Reading 2015: It's so boy-boy

This from Viv Albertine's Twitter feed:

On the right, the Reading-Leeds bill announced so far. On the left: the bands with female members.

Two days with not a single woman on either the main or second stage. One stage without any women at all.

It's a pretty poor show.

Reading/Leeds headliners announced

The first names for Reading/Leeds have been announced, and the NME has got a photo on their page:

Blimey. Status Quo? That's a surprise.

Hang about, if I squint a bit... oh, it's not Status Quo at all. Or not quite, anyway:

Metallica, Jamie T and Run The Jewels are among the first names confirmed to perform at next year's Reading & Leeds Festivals.

I don't know how I could have confused a one-trick pony who have spent the last decade or so complaining about the music industry while churning out the same song over and over again with Status Quo.

Reading Button, Leeds Button

In a rare foray into providing news you can use, here's the times when Reading & Leeds coverage will be on the BBC Red Button this weekend, and then highlights through the week:

Freesat/Sky/Virgin Media:
Sat 25th August, 7:00pm-2:00am
Sun 26th August, 4:00pm-2:00am
Mon 27th August, 6:00am-Saturday 1st September, 4:00am

Freeview:
Sat 25th August, 9:30pm-2:00am
Sun 26th August, 4:00pm-2:00am
Mon 27th August, 6:00am-9:50pm
Tue 28th August, 4:10am-10:20am
Wed 29th August, 4:10am-2:50pm & 6:10pm-7:20pm
Thu 30th August, 4:10am-9:50pm
Fri 31st August, 4:10am-6:50am & 11:40pm-4:00am

Vince Power hates BBC putting on live bands. Nowadays.

Vince Power is quite clear when he condemns the BBC for getting into the festival business:

The Hackney Weekend has been criticised by veteran festival promoter Vince Power, former prime mover of the Reading festival, and now running Hop Farm and Benicassim in Spain. Complaining that taxpayers' money should not be spent on a free festival in times of austerity, he went on to say: "If the BBC is giving something out for free, then we can't compete. It's really pissed me off."

Oddly, though, when Power was running Reading and Leeds, he was happy enough to have a Radio One stage as part of the events - curious that he seems to be relaxed about licence fee money being spent to subsidise his own operations, but not in competition with them. Oh, to have such principles.

Reading - Leeds was great, says Mr Reading-Leeds

As is now traditional, the organiser of the festival must have his post-fest interview to declare how well everything went. Melvin Benn has, thus, proclaimed Reading-Leeds good.

And, given the way Leeds used to always end in a pitched battle and burning trash, the organisers probably do deserve credit for having turned things around. Nowadays, it's just the bands who are causing trouble:

Last night at the Leeds Festival Axl Rose slammed the festival organisers, saying "This war ain't over". Benn had cut the band's sound at Reading to prevent them from breaking the noise curfew.

Benn played down the feud, saying: "I'd definitely book them again but I don't know if they'd come and play. I doubt I'll be getting a Christmas card from them. It's not personal, I think the band are great. Why would I make it personal?"

It's not entirely clear how Axl intends to pursue his "war"; or, indeed, if he'll even remember he's at war this morning. Shouldn't he really be at war with the licensing authorities rather than the festival anyway?

Benn was pleased with how professional the Libertines were:

"Anyone coming into this festival that just read press would have thought thought The Libertines were going to be the issue but they were professionals," he said.

He added: "They were just fantastic. It was the real deal and they made the effort. Whether it's got legs for the future I don't know. What they have done is knock their heads together and gone, 'Let's put great shows on'. They may all walk away from each other again, if they do I expect they'll walk away very happy because they've really hung out again.

I suspect "professional" is the key word here; watching on TV the set came across as very highly-polished, like something a Libertines tribute band might do. In the reuniting, they lost something of their soul. The Likely Lads have become Mike And Bernie Winters.

Gordon in the morning: Don't look back into the sun

There are many things you could say about the ill-advised Libertines reunion. Possibly only Gordon would go with this:

Smells like 'tines spirit

Because, effectively, The Libertines and Nirvana are the same thing.

Not that Gordon isn't over-excited:

If they'd managed to keep going, they were on course to become the biggest rock band in the country.

Really? You can't picture them playing the game quite like Kasabian, flogging football shirts and turning up to feed the tabloids. And if you try to picture it, all you can see is the band splitting apart.

Decade Null: 2000 - PJ Harvey

Officially hailed as the 124th best album of the last decade, and given some sort of prize on the day the Twin Towers fell, PJ Harvey's Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea still feels like it's under-rated.

