Billie Eilish made history over the weekend as the youngest artist ever to headline Reading Festival. Performing to around 100,000 people, the 21-year-old LA singer-songwriter topped off an uneven edition of the annual Thames Valley gathering. Once a byword for heavy rock and loud guitars, Reading has become more youthful, diverse and pop-friendly over the past decade, though it still has gender imbalance issues. Eilish is one of just six or seven female artists to top the bill in over