The Great English Festival

I've never been drawn to Festivals. The idea of camping in a field with 100,000 people who are on their worst behavior just didn't seem worth it to me. But, in the spirit of trying new things and seeing as the English have a reputation for throwing a hell of a festival I figured now was the time to try. We were told Glastonbury was the craziest and best festival to go to, but it wasn't on this year. There's a number of huge festivals to choose from, but when the line up for Reading this year included Foo Fighters the decision was pretty easy. They're easily my favorite band still active but I hadn't seen them yet - We actually had to sell our tickets to their last Vancouver show because tickets to London were too cheap to pass up only 2 days before. It was almost too perfect to have the chance to make up for that and cross a festival off our list at the same time.

Leading up to the festival we did a little research to see what to expect. The more we read, the more anxiety I started to feel. Rain, mud, shit, piss, teenagers, fights, what the hell were we thinking. Too late to back out though, and you only live once.

We arrived early on Thursday to get a decent spot, and after a 30 minute trek from the car park with all our gear we were inside. The site was absolutely massive, about a 30 minute walk from one side to the other. We had read that we didn't want to be too close to the stages (mayhem), too close to a path (trampled) or too close to the toilets or bushes (toilets). You could also tell what areas looked like they would be mud pits when it rained. We found a spot we liked and set up. We introduced ourselves to our neighbors right away since we were hoping to find some people to party with as well as keep an eye out for our stuff. They happened to be locals, a group of about 10 who were all on at least their 8th Reading festival in a row. We felt pretty good about our spot after finding out the veterans chose it as well. They also happened to be in their mid 20's, which turned out to be a bit of a rare find amongst campers.

The vast majority of people at Reading looked to be under 20, which made me feel pretty old, as well as terrified about having a teenage daughter. I always thought I might be kind of a cool dad, but I would have a pretty hard time letting my daughter go to a place like Reading, and yet there they all were with their 15 year old asses hanging out of short shorts. Scary.

As well as short cut offs, festival wear consisted of a lot of ridiculous fancy dress, further proving the English dress up for everything but Halloween, and Wellies. Wellies are gum boots here, and you can't do a festival without them. We overheard someone say it was the best weather they'd ever seen at Reading, which I guess we should feel good about, but there were periods where it was absolutely pissing and parts of the camp definitely required the wellies.

English Festival Fashion

While wearing a Canucks shirt I got a shout out from a couple walking by who ended up being from Vancouver and on the tail end of a 2 year trip of their own. They were both great people and we wound up spending most of our time in the venue with them, which was a funny coincidence. It was quite easy to make friends there as Canadians, it's an easy thing to talk about and people seem genuinely interested in the novelty of it, I'm really going to miss that. Being Canadian in Canada is boring.

Friday we watched The Hives, Bombay Bicycle Club, Paramore, and The Cure. The Cure had played there 33 years earlier, which is pretty awesome. They put on a great show, but the highlight for me was when Robert Smith said 'I know I don't say a lot, it's not easy for me, but just know that I'm thinkin' it' which just seemed so honest and real, I loved that. They were great.

Secret Green Day show!

There were rumors that Green Day would play a surprise set on Saturday at 12 so we headed in early to check it out, and lucky we did because they did play and they started at 11 and only let a certain amount in so tons of people missed it. I was a huge Green Day fan when I was 15 but never saw them, so it was a perfect surprise gift to my teenage self to get to see that, and we were quite close as well. They played a lot of older stuff and it was a really high energy show, and as Gen pointed out, probably the only time we'll see a concert like that at 11am.

Saturday night was The Shins, Florence and the Machine and Kasabian. It pissed rain for the last 2, which really make it feel like an English summer festival. Florence was great, but she is a weird girl. She was on her knees in the rain patting a puddle at one point.

Sunday was the most anticipated day, starting with Band of Skulls, who we had seen open for The Black Keys in December and really liked. They're our favourite British discovery. Then another cool English band The Kaiser Chiefs followed by The Black Keys and then Foo Fighters. All of them were great, but Dave Grohl was unreal. They played for over 3 hours, and every song was better than the last. He also had his daughter on stage with him, sang Happy Birthday to his mom who was there, and told a lot of personal stories about his time with Nirvana and what the Reading Festival meant to him. He said coming back to headline was one of the most important shows of his life, which was so cool. He had Genevieve in tears a couple times. The sun was shining all day Sunday, and it was just such a great show and perfect finish to the weekend.

Like I said, I was getting really worried leading up to it, I mean I'm 27 and had never been to a festival and I had my reasons for avoiding them. While it was really crazy, and there were obviously a lot of nutters and pissed up teenage boys, it was way more good than bad. We met a lot of really awesome people that we had a great 4 days with, and saw some incredible performances at a legendary event. I'm so glad that we stepped out of our comfort zone again while we were here and tried something that is truly iconic here in England. I couldn't have asked for a better place to go to my first festival and it was a highlight of our time here for sure. Loved Reading 2012!

-Justin