Reading Festival

Today has been an amazing and very very long day. An early start this morning for the drive down to Reading sans satnav and with a couple of scribbled down directions and we managed to find it without getting lost! This was mainly down to my passenger who spotted the signs to the city centre and for the festival once we got a bit closer. I managed to pack in a lot of music at several different locations around the site and we even had time to stop off at the alternative stage and watch Milton Jones. That was one of the funniest half hours I have ever witnessed. How he managed to fill the time with just one liners is amazing and he is definitely one of the cleverest comics around today.

Compared with my experience of Leeds festival last year, this was miles better and rather than having just one highlight, it seemed to be several highlights, each replacing the last as the day progressed. The first highlight was I Blame Coco on the Festival Republic stage where I saw last years highlight - La Roux. I really like the intimacy of the smaller stages and I think having the performance inside a tent really adds to the atmosphere and during the day, enables the technical team to make everything look and sound very good. On the main stage, you have to contend with daylight and wind making the light show look less than impressive and the wind can often interfere with the sound.

Dizzee Rascal was the next highlight, and whilst I'm not his biggest fan, the audience participation made this one stand out for me. There was lots of interaction with the audience and everyone was really into the music, singing and dancing along. Even with the best act in the world on stage, if the audience isn't playing along, then the show can be ruined. My final (and overall) highlight of the day almost didn't happen. I was in two minds about whether to see headliners Arcade Fire or Pendulum. In the end I decided to plump for Pendulum on the basis that as a live act, they would be much better than Arcade Fire because whilst Arcade Fire are a good band, I'm not sure that their music would improve by seeing them live whereas Pendulum are renowned for their energetic live shows.

I also managed to see the Gaslight Anthem, the Libertines, the Futureheads and Mystery Jets. The crowd during the Libertines set was particularly rowdy and for the first twenty minutes I didn't see much at all instead rather concentrating on standing up (which I somehow managed) and if I wasn't battling with the crowd then my glasses were steaming up from the heat generated by the crowd! In the end we decided to move back a bit and actually watch the performance which in my opinion wasn't that great.

The journey home was rather more difficult than the seamless journey this morning. Knowing that we had to get on to the M40, we decided it would be easiest to go via the M4 first. We were then confronted with a choice of east or west and went for the logical choice of west given that Birmingham is indeed west of Reading. Sadly, this was the wrong choice and to get onto the M40 we should have gone east a little bit more. This meant that the planned 2.5 hour journey took far longer as we went to junction 20 of the M4 in order to get onto the M5 and back home. We did finally get back at around 4am and by this time, I was shattered. I had to stop at the services on the M4 for a bite to eat before carrying on otherwise I'm pretty sure we would have ended up either in the central reservation or a ditch.