Anyone remember festival rumours? If you were of gig-going age at a time before smartphones, you probably heard a few yourself. Stories that the Queen had died, missing Manic Street Preachers' guitarist Richey Edwards had been found alive and a sinkhole had swallowed up the Green Futures tent used to sweep Glastonbury on a yearly basis, and news of Cliff Richard’s death was passed around Reading Festival on a couple of occasions by bored mischief makers. Having little access to official news outlets from the outside world, it took a good while for such apocrypha to be disproved.
As punters gathered for the annual Reading festival on the August Bank Holiday in 1992, the loudest and most urgent whisper doing the rounds was that Sunday night headliners Nirvana were in fact not going to appear. And it kind of made sense. Evidence that all was not entirely rosy in the grunge giants’ garden had been gathering for the previous six months or so.
