Friday overview

Luck shines uponeth the flocks of Reading Festival 2007. After a season of miserable, rained out festivals and general disillusionment at the state of our climate, a clear sky and sun are the simple ingredients that make this festival the summer’s best right from the off.

Opening up the festival on the Carling Stage are Highgate teens Bombay Bicycle Club, who draw a surprisingly huge crowd of hung over revellers, who’ve dragged themselves out of their tents after Thursday night’s pre-festival partying. With lots of clappy bits and sing-a-long choruses, the likes of ‘Sixteen’ tread your standard indie fair, only with an added layer of subtlety and trilling vocal emotion. It’s a great start to the day, but you somehow wonder if anyone’s going to remember seeing them by the end of Sunday night.

Basking in the sun by the Main Stage, the early afternoon is taken up keeping one ear on Little Man Tate and The Long Blondes. The former lack any charm or charisma, not to mention decent songs – lead singer Josh struggling to even find anything to say to Reading between songs, “F*cking hell, err, I mean, f*ck me.”



The Long Blondes fare slightly better, but with the excitement around them long dissipated, and most people having seen them about fourteen thousands times already, they struggle to fill in as anything more than intermissionary entertainment. And, for some reason unknown to us, the giant screens on either side of the main stage are not turned on until mid-afternoon each day, meaning unless you’re squashed down the front, you can’t really get a good feel of what’s going on. Bad move, Mean Fiddler (sorry, Festivals Republic).

The line-up clash of the festival takes place for this writer when Interpol, Enter Shikari and Cajun Dance Party all take their various stages at the same time. Opting for Enter Shikari on the Radio 1 stage, they play one of the most thrilling sets of the weekend, that sees singe Rou split the crowd in two like the parting of the Red Sea, before setting them free to collide in mosh pit carnage. Their off-kilter thrash metal is balanced out more fully with their programmed trance beats than it is on record, and it works a treat in this environment. ‘Mothership’ kicks off with a raved-up D’n’B sequence, making its decent into grinding guitars even more thrilling. By the time they reach ‘Sorry You’re Not A Winner’ and kids left right and centre and forming giant human pyramids in the crowd, there’s no doubt they’ve scored the first great festival moment of the weekend.

Meanwhile, Interpol sadly avoid my eyes, but there’s just enough time to catch the end of Cajun Dance Party in the Carling Tent, who continue the trend of London teens taking over the music world started by the aforementioned Bombay Bicycle Club earlier in the day. They’re a charming, chipper bunch with more heart and soul than their silly band name would suggest. The crowd are going wild for them, with everyone singing along during ‘The Next Untouchable’.


Kings Of Leon are the main stage highlight of the weekend, despite the general massiveness of their platform dumbing the whole thing down a bit. One rule of thumb at Reading festival – things are far better on the smaller stages, only bother hoping to the Main Stage if you really love the band. As they play through tracks culled from all three of their ace albums, the most remarkable thing about them is that they all look younger now than they did in 2003 when they first appeared on the radar, having shaved off all their copious facial hair.



Razorlight follow and prove undoubtedly to be the biggest flop of the weekend. A pitifully small crowd turn out to see them, the smallest I’ve seen for a headline act in the eight years I’ve been going to Reading festival. They sound tired, too self-revering and, most-tellingly, too light on genuine hits, and it prompts a mass exodus from the Main Stage, as people go elsewhere to find their Friday night kicks.

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