Live at The Reading Festival (2001, actually), this is Peej working her way through The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore:



[Part of Decade Null - 2000]

Oasis "split": It's all in the timing

You have to wonder if there might just be a God, and that he or she might have been a Melody Maker reader. The death of Michael Jackson coming just as the NME team had arrived en masse at Glastonbury followed by the latest Oasis split coming on the first day of the Reading Festival. Not the best of times for a big music story to be happening.

Flagging

Apparently, they've banned flags from Reading and Leeds this year, and Melvin Benn had suggested they introduce the ban at Glastonbury as well.

Glastonbury have decided to allow the carrying of flags to continue. Maybe even to make the flags mandatory.

There's a debate, you know. There must be:

See the new issue of NME, out today (August 26), for more on the flags at festivals debate.

It's almost pointless to continue writing this piece, for without a doubt everyone is now rushing to their newsagents to get a copy of NME to read the "debate" (= "it was a bit of fun at first but now everyone's doing it and, frankly, it's got out of hand, but if you come down to it, there are far more pressing questions about ticket prices, oversupply of festivals, security and the environment that makes focusing a debate on if someone should carry a stick with a sheet attached to it seem almost as if the NME is ducking an issue where the festivals might get some proper criticism to focus on a minor annoyance.)

Teenage Fanclub weekend: Reading 1991

One of the joys of YouTube is the transfer of old VHS tapes to digital, bringing with it crystal clear clarity of how ropey the original recording was. This, squirreled away in the analogue past, is a three chunk piece of TFC's 1991 Reading set, starting with the mighty God Knows It's True, then The Concept (again) and Satan:



[Part of Teenage Fanclub weekend]

Reading-Leeds: The servers melt again

There are some things which are obviously always going to happen. Like Peter Barlow's drinking getting him and his strange child-unit into serious bother. Like Boris Johnson's cabinet of skellingtons being paraded up and down the street. And like the launch of tickets for festivals being bungled by the organisations responsible for them.

Mike E emailed about 6.40 to report that seetickets had collapsed - twenty minutes before the Reading-Leeds NME tickets presale was due to start.

I feel a little responsible, what with starting rumours that George Sampson would be headlining.

Elsewhere on the web, there's the usual complaints caused by an apparent inability on the part of ticket companies to predict popularity:

They're pretty much all sold out. How people get through I don't know, because I've been trying everything since 3 minutes to 7! & it pisses me off to see tickets on ebay already. If you're not going, don't bloody buy them! I swear they probably won't make much of a profit after ebay & paypal fees anyway. Grrr

Caused by the inability to design a system which degrades gracefully:

reading festival organisation is such bullshit this year. no tickets on the box office? tickets onsale at hmv at 7pm instead of the following morning? so. much. bullshit.

doesn't matter much to me, because i already got my ticket last year. & will continue to do so every year from now on, because it is IMPOSSIBLE to get them online. i was there, on the dot, at 7pm, refreshing four different ticket sites to buy a ticket for my friend. i was clicking for half an hour, & i didn't get through once. bull. shit.

And, I suspect, there's going to be more complaints when people start to see this sort thing popping up all over the place:

viagogo is Europe's largest ticket exchange, where fans can buy & sell tickets for live events and they are the ONLY official ticket resale partner for the Leeds and Reading Festivals.

Use voucher code VGG762 before April 19th and get 5% off the price of your tickets.

Meanwhile, more of the line-up has appeared on NME.com:

Main Stage
Kings Of Leon
Kaiser Chiefs
Placebo
Fall Out Boy
Funeral For A Friend
Deftones

READING SATURDAY (29)/ LEEDS FRIDAY (28)

Main Stage
Arctic Monkeys
The Prodigy
Maximo Park
Ian Brown
Courteeners

READING SUNDAY (30)/ LEEDS SATURDAY (29)

Main stage
Radiohead
Bloc Party
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Vampire Weekend
Brand New

The Kings Of Leon? Are you sure? Sure, the Sunday line-up looks pretty good, and you're not going hear complaints from here about Placebo. But The Kings Of Leon? Are they blackmailing somebody? Are they working undercover and need to be included at the top of the bill of every festival to help their cover stories?

Did Seetickets collapse under the weight of cancels?

Reading/Leeds: Monkeys on top

NME is reporting that the Arctic Monkeys will headline this year's Reading Festival, which obligates them to do the same for the Leeds Festival as well.

