Reading Festival 2013 review - Day Two

The weather didn't start off well at Reading. With black clouds and rain it seemed that this may be the wash out everyone was expecting. Luckily though the rain gave way to overcast and at times sunny weather. 

But with Eminem headlining day 2 not much of that mattered. With a stage set to make Beyonce envious, Mr Mathers delivered a powerful,confident and polished 90 minutes.Accompanied by a full live band and opening with "Survival" he rattled his way through hit after hit. Being joined on stage by Dido for "Stan" and providing a "mega-mix" of Slim Shady tracks he was joined on stage by Mr Porter who, i fear, suffers from hear loss as he was continuously telling the crowd that "he couldn't hear them". If 80,000 people screaming is hard for you to hear I suggest possibly a horn like hearing device.

Finishing with "Lose yourself" as the encore song, Eminem cleverly made sure that each track was not in its entireity, a couple of sections to each track before neatly skipping into the next ensuring that no one person got bored with maybe a song they didn't know.

Elsewhere in the day Johnny Marr played a robust set to an energetic older crowd. With his velvet jacket he is everything Miles Kane wished he was. On the BBC introducing stage at the same time were Catfish and the Bottlemen who had a good little gathering themselves and with so much energy you tend to wonder why bands like this are on a small stage such as this when you have the likes of The Foals on the main stage supplying a droning, hipster-student laden set which was enough to send anyone off to their tent in contemplation to where it all went wrong.

Lucy Rose was a brilliant breath of fresh air away from the poor man's Prodigy, Chase and Status, playing the main stage. Playing the Festival Republic tent I was quite surprised at how funky her set was. Probably as I was expecting an acoustic set, I was pleasantly taken aback. With a glorious voice travelling across the audience who were clapping without even being prompted. 

After that it was across to the screaming girlie tent for Jake Bugg. I have never seen Jake Bugg live before but the first thing that struck me was..isn't he just doing Johnny Cash/Buddy Holly tracks? Not that there's anything wrong with that but I expected a more northern soul to his music and was quite shocked to see 18 year old girls jumping around to what was tantamount to 60's music. Not to take anything away from Jake as his songs are meaningful and lyrically very clever and it takes a lot of guts to stand up on your own to a good thousand people.