Reading is not the most exotic location for an epiphany but they come where they come. It was 1991. The festival’s heavy metal years having ended in 1988 when Meat Loaf was struck in the face by an airborne bottle of urine, it was three years into its new indie-rock incarnation. I was 17 and mortifyingly insecure. Reading offered great bands – Sonic Youth, De La Soul, the Sisters of Mercy – and, more importantly, three glorious days and nights with two of my best friends and no parents. I got stoned for the first time (yes, I was assured, the stars did indeed look beautiful), put myself off vodka for life, had my trousers stolen (with all my money in them) while I was sleeping, lived off £1 garlic bread, and made countless new friends while sitting around campfires. In the car home on Monday morning, I felt like a different person, flushed with a social confidence I had never experienced before. Even through the scrim of a three-day hangover, life looked brighter.
This year, my daughter Hope is going for the first time, along with tens of thousands of other 16-year-olds. Her generation has acquired more rituals, from proms to commemorative leavers’ hoodies, and Reading, which neatly begins on the day the GCSE results come out, has become a consensus rite of passage, regardless of whether you care about live music. Many first-timers will never go again because it will have served its purpose as a milestone experience. Hope finds it easier to name the friends who are not going.
I don’t feel nervous, though I’m told I should be. Reading, along with its younger sister festival, Leeds, has become a lightning rod for parental anxiety about teenagers doing what teenagers do. You might get the impression from press coverage that the festival is a dystopia of debauchery somewhere between Mad Max and Satyricon, illuminated by the infernal glow of burning tents. In a recent article in the Daily Telegraph, headlined “Sex, drugs and teens off the leash”, one mother recalled her daughter “leaving home a sweet 16 and coming back sounding like Keith Richards”. (This was not a brag.) Another complained, “When I asked the girls what they’d done at Reading, there was notably no mention of any music, but nor was there much detail on what else they did.” Newspapers provide many clashing flavours of disapproval. While Glastonbury is too bourgeois, Reading is too barbaric. Young people are apparently abstemious, puritanical scolds who demand safe spaces except at Reading, where they are anarchists and arsonists.
I’m not sure the fundamentals have changed since I went, although there are now more vapes than cigarettes, and mobile phones have long since replaced losing your friends because you failed to rendezvous at the cider stall in time for Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Though it launched one year after Glastonbury, in 1971, Reading feels more like its scruffy younger brother. It has always been primarily for teenagers. I remember feeling too old for it at 20 and graduating to Glastonbury, which you can attend year after year without ever feeling antique. It has always had great bands. I saw New Order, Public Enemy and Nirvana’s last UK show, while this year’s crowd will see the Killers, Billie Eilish and the 1975. And it has always been rowdy. It is the only festival whose Wikipedia page has a long section dedicated to “Bottling Incidents”, where you can read about how the guy from Twenty One Pilots was robbed while crowd-surfing and 50 Cent stormed off stage after being hit by an inflatable paddling pool.
I don’t remember any burning tents during my four-year stint but I did go to the Phoenix festival, Reading’s short-lived rival, in 1993, and watch “revellers” tear down and set fire to a fence. The Daily Telegraph’s writer recalled similarly fiery scenes from her first visit in 2007. There is something very British about it: part Johnny Rotten, part Dennis the Menace.
Sunday night seems to be the chaotic nadir, although dramatic phone footage tends not to be supported by reports of arrests and injuries. It is possible that the Sunday mayhem is not a spontaneous eruption but a contrived ceremony of obnoxiousness. But with security and medical personnel on hand, Reading is, broadly speaking, more supervised than a teenage house party and safer than a town centre at chucking-out time. The site is not even a self-contained fiefdom like Glastonbury; the shops and station are a short walk away. It is not exactly Altamont or Woodstock ’99.
While I’m not too blasé to give Hope some festival advice, I am sanguine about being the parent of a Reading novice. I would not have done what I did at Reading at home, but I would have done it somewhere or other. The festival does not have the unique power to turn fresh-faced Bruce Banners into projectile-vomiting Hulks. What it offers is a communal experience of independence and release for people who are old enough to leave home, get married or join the army, but have probably done none of those things. It is the kind of viscerally offline experience that we are told that this anxious, sheltered generation doesn’t get enough of. It is a noisy, messy gateway to early adulthood, with musical bonuses. For parents, therefore, it is a bitter foretaste of no longer being needed; lesson one in learning to let go. What parents fear is exactly what I loved: freedom.
One of my friends ended up reconnecting with one of the girls we met at Reading ’91. Six years later, they got married. Nine years after that, they had a son. Last year, he opened his GCSE results and went to Reading.
Reading down the years
1971
The event, then known as the National Jazz Blues and Rock festival, moves to Reading. Arthur Brown headlines while up-and-comers Genesis are further down the bill.
1978
Tension between punks and hippies boils over and the stage is stormed during Sham 69’s set. Singer Jimmy Pursey ends up in tears after fighting in the audience.
1983
Thin Lizzy play their final UK show before the band breaks up.
1984/5
The event is cancelled due to noise complaints.
1988
Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler are both forced off stage by a barrage of urine-filled bottles. Generally seen as a low point for the festival in terms of violence and confused programming.
1992
Kurt Cobain comes on stage wearing a hospital gown to poke fun at worries about his health. It is the band’s final UK performance.
1994
Radiohead play one of their first festival gigs – six months before The Bends is released.
2004
50 Cent is a strange addition to a bill featuring Green Day and Placebo. He is forced to leave the stage after 20 minutes by a barrage of bottles.
2005
Arctic Monkeys are the hit of the festival, five months before their debut album comes out.
2008
Nicky Wire describes Reading as “the only festival that feels like home”. It is the Manic Street Preachers’ fifth appearance.
2010
Headliners Guns N’Roses are an hour late taking to the stage. The power is cut due to a curfew and Axl Rose has to sing Paradise City through a megaphone to finish.
2017
An 18-year-old is stabbed during Kasabian’s set and needs hospital treatment. A 17-year-old is found dead in his tent.
2021
Stormzy headlines. His triumphant set confirms the festival can bring headliners from different musical genres.
