Hope of the States

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Reading Festival 2006

Friday 25th to Sunday 27th August 2006
Little Johns Farm, Richfield Avenue, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 8EQ, England MAP
£135 for weekend (including camping), £60 any day

Daily capacity: 55,000

The band come out carrying a video camera and filming the crowd in what may well turn out to be their last weekend as a band, if rumours are true. Worse still the set is disrupted by Sam Herlihy’s guitar giving up the ghost. “My guitar doesn’t actually work anymore, we’re gonna have to play something else.”

The crowd is a fair bit smaller for this swan song than acts earlier in the day and in this heat the brace of tracks ‘The Black Amnesias’, ‘Black Dollar Bills’ and ‘Red the White the Black the Blue’ are a welcome respite.

The soaring fiddles and guitars are so nice after the assault of indie bands littering the bill. Hope Of The States offer us so much more than them and those of us here to watch it are loving it although perhaps with more guitar and the original set this could have been a masterpiece!

New tunes from the latest album 'Left' are thin on the ground, probably too difficult to perform with no guitar or effects but we get 'Bonfires', 'Forwardirektion' and 'Blood Meridian' before they return to the glorious Lost riots album for 'Blood Meridian', 'George Washington' and the finale of 'Enemies/Friends'.

The crowd love it and it’s a great final performance. Have they really hung up their guitars?