Gig Review: Reading Festival 2010 – Friday 27th August
We arrived at the festival with just a day ticket in the back pocket for the second year running…a day ticket that cost as much as a weekend pass when I started attending in 1999.
We made the trip from the car park down to the arena via the long-running boat service (I still resent them moving all parking offsite in 2006!) and collected our wristbands upon entering the festival. Our trip to the arena was quickly stopped about ten metres into the campsite when we ran into familiar faces – the sister of Alice, my friend Jon’s girlfriend. We stopped and asked them how the weekend had started and what affect the mud had on proceedings. After a few minutes conversation, we moved on towards the arena, where we saw one of the highlights of the day – ‘The 95 Bar’.
A new idea at the festival this year, and a welcome homage to past festivals, is the addition of each bar being named after a particular Reading Festival. Dotted around the arena were ‘The 72 Bar’, ‘The 82 Bar’, ‘The 89 Bar’, ‘The 79 Bar’ and, my personal favourite, ‘The 95 Bar’. Each bar was headed up with the names of bands that played that year and some famous quotes to accompany them. It was a nice touch and showed that the festival hasn’t entirely moved away from it’s roots.
Once in the arena, we saw some familiar faces on the main stage. NoFX (***) returned to Reading after five years away and fifteen years since their debut appearance. They bring their usual mix of humour and punk rock to the crowd, who don’t seem all that familiar with the band but are seemingly won over by Fat Mike & Co’s gags. Despite being seen as a joke band, NoFX are politically aware and interject the immature with some interesting views. Not a bad start to the entertainments.
Next up on the main stage are Lostprophets (*), a band whose popularity has always baffled me. It surprises me that anyone is duped by their faux-rock ‘anthems’, but the crowd seem to lap up song after song by the longstanding emo troop. The stage is adorned not once but twice with the motto of the band: “MEGA LOLZ!!!” – a slogan that further distances me from their teenage girl fan base. A detour the bar is in quick order.
Once we’ve visited ‘The 79 Bar’, we arrive back at the main stage to find a bigger crowd enjoying Biffy Clyro (***) opening with the popular single ‘That Golden Rule’, which goes down very well with the masses. It’s a song that I don’t mind by a band that I don’t mind. They continue through a setlist based around their more recent offerings that seems to please most people, although a few mutterings are heard about them deserting their earlier material. But I can’t blame them for having a bias towards the songs that have taken them further and further up the line-up at Reading. ‘Bubbles’, ‘The Captain’, ‘God and Satan’ and ‘Mountains’ are also played and the crowd give heavy applause before retreating towards the Radio 1/NME Tent.
Next up are Reading regulars Queens of the Stone Age (***), who disappointed me when I saw them at Reading 2005 and 2008, although I enjoyed them at Reading 2001. Before the show there are rumours that the charismatic Nick Oliveri had returned to the band, but these appear unfounded once Josh Homme and his band stride onto the stage and promise the dwindled crowd “Something special”. A couple of old school hits (‘Feel Good Hit of the Summer’ and ‘The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret’) get things off to a promising start, but the lacklustre ’3′s and 7′s’ softens the pace soon after. But the temp is soon returned to a higher pace culminating in a crescendo of a crowd sing-along to ‘No One Knows’ and then a blistering rendition of ‘A Song For The Dead’. Despite not being one of my favourite bands, they are always a passable live act.
And then we wait (and wait!) for the reason our foursome attended the festival – Guns N’ Roses (****). Despite arriving an hour late onstage and receiving either boos or eerie silence from the masses, I enjoyed Axl Rose and his current incarnation of GnR. The band are easily the most able and skilful of those on offer today (and the entire weekend, for that matter) and prove it by reeling out classics like ‘Welcome To The Jungle’, ‘It’s So Easy’ and ‘Mr Brownstone’ in quick succession. The band is so tight that the newer songs from ‘Chinese Democracy’ sound much better than on record – and yet still minimal applause. It’s the most indifferent and lukewarm reception I have ever seen given to a headline band and yet it does not surprise me one bit. A Reading Festival crowd circa 1999-2005 would have loved this band and performance – and even the theatre of the hour delay in waiting for Axl to get onstage. This remains one of the biggest names in rock music today, but not for those that attend Reading Festival in 2010.
Despite the lack of reception, the band plug on and continue to reel off GnR classics in the shape of ‘Live and Let Die’, ‘Rocket Queen’ and ‘You Could Be Mine’…which are met with the same reaction…a mixture of boos and lifelessness. And still the band push on and even gain the only cheer of the set: for the intro of ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’. But the sudden positive twist is incredibly short-lived and the song barely gains applause once completed. And it actually seems that many people had turned up just to express their disappointment with the choice of headliner – which again highlights just how much this festival has changed.
Axl Rose leaves the stage for what is probably his fifth or sixth outfit change of the show and darkness descends. From the shadows emerges a rendition of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)’ that seems lost on most attendees, but goes down very well with me. It was haunting and poignant in terms of the musical education that the average punter at Reading could do with.
Shortly after the band work through a criminally poorly received ‘November Rain’ (the most epic song of the day by a distance) and a powerful run-through of ‘Nightrain’…which is in full flow when Axl Rose can be heard saying “It looks like that’s it. They’ve told us to get off.” Yet the band continue to rip through the ‘Appetite For Destruction’ classic without Rose’s voice until the finish. It’s midnight and gradually each aspect of the stage is shutdown, from the mics and instruments to the screens and lights. A rather angry GnR are left of the stage to protest the shutdown, but there is nothing they can do about it. The band remain onstage and work a sing-along of ‘Paradise City’ with the remaining few in the crowd, but it’s a hollow finish to what will be seen as a mess of a headline show. Axl Rose can really have nobody else to blame but himself for being cut off before their set was complete. Had he not decided to arrive on stage an hour after their start time, he would’ve long finished up before the midnight switch off. It’s yet another poor show to fans who pay good money to see Rose and the band of his selection going by the classic name of Guns N’ Roses. He does have good taste in musicians though, as the band he has assembled are all hugely able with their instruments and proved it here.
We walked away from the main stage and headed towards the boat that would take us back to our car before the seemingly long drive home. An interesting day that was capped off by Axl Rose making a bit of fool of himself…but musically, they certainly delivered.
Oliver Martin
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