Reading and Leeds Festivals

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Reading and Leeds Festivals


Location(s)	England Various as National Jazz Festival (1961-1970) Reading (since 1971) Leeds (since 1999)
Years active	1961 - present
Date(s)	August bank holiday
Genre(s)	Alternative rock, Punk rock, Indie rock, Dance, Hip hop
Website	www.readingfestival.com www.leedsfestival.com

The Reading and Leeds Festivals, officially called the Carling Weekend, are a pair of annual music festivals that take place in Reading and Leeds in England. The events both happen on the bank holiday weekend in August (on Friday, Saturday, Sunday), and share the same bill (usually with one or two exceptions.)

They used to be strongly folk-oriented festivals, now more alternative/indie/punk/metal. The festival will typically have the following stages:-

Main stage - major rock/indie/alternative acts
NME/Radio 1 stage - less well known acts
Carling stage - acts with less popular appeal and breakthrough acts
Radio 1 Lock Up Stage - underground punk/hardcore acts. Due to demand, this took up 2 days in 2006, as opposed to 1 day in previous years. Will return with a new name in 2007 (possibly returning to previous name, "Concrete Jungle") due to the end of the Radio 1 "Lock Up" show.
Dance tent - dance music acts, on the day that the above stage does not run
Comedy tent - comedy and cabaret acts
TopMan Unsigned tent - Unsigned acts from the local area (Leeds only)

The festivals are run by Mean Fiddler Music Group and are currently sponsored by Carling. For promotional purposes they are known as the Carling Weekend Reading and the Carling Weekend Leeds.

In 2005 the capacity of the Reading site was 66,500 and the Leeds site was 57,500. For the 2006 festival, capacities were increased at both sites with 80,000 at Reading and 70,000^[1] at Leeds. The Reading festival is held at Little John's Farm on Richfield Avenue in central Reading, near the Caversham Bridge. The Leeds event is held in Bramham Park, the grounds of a historic house. Campsites are available at both sites and weekend tickets include free camping. Day tickets are also sold.

1 Early history
2 1970s
3 1980s
4 1990s
5 2000s
6 List of Headliners
7 Notes
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] Early history

Main article: National Jazz and Blues Festival

The Reading Festival originates from the National Jazz Festival, which was conceived by Harold Pendleton (founder of the Marquee Club in London) and was first held at Richmond Athletic Ground in 1961. This festival, in turn, took inspiration from events held in America. Throughout the years, the festival changed names and moved around sites a few times, being held at Windsor Racecourse, Kempton Park and Plumpton, before finally reaching Reading in 1971.

[edit] 1970s

The line-up settled into a pattern of prog rock and heavy metal during the 1970s. It did dabble with punk rock in 1978 when The Jam, Sham 69 & Penetration played. The festival attempted to provide both traditional rock acts and new punk bands, leading to clashes between the two sets of fans. Although The Ramones played the following year, the festival gradually became known for focusing on heavy metal and rock acts.

[edit] 1980s

During this decade the festival followed a similar format to that established in the late 1970s. In 1984 and 1985, the local council reclaimed the festival site for development, and no festival was held. A proposed move to Northamptonshire failed, and a Labour Party council election win in 1986 saw the festival restored to fields adjacent to its original site. By the late eighties, however, the festival was seen as "out of touch" with the new British music scene. In 1987 although the first goth acts appeared on the bill (e.g. The Mission and The Bolshoi), the likes of Status Quo still appeared. In 1988, the festival hit its lowest point with the likes of Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler being bottled off the stage. The festival was declared a disaster and its future was under threat. Things were due to change for the better though.

[edit] 1990s

The NME/Radio 1 tent at the 2005 Reading Festival

In 1989, Mean Fiddler Music Group got involved for the first time. The festival started to change, leading towards its re-establishment in the 1990s as one of the UK's biggest music festivals. Notably, the new indie music of this decade started to appear on the bill and the future of the festival became more secure.

In 1991 Nirvana played the first of their two appearances to massive crowds. This is also the year the first britpop bands such as Suede and Blur started to show themselves on the festival circuit.

The next year was one of the most famous in the festival history. Nirvana did their last presentation ever in Reading and what later became one of their most famous concerts. The band's frontman, Kurt Cobain entered in a wheelchair pushed by journalist Everett True, parodying the speculations about his mental health. Then he got up and joined the rest of the band in tearing through an assortment of old and new material. At one point in the show, Cobain revealed to the crowd the recent birth of his daughter Frances Bean, and succeeded in having the crowd chant "We love you, Courtney!" (referring to Cobain's wife, Courtney Love) in unison.

Over the next few years the festival continued to grow as the popularity of outdoor festivals increased. Britpop and indie continued to dominate along with rock. Notably, rap acts such as Ice Cube began to appear regularly on the main stage.

In 1996, The Stone Roses played their final gig at the festival.

In 1998 it absorbed the failed Phoenix Festival. This resulted in the infamous on-stage spat between The Beastie Boys and The Prodigy over the song 'Smack My Bitch Up'.

In 1999 the festival gained another leg at Temple Newsam in Leeds, when it was clear that the Reading site was far too small to deal with the demand. Though the 1999 Leeds Festival ran a day behind the Reading leg, a system where the line up of Reading play Leeds the following day, with the bands from Leeds' opening day playing the final day in Reading, soon developed.

[edit] 2000s

A 2006 Reading Festival weekend wristband.

A fire at Reading 2005

After a successful first year in Leeds, a continued resurgence in the popularity of outdoor music festivals led to the Reading festival selling out more and more quickly every year. The Leeds leg, however, was plagued by riots and violence which led to problems in retaining its licence. Mean Fiddler moved the festival to Bramham Park, near Wetherby to the east of Leeds in 2003. Since then, security at both sites has increased and problems appear to have been quelled. However, this has also lead to an increase in demand.

The first few years of the 2000's saw a varied but predominantly Rock line-up, however as the decade has progressed the Main Stage and Radio 1 Stage line-up has followed music trends and featured more and more indie artists, that have become very popular in the British music mainstream. However, one day (Sunday in the case of Reading) is traditionally set aside for hard rock and metal. Most notably of which is the 2006 festival which saw little hard rock on the first two days, but featured bands such as Mastodon, Slayer and Pearl Jam on the Sunday. However this can arguably laid down to the growing popularity of the Download festival in June providing a solely metal, hard rock and punk outlet.

The 'tradition' of unpopular bands being bottled off (being forced off stage by a barrage of audience-thrown plastic bottles, sometimes filled with urine) has continued; famously, Daphne and Celeste suffered this ignominy in 2000. Good Charlotte experienced it in 2003, but remained on-stage and encouraged the crowd to throw more. In 2004, The Rasmus were bottled off at Reading, as was 50 Cent (with urine, fireworks, mud, pieces of furniture and generally anything people could throw--even a children's paddling pool) in Reading only. Some question the wisdom of organisers placing 50 Cent, a rap/urban act, in between Placebo and Green Day, both rock acts (although other rap acts including The Streets, The Roots and Jurassic 5 played earlier in the day with little or no incident). 50 Cent lasted nearly 20 minutes at Reading, before throwing his microphone into the crowd in anger after a deck chair was thrown on-stage. In 2005, Fightstar, despite suffering a barrage themselves, remained playing throughout their entire set as the audience's bottle supply was quickly exhausted. This has given the band, featuring Charlie Simpson an ex-member of pop group Busted, a strike of admiration and praise for being able to remain on-stage throughout the incident. In 2006 at Reading, Panic! at the Disco lead singer Brendon Urie was knocked down from a hit by a water bottle thrown from the crowd, causing the band to stop for 3 minutes while he received medical attention, before continuing to play the whole of the set with no more bottles directly hitting them. Despite this, the band played their set at Leeds the following day with no incident (aside from a thank you and praise for being a better crowd)^{[citation needed]}. My Chemical Romance also suffered a barrage of bottles in 2006, but completed their set, encouraging the crowd to boo, hiss and throw more. Aiden were famously bottled at the Reading Festival 2006, and singer Will Francis made it considerably worse by shouting "Let's see what you got, you fucking pussies!" meaning they were bottled with urine filled bottles from then on.

The then unknown Arctic Monkeys famously filled the Carling Tents at both festivals in 2005. Many remarked they had never seen the Carling Tent so packed - people were standing outside up to twelve metres away, and more and more joined the crowd as the band played. In 2006 it was announced that they would be the second headliners of that year's festival - a remarkable jump up the bill.

The Evening Session tent has also had it's fair share of infamous sets, like Feeder's set in 2002 which saw the tent heavily overcrowded, with many people watching from outside as a result. The band decided to play the second stage to keep the show low-key, as it was their first official appearance after the death of their drummer Jon Lee.

The announcement of the line-up and ticket release for the 2006 festival saw weekend tickets for Reading sell out in just under two hours, breaking all records so far, and emphasising the growing desire for live music because of the "rock revival" of the past few years. Further Weekend tickets went on sale again soon after and sold out in 26 minutes.

Reading Fringe Festival Logo

In 2005 the Festival spawned the Reading Fringe Festival in the town. Much like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this sees venues in the town hosting fringe acts hoping to draw crowds and industry figures from the larger festival. A second Fringe followed in 2006 and at the time of writing plans for a 3rd festival in 2007 are well under way.

In 2006, Mean Fiddler announced that they were using the Government's new licensing laws to keep the festival going later into the night (an attempt to quell some of the unrest of earlier years. The organisers kept revellers happy with the Aftershock tent, an Oxfam tent and the Silent Disco.

The lineup for the 2007 event was revealed on Monday 19th March 2007 at 6.45pm, with tickets going on sale at 7pm. Tickets on some websites reportedly sold out within 5 minutes of going on sale.

In 2007 'The Book Of The Reading Festival' is being released to conincide with the festival weekend. The book covers the history of the festival from pre-1971 to 2006. The book features over 500 contributions from artists and exclusive interviews, all made for the book. The book features legends such as Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Whitesnake, UFO, The Stranglers, Slade, Scorpions, Twisted Sister, to more eason bands such as Kaiser Chiefs, Bloc Party, Editors, Oasis, Maximo Park, Foo Fighters and many more. Updates for the book are found at www.myspace.com/readingrockfestival.