Reading Festival 2012

A short piece I wrote after attending Reading Festival in 2012, in the style of a news column.

                Reading Festival is a great place to go if you want to meet a wide variety of people- as long as by wide variety you mean ’16-25 year old white male’, and by meet you mean ‘get thrown into’. The festival is poorly organised and the music isn’t even that good, but why do so many people go each year? I found a willing friend and we decided to brave the mud and rain to find out what Reading was really all about.

                The first thing we were told upon entry was ‘don’t camp by the river, it floods.’ Twenty minutes later, after picking a great spot near the arena and even nearer the shops, we discovered to our dismay that we had set up our tent two meters from the river. Set up is an abstract term at best, as our tent was missing a third of the poles and didn’t even zip up properly, but you have to make the best of a bad situation and so we used duct tape to cover the outside of the tent in plastic bags.

                After realising this was a lost cause, we decided to visit our neighbours who were happily painting their faces in toxic waste. ‘Oh yeah, we’re here to see The Cure,’ they said. We made a point never to speak to them again. The toilets were the talk of the town, so we made our way next to one of the various sites of interest. It turns out various means ‘one of two sites, both miles from YOUR campsite Tom!’ but ultimately it was worth it for the comic value of seeing the huge troughs under the toilet blocks already full of waste.

                We received word that the Silent Disco Arena was well worth a visit and I was curious to see what this contradictory name meant. Silent disco? Sounds like my kind of disco! Unfortunately the silent disco was closed and so we found ourselves in the on-site funfair, watching a weird freak-show of super-heroes and other fancy dress characters parade past us in the shower of lights and people that was the funfair. It seemed like everyone attending the festival and their mothers was congregating at the same square foot of turf and it turned into the biggest mosh-pit I saw for the whole weekend, but there was nothing else to do on site for the first day so the large number of people was unsurprising.

                Friday morning, the whole site rose bright and early ready for the festivities to begin, and waited. And waited. This is where I first realised something was fishy, but being the good-natured person I obviously am, I chose to ignore it. The problem was that the arena was only opened at 11, and when you wake up at 7 in the morning (and you WILL wake at 7, everyone else will see to that) you find yourself with 4 hours of waiting and avoiding your Cure-loving neighbours.

                When we were finally let in, got over how small the stage actually was and the fact that no-one good was playing until about 5, and spent our money on extortionately priced t-shirts we realised we were bored. Bored at the biggest festival of the year, you ask? Well yes, we were. Reading has an annoying habit of pandering to the biggest chunk of the audience they can, and this year that meant bringing along way too many ‘hardcore’ bands… (screamo, to me or you). As a result we spent a long time aimlessly wandering, listening to music we hadn’t heard and trying to avoid the screams of bad music. I discovered some new bands which was a bonus, but there are some sounds you can’t remove from your skull.
Tom Bedford 22/10/2013 18:08