NME.com is going to unveil the rest of the bill this evening at 7pm, and, simultaneously, will be selling tickets via Seetickets. You'd think they'd have put the tickets on sale ten minutes later, so that you could read who's playing before joining the log-in rush. After all, if it's Spandau Ballet on Saturday night, and George Sampson headlining the second stage every night, you might think twice about investing your cash.

Darkness at 3AM: Turn it up

The 3AM Girls are all of a twitter at Metallica:

Rock legends Metallica were so disgusted by the sound quality at Reading Festival that they were ready to pay a £10K fine to crank up the volume. Now there's a band that goes up to 11...

How rock of them. Never mind that the real question is not the 'fine' levied on the Festival, but the question of what happens next year when the Reading Festival comes to ask for a licence. Given that you could happily picture homes being built on the lucrative site in Reading, councillors who would rather help builders than host rock concerts might wonder if taking the attitude that you view environmental controls as something you balance against profits rather than strict regulations is not a sign that the festival doesn't take its licence terms all that seriously.

Reading festival aflame

Now, there's a tradition stood on its head: the fires usually don't happen until the last night of the Reading Festival, but this year the fire has got underway on day two. Nineteen cars caught alight in the car park this evening; the fire service say the cause will "be investigated".

Mass spontaneous auto combustion is being ruled out.

Slipknot slip, not playing Reading

Slipknot have pulled out of Reading/Leeds, after realising that it's 2008. Sorry, that should be after Joey broke his ankle:

To Our Fans:
It is with huge regret and disappointment that we have been forced to cancel our imminent festival appearances at Leeds and Reading. The other night, Joey Jordison broke his ankle and doctors have advised Joey to stay off his leg for 4-6 weeks to prevent further injury or permanent and more serious damage.

We know you will be hugely disappointed and so are we. Cancelling shows is never an easy decision and we apologize to all our fans, friends and family for not being there to throw down with you.

Stay,
Slipknot

Presumably their family, though, aren't going to be quite as disappointed? Unless they only have access rights during festival season?

Embed and breakfast man: Suede

It's a pure slice of self-indulgence this weekend, as we rummage around in the glorious past of Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler for a slew of Suede gawping.

Reading Festival, 1997: The three headliners were the Manics, Metallica - and, if you subtracted the Metallica from the Manics, you'd have Suede, who were the first climax of the weekend.

Beat the crap out of Beautiful Ones, Brett:



More video action across the weekend:
Can't Get Enough & She's In Fashion live at Glastonbury 2003
The Drowners
Trash from Top Of The Pops
The Next Life from Later With Jools Holland

Followed by Bernard Butler Monday
The Tears on Tuesday
Brett Anderson Wednesday

Buy
Suede - the timeless debut album
The Singles - all of them, no matter how questionable
Introducing The Band - their first live video, originally cranked out on VHS back in the mid-1990s, sort of half-arsedly thrown out on DVD
Love And Poison - the official biography (= not quite detailing the worst excesses)

Reading, Leeds announce headliners

Presumably the motivation of announcing The Killers as headliners for Reading and Leeds shortly before the 7pm switch-on of the ticket sales is to try and dampen demand for them and stop servers from falling over?

It's not that there's anything inherently rotten about the Killers - alright, there is - but as a handy rule of thumb, festivals should steer clear of signing bands that seem to exist purely to headline festivals. The Killers are a bit like chemical toilets - you might put up with them in a field, although paying a hundred quid or so for them might make you feel a bit duped, but they're not really much of an attraction in their own right.

The Ride weekend: Like A Daydream

We couldn't decide between the video, and the 92 live appearance at Reading. So, have them both:





[Part of Ride Weekend]

This, then, is what mounting tension feels like

As if it makes any real difference to the children of rich kids who use it as a backdrop to drinking cider, burning plastic and sexual experimentation, but Reading and Leeds is having three American headliners this year.

Melvin Benn, the tease, won't reveal who, though.

He has announced that the fest is going to be unsponsored this year:

"The contract was up for renewal and I wanted to reclaim the name of the festivals to return to their roots. I didn't want the festivals to be named after a sponsor.

"I am not asking another sponsor to come in and take it over. I wanted it to be less corporate like your listeners wanted."

So, the Carling Weekend is no more, then. But it's a mutual separation. We're not quite sure how the Leeds Festival is going to return to its roots - perhaps they'll call it 'Attempting to work economies of scale from the Reading Festival 2008' or something, but its good to hear Benn taking such a brave decision.

Of course, it could just be that as the economies take a bit of a downturn and there's a million ways for sponsors to create their own events around music the cost of having your name ignored by everyone but the organisers of ("attached to") the Reading/Leeds festival became to great to justify. But we're sure that's not the case.