Whoop whoop Reading TR Part 1

Wow, I've been the shittest blogger in the world recently, but life's been abit busy with poker and the like. That's the excuse and i'm sticking to it.

I thought I'd hit up the blog scene again because I just came back from a wicked weekend at Reading festival 2009, in which I saw some really good bands and had a really good time in general.

The weekend really started on Wednesday night when i decided to play a bunch of tournaments through the night, which proved to be a good idea because I somehow managed a 7k heater in about 100 games. I woke up the next morning with a spring in my step, knowing that I'm now well over half way into the huge hole that is my makeup.

Thursday;
I woke up lazily on Thursday morning to a call from my friend Lizzie who was already at the festival asking me when I was going to come, I told her 'soon', put the phone down and slept for a few more hours before finally slumping out of bed and plodding towards the train with a bunch of heavy bags/tent/sleeping bag. After 2 hours of napping on the train, I was in the beautiful city of Reading; just one of the tens of thousands of young, happy-go-lucky campers who'd came to see what was probably the best festival lineup in our lifetimes. The first thing we did when I arrived was go to Tesco for get supplies (by which I mean alcohol) with Lizzie's Bury friends, the guys I was camping with, and then go explore the campsite with cider and spirits in hand. Since there was no music until Friday, we just chilled around the fairground and had some bananas. I did prop bet Lizzie £100 to run across the dodge ems while they were going which she promptly snap-called me on and earned herself what she said for her was 2 days work. I think the stupidest part of the bet was that she probably would have done it for about 1/4 of the price, but at any rate it was a fun start to the weekend.

Friday;
I woke up on Friday morning with the familiar headache and bad back that is usually created by the combination for booze, bananas and sleeping in a tent, but I wasn't going to let that ruin what looked like a fine day of music. There was a slight drama at about 10am, when Lizzie went to withdraw some cash and she found herself with £2k less than she thought she had, after much nail biting and talk of identity theft and a 60 minute walk into Reading city center we found that Lizzie is in fact terrible with money and had simply spent about £1500 without knowing it in the last few months. At least the journey back to the campsite was much more fun than it's counterpart, with us taking the piss out of Lizzie for the absurd situation she got herself in.

We got back to the festival at about 2:30, just in time to be convinced to go to the arena and check out Little Boots, who I really enjoyed. Her girly brand of electro-pop was a great way to show the world my dance moves in what was just generally a really fun and upbeat set. I wanted to try and embed some video clips into this, but the bbc website is being rubbish and protecting against that, so I'll just have to give links;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/readingandleeds/2009/artists/littleboots/video2.shtml#emp

We then headed back to the campsite for a quick half our alcohol refuel before going in for the rest of the evening. First up on the bill was New Found Glory, who Lizzie and I saw in honour of our friend Emo who couldn't make it to the festival despite having tickets. It was pretty good to rock out to abit of emo/pop-punk that I haven't really heard for 5/6 years, I think the last time I saw them when when they were supporting Greenday in 03.

After that we met the rest of the group of people we were camping with to go and see Florence and the Machine, the band I was most looking forward to that day. About a month previously, I had bought her album and had been slightly embaressed to admit that it was pretty much the best album I'd heard this year. After her performance on the NME stage, I'm certainly not ashamed anymore. She gave an amazing performance that could be confused with an aging rocker who'd given hundreds of festival performances. I literally can't give high enough praise about how good she was;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/readingandleeds/2009/artists/florenceandthemachine/index.shtml#emp

edit; can't find a one song clip of that performance, so just watch as much as you want (the 30 minute highlights are well worth the watch fwiw)

After Florance I was pretty buzzed, and having met my friend Tom and his girlfriend we rushed over to try and check out the end of Placebo (which we just missed) so we hung around for abit checking out some random bands/comedy performances before eventually deciding to go and see the Kaiser Chiefs.

We obviously weren't expecting much, but I've got to say they were quite a lot of fun, we danced it away and ate some bananas while not so quietly asking when they were going to do the one where he predicts a riot. I liked that they didn't take themselves too seriously and just played some good rocky tunes;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/readingandleeds/2009/artists/kaiserchiefs/
(go to about 22 minutes in for the best performance of the set)

Suitably pumped up, we waited for the Kings of Leon, who were the evenings headline act. The crowd really started to fill up and get tight, it seemed as though everyone at the festival had really wanted to see KoL and to be honest, the vast majority of them were bitterly disappointed, not by the performance which in my estimation was a very good, rocky show, but the 'fuck you' attitude of the band, who at 4 different points were complaining about seemingly nothing, only to end their show with no encore and the lead singer giving the 50,000+ crowd the V. Despite that, the music was pretty good, and I'd probably go and see them again;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/readingandleeds/2009/artists/kingsofleon/

(watch from 16:55 for a perfect example of both a great musical performance and class douchbaggery)

Will hit up a part 2 tomorrow

loves and hugs xx