The kids talk a lot these days about “canon events”: the key life moments that combine to create your personal superhero identity. You might not have been bitten by a radioactive spider but your individual highlights reel will still contain a succession of unforgettable firsts, and those come at a breathless rate around age 16: likely a first snog, first pint, exams, prom, and music festival.
Reading Festival doesn’t have the same lifelong must-go status as Glastonbury although it has been running just as long, initially focusing on prog and heavy rock, transforming into an indie mecca in the Nineties, adding a northern twin in Leeds in 1999 and becoming the canon music event for 16-year-olds due to the fact that it takes place in the same week that they receive their GCSE results. Instead of caps and gowns they sported football shirts and bikini tops, racing in herds towards rap and pop stars, drum and bass DJs and anyone with a song that’s big on TikTok.
If you’re still attending beyond your teens, refusing to graduate to the kind of festival that has a literary tent and paddleboard yoga, you’re likely to feel like a cobwebby Captain Tom in here. But there’s a warm glow from witnessing the first times of so many others, and as a number of performers acknowledged, returning to the scene of your festival virginity packs a powerful emotional punch.
On Saturday, Fred Again, a 31-year-old dance producer who said that Reading was his first festival aged 16, topped the bill. He began his set pecking furiously at a sample pad from a raised platform in the crowd, facing the main stage screens as though watching himself achieving his teenage dreams.
His excitement was infectious. Filmed by static cameras in sweaty close-up, he disproved the assumption that there isn’t much that’s genuinely “live” about electronic musicians by prodding buttons constantly, playing piano and singing. Sampled vocals from others, such as Obongjayar’s beautiful contribution to “Adore U”, were joined by grainy video loops showing them singing, rapping or speaking – a lo-fi approach that made big, energetic songs feel personal. His sound maintains house music’s hedonism but the words have an unusual vulnerability that made him the key breakthrough artist of the pandemic era. “I’ve been lost for a while, but I’m really trying,” he repeated through “Angie (I’ve Been Lost)” as thousands of phone torches sparkled.
The connection he cultivated was in stark contrast to Lana Del Rey, who performed before him but due to ego-stroking semantics was billed as “first headliner”. The poised torch singer’s slow-poured balladry is simply a bad fit for any outdoor festival, with its half-interested chatterers and distracting rival stages. She and her surroundings looked spectacular – Hollywood glamour beneath romantic architectural ruins – but her sonic subtleties were all but obliterated by the thunking dance music of Sonny Fodera at the opposite end of the field.
She didn’t help herself either. The festival’s organisers have taken responsibility for Del Rey sitting on stage in confused silence, watching the fireworks meant for her last song: “We accidentally cut Lana Del Rey’s incredible set short by 5 mins,” they confessed on Instagram. But if she hadn’t come on 20 minutes late, perhaps an ending repeating her tardy shambles at last year’s Glastonbury could have been avoided. Her set lists from other festivals suggest she missed at least two songs.
Earlier in the day, this year’s most hyped band, The Last Dinner Party, were just as theatrical and a lot more fun, with striking singer Abigail Morris dancing, skipping and rolling around with abandon. Overwrought originals such as “Sinner” and “Nothing Matters” charmed, and the band embraced their obvious influences by diving with both feet into a cover of Sparks’ “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us”.
As for the noise pollution, the new Chevron Stage on the far side of the site could have distracted occupants of the International Space Station. With a focus on electronic performers, and plenty of the drum and bass that is enjoying a huge revival with youngsters hearing its skittering style for the first time, it featured a “floating video canopy” – a vast fishing net of LED lights that made it look as if people were dancing beneath sheet lightning. Yorkshire jungle revivalist Nia Archives used the setup to vibrant effect, singing sweetly over her racing, tumbling beats while the visuals dazzled.
The Prodigy’s use of these innovative surroundings was less giant Christmas tree, more terrifying apocalpyse. With a fearsome, decades-honed development of an electronic sound that in effect made them the loudest rock band of this weekend, they overcame the death in 2019 of their firestarting figurehead, Keith Flint, by beaming out his devil-horned silhouette in mean green lasers.
Surprisingly given this festival’s grizzled history, there wasn’t actually much competition for loudest rockers. A lot of the guitar music among the newer bands, particularly impressive in the dynamic indie rock of Wunderhorse and the arena-ready anthems of Good Neighbours, already sounded highly polished.
Today’s attendees have different priorities. Six-time Brit Award winner Raye is the kind of pure pop act who in a different era would have performed at V – the defunct, mainstream-friendly ITV of music festivals – and been bottled off if she had dared to show at Reading. Instead she drew Saturday’s biggest daylight crowd as well as its biggest crowd on stage, an army of gospel singers, string and horn players that sealed her status as an extremely big deal. Like Adele before her, she combined a diva’s gown with an earthy personality. Her powerful performance of “Ice Cream Man”, a song about sexual abuse, surely won over any remaining doubters.
That left Liam Gallagher to close proceedings with an anticlimax, but only because rumourmongers had coaxed each other into expecting a truly historic moment. Playing the songs of the Oasis debut album, Definitely Maybe, to mark its 30th anniversary, he wouldn’t bring out estranged brother Noel and finally announce the reunion, would he? Not quite, but the screens displaying Tuesday’s date[27th] inside the Oasis logo seemed to confirm that it’s really true. Next summer’s delivery of these classic songs will be met with significantly more excitement.
