crowd-pleaser hits like ‘Closer’, ‘Head Like a Hole’, ‘Hurt’, ‘Hand That Feeds’ or any number of others. Reznor’s reluctance to play to the masses should be saluted, but it’s hard to tell if the crowd, many of whom may have spent £90 just to come to see NiN for the day, deserved deference, rather than a setlist that differs somewhat from Lollapolooza, Leeds and various other major festivals this summer. It’s this risky disregard for being what is expected of a popular, industrial-inspired mainstream-bothering metal act that separates NiN from pretty much every other act on the bill. Sure, it wasn’t the visual feast they had planned, but beneath the bleach-bright lights and the billowing cloud of smoke, something special happened.
I’m left feeling that the set list didn’t matter, that most of these kids had no idea who they were anyway and that the beats and intensity won them over (or at least kept them happily diverted for an hour or so). Amongst this feeling that’s a mixture of disappointment and confusion at the lack of some of my favourite tunes, I can’t quite work out if Reznor is riding the zeitgeist of a new generation. By embracing the ‘I like a bit of everything’ beat-chasers to secure his place in their fractured history, or if he’s just as in awe of the possibilities of electronic music and modern technology as he ever was.
...as the sun rises on Monday, I have a head like a hole, I know that much. This means another Reading is over. I’ll be back, but hopefully the next youthquake in "alternative culture" (be it mass-produced entertainment producer or a more DIY counter-culture) will be a lot less Skrillex, and a lot more like Reznor.
Photos by Burak Cingi.