VERY GOOD, YOU'VE BROKEN SOME THINGS

We're not sure who's underwriting the Babyshambles sideshow these days, but we bet they'll be delighted that the stuff the band didn't succeed in smashing to pieces they threw to the audience at the end of their Reading Festival appearance.

Hint, Pete: The Who used to substitute fake equipment before they started breaking things. Otherwise, it gets pretty expensive.

Elsewhere at Reading/Leeds, The Rakes battled on despite Alan Donohoe being sicklisted off; in Reading they swelled their ranks with Russell and Gordon Bloc Party, Paul from Maximo Park and, um, Danny and Dirk from Sigue Sigue Towers of London. In Leeds, Kele Okereke helped out.

Razorlight gave a sneaky preview of the track they'll be doing for the new Help album - although they'd actually played it at Glastonbury, but that was before it was earmarked for the project. Andy Burrows told the NME that their Reading set would mark the official end of touring for the Up All Night album, too.

Charlotte Hatherley was joined on stage by Graham Coxon, which made her a little wibbly:

“Graham’s brilliant because he just kind of ambles on, pulls a few faces, plays some amazingly crazy wacky guitar, and then ambles off. Haha! It’s so cool. I’m quite a huge Blur fan though, I went to see them when I was 15 and he was my kind of pin up, so in that respect I thought it was really mad. Is he still on my wall now? Yes!"

The crime story seems to be spinning round in the opposite direction from the start of the weekend - apparently, all that theft during the first twenty-four hours marked a less crime-ridden festival:

Melvin Benn, managing director of the Mean Fiddler, organisers of the Reading Festival, said: “We have had a musically fantastic weekend, blessed with glorious sunshine and happy crowds.

“We have also had significant reductions in crime, medical casualties and fires. It’s been a great weekend.”

The police, too, were happy with the way the event went:

Superintendent Steve Kirk said: “Despite the higher numbers of people attending Reading Festival this year I am extremely pleased to say that we have seen a large reduction in crime, with over a quarter fewer victims than in 2004.”

And we now know that Fightstar are tougher than Fifty cent - they were bottled at the start of their set, but refused to be cowed; eventually, the crowd ran out of bottles, which is close enough to "winning them over" as to do for us.

Earlier Reading-Leeds post

music festivals reading leeds babyshambles pete doherty