But while some started frothing at the mouth at the thought of seeing some of the acts, the announcement, like last year's, was greeted with few people fully appreciating the offerings from Festival Republic. There weren't many complaints about the headliners this year, unlike the tirade against My Chemical Romance or ignorance towards Arcade Fire, but instead people accused FR of an uninspiring line-up.
Strong aspects
- · Exclusive headliners, giving hopefully fresh and not-as-rehearsed performances· Excellent 2nd stage headliners, giving good alternatives to the Main stage headliners. Leeds and Reading are the only UK festivals for At The Drive-In, which is a bigger coup than Death From Above 1979 of last year.· Bands with large followings being given a chance to play a higher than expected slot at the festival, eg Bombay Bicycle Club, The Vaccines.· Diverse selection of bands on the Main-stage, eg. Paramore, Cancer Bats, Bullet for my Valentine, The Vaccines.· Large NME-orientated Dance stage, with Metronomy being a big headliner for them.· Some big bookings relative to actual size. Bullet For My Valentine, The Cribs, The Courteeners.· Opportunities for sub-headliners to step up to the plate. Florence and Paramore are one classy performance away from being considered headlining size. The Black Keys are exciting many at the moment and their booking below the Foo Fighters seen as the most inspired booking
Weak Aspects· Headliners appear safe. Foo Fighters played all over Europe last year, similar to Muse in 2010. Some could say The Cure is a booking based purely on their successful headlining set at Bestival late 2011, and Kasabian headlining T in the Park already, and have been on the festival circuit a lot as of late.· Some say the high slots of BBC and The Vaccines are lazy bookings and that FR should have booked more imaginative acts, such as Jack White, The Specials or Franz Ferdinand.· There is not a large amount of alternative rock at the festival, one of the genres which used to be big and seen as an important aspect to the line-ups.· With The Cure headlining, some would have expected a better and more relevant sub-headliner, not Paramore, a pop-punk band who flopped two years ago. Smashing Pumpkins, Franz Ferdinand, Pixies would have been more relevant.· Almost all bands on the line-up have been rumoured and are championed by the NME so there aren’t many surprises and the line-up looks rather formulaic. Also, over 50% of the acts have played at the festivals in the past two years.· Many have also been playing Leeds for the past number of years, eg Enter Shikari, Crystal Castles, Bombay Bicycle Club, The Cribs. Too many are now synonymous with the festival, and makes their names stand out much less to regular goers.· Along with Paramore-Cure, there are some really strange bands following each other this year, eg Enter Shikari>Vaccines, All Time Low>BFMV>Kaiser Chiefs>Black Keys. Days on the Main stage are less defined as a result.
Overall, the line-up lacks direction for most who have been attending the festival for the past few years, and could do with a few more surprising entries. At the same time, I can understand Festival Republic's decisions because they really fancy a quick sell-out this year and to target the NME audience and the pop-punk crowd, they stand a decent chance.
On a personal level, 4/5 of the bands who are touring I really want to see this summer are playing at Leeds this year. Black Keys, Foo Fighters, At The Drive-In and The Cure (Franz Ferdinand being the other), so I'm over the moon with the announcement and can't wait to see how the rest of the line-up shapes up as I spend quite a bit of time at the Festival Republic tent, a stage which hasn't been announced yet.
The line-up features a good mix of British and American bands who, between them, cover a wide range of genres although the running themes throughout seem to be loud guitars and enigmatic front-men. The first band that I would see on the Friday is Nirvana, a prime example of this. And whether you like them or not, their thrashed guitars and growled vocals infused with intelligent song writing and genuine pop hooks from the transitional period between 'Bleach' and 'Nevermind' would be impossible to ignore. In hindsight, seeing them in their natural and more comfortable environment of a smaller stage, earlier in the day would be an incredible experience not to be missed and a stark contrast to their huge headline slot a year later. The polarity of these two performances shows the band's phenomenal growth in one year. Following Nirvana are the brilliant and often overlooked shoegaze band Chapterhouse who find themselves trapped between loud, distortion-driven, American bands but who provide a breath of fresh air with their vibrant, up-beat, bass-driven, anthems. Next on are Dinosaur Jr. who, armed with noise from their first four albums, including the fantastic 'You're Living All Over Me' and 'Bug', as well as J Mascis' huge solos, would, no doubt, rip apart the main stage and get the crowd warmed up nicely for Sonic Youth later on that night. It's just a shame that hip-hop rejects Pop Will Eat Itself had to fall between the two. The night ends with Sonic Youth and the Iggy Pop, a true testimony to the progression of punk rock up to that point, with firstly a post-punk band (in its literally sense) at the forefront of rock experimentalism at that time and secondly the "proto-punk" who started it all twenty years prior.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although Saturday has a more British feel to it, overall, it does start with Mercury Rev. Their epic, classically-geared pop does, however, sit nicely on the line-up next to Britpop and shoegaze bands. The next band that i would see on the Saturday would be Teenage Fanclub who, after the Americans set the marker down the day before, show that we can do noise here in the UK too with their loud, brash brand of power-pop. After their masterpiece 'Bandwagonesque', released on the legendary Creation Records, they would be unmissable and unstoppable. The same applies for Blur who are next up on the main stage and playing off the back of their exceptional debut 'Leisure' which remains to this day one of the best albums from the Britpop movement. After these two fantastic pop band in their prime, we are presented with the odd, anti-pop combination of De La Soul followed by The Fall. Both are undoubtedly experimental, progressive and subsequently influential within their respective genres and both are challenging lyrically, yet completely different to one another. Although I'd watch both bands, I'd be more excited for The Fall to see Mark E. Smith spit his venomous poetry on top of a dizzying post-punk backing track. In terms of Saturday's headliner, I'd miss Britpoppers James to see ex Orange Juice front-man Edwyn Collins play his bluesy pop on the second stage.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Sunday offers disappointingly little except for shoegaze outsiders Kitchens of Distinction and Ned's Atomic Dustbin. The headliners, The Sisters of Mercy, are a hiccup from the darker days of the festival, in both meanings of the word. In spite of this weak day, I still would go to this Reading festival over any other to see the 90's music scene in bloom. But it is great to see on 2011's line-up, exactly twenty years after, that the spirit of 90's music lives on with a fantastic line-up featuring new bands such as Yuck, The Horrors, Grouplove, Tribes, Big Deal, to name a few, as well as resurrected Gods Pulp flying the 90's flag.
