Reading Festival Highlights

Posted by Gill Sutherland at 16:20 on 1 Sep 2009

• Print
• Share
• Comment

Ahh, the arse-end of festival season
Call us kinky, but Festival Frolics looks forward to Reading with a mixture of delight and dread. Forget the rolling countryside idylls of other festivals, Reading occupies a remarkably un-boutiquey industrial estate awash with slithery noodles waiting to drag you by the Havaianas flip-flop down into a sub-layer of last year’s catering and bog-derived ooze. Meanwhile you are buffeted by gadzillions of zombie indie-types whose brains were pickled by pear scrumpy back at Glasto ¬– it’s like some sort of armageddonish Xbox thriller. But, you know what? It’s frightfully rock’n’roll and we like it. A lot.

Champagne Super… Over!
Not quite sure it can compete with the ‘Jacko dead’ scoop of Glastonbury, but Friday night’s news about the demise of the once-colossal Oasis is a corker. Tales of “moron”-calling and guitar-trashing timmy temper tantrums gets the festival rumour mill off to a fantastic turbo-spin start on Friday night.

The Mighty Cup Amnesty
Since the beginning of time, come sundown, the faint-hearted and asthmatic have fled the public arena. No, not because of the werewolf-dust mite mutant thingy (the weremite?), but because of the cursed cup fires – a Reading tradition where great heaps of toxin-belching cups were set alight campfire stylee. Now, thank the green gods, punters are given 10p back on their cups – meaning that binge-boozing entrepreneurs can be seen collecting wobbling six-foot stacks of money-spinning cups to exchange for beers at the bars. What a wheeze. Or indeed not (cough).

From smoggy lungs to smokin’ feet
Festival Frolics hottest dance moves award goes to indie-dance lads Friendly Fires and their jiggy frontman Ed Macfarlane. Ed’s twizzle toes and crotch-grabbing antics have surely been tutored by Jacko’s newly redundant choreographer? Whatever, it was pretty boogeytastic.

Posh burgers
Time was when scoffing a Reading burger was akin to drug-taking: gut-wizening, staring death in the face, etc. But, hurrah, because now there’s a new (burger) van in town: the Fine Burger Company serve a delish non-ratty patty, smothered in a home-made smokey sauce, on a gourmet-tastic bun with a squeakily fresh salad. Seriously scrumdiddlyumptious.  (Festival Frolics knows she’s sounding a bit non-rocking middle-class and she apologises.)

Go Flo!
Threatening to straddle the site and stuff Reading into her conquering chops like some flame-haired, erm, prettier and female King Kong was the mighty Florence and the Machine. Sneaking side of stage for her Friday afternoon set, Festival Frolics stood in awe of her immense pre-Raphalite beauty, lion-lunged vocals, headbanging, hair-wafting stage moves and her towering physique. Now please don’t eat us.

Supergroups
Saturday afternoon. Something was going down. The Radio 1/NME tent went into lockdown. Our passes no longer worked (yikes, no posh bog). There was much golf-cart/walkie-talkie action. Security pulled its pants up and strutted importantly. It could all mean only one thing: yup, famous not-on-the-bill-though people were arriving. We wheedled a side-of-stage pass and managed to crane a glimpse of Dave Grohl (Nirvana chap), Josh Homme (Queens of the Stoneage bloke) and John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin oldie). They rocked, obviously, but legends or not, went on a bit.

Entrepreneurial stall folk
We are loving the customised Jacko Thriller-era t-shirts we bought one for a ‘mere’ £15 – hey Festival Frolics can probably flog it on ebay for twice that, right?!

Marina and the Diamonds
The girl-rulers have a new princess in the form of  Marina and her three-piece, who bedazzled the crowd with their super avant-garde pop. FF loves.

And on a bum note: Lethal Bizzle
Proving that Reading really is literally and metaphorically the arse-end of the festival season was rapper Bizzle. Taking the whole low-slung jeans gangsta look to new, erm, depths, the rapper wore his trews somewhere above his knees for his set. Those note afraid of a mooning or heavy duty swearing can “check it” (as they say in rap land) below:

http://www.nme.com/video/bcid/36135238001/search/NME

• Previous entry