Reading Festival 2013 review - Day One

It's been a while since I was at Reading Festival. 8 years in fact, and much has changed since then. The site has grown in size. Which is good in the fact you can now sit in one tent/stage without the overlap of another stage coming through but bad in the fact that its much more difficult to navigate.

But aside from that, we aren't here to talk about the best way to get to places, we are here to talk about the music. 

Friday's starting act was Frank Turner, who in a weird set up, had his mother introduce him on stage and asking the crowd to be "nice to him". This was quickly followed by a wheelchair bound Frank Turner coming on to sing "If I ever stray", waving his arms around before suddenly leaping up to his feet. TA DAH! Magic! Frank can walk. With the aid of a "corset" I may add. What followed though was a rip roaring set with help of his stand in guitarist (this was only his 2nd gig). Although this probably wont go down in Reading history as the Kurt Cobain stunt in 1992, it was a nice touch.

A wander over to the BBC introducing stage and the and The lock up stage saw Amber and RX Bandits respectively. Amber seem to have grown quite a following and although we only caught the last 2 tunes I was suitably impressed by there Bastille-like music and energy. RX Bandits all suited and booted were busy creating a semi mosh pit in a tent with lead singer, Matt Embree, in the midst of it. All that I could see of him was his microphone wire being held over the crowd. 

System of a Down made a welcome return to Reading. Piling through a back catalogue of songs the band wasted no time in kicking it of with "Aerials". There wasn't much crowd interaction throughout the set but with song after song being pumped out at full intensity, who cares! One of the highlights of the set though didn't come from the band it came from the crowd. The sight of a middle aged man, in a camping chair, reading a paper being carried over the crowd was something both bizarre and wonderful!

Thinking that System had done a high energy I realised this was nothing to Green Day. Doing a 2.5 hour set which included playing the whole of Dookie in full, whilst manically running around the stage at full pelt would be enough to make someone half Billy Joe's age call for an ambulance and need a heart massage.

Genuinely excited to be there, they went through hit after hit culminating in "Time of your life"

I did pop over to see Skrillex midway through Green Day's set but I may as well have just put his CD on and watched some psychedelic cgi for all the good it was. He may have not even been there! There was no crowd interaction and for all anyone knows it could have been a cardboard cut out and a copy of his CD played in a random order.

Eminem headlines the second day of Reading Festival 2013 tomorrow, along with sets from Alt-J, Jake Bugg, Foals, Chase and Status and many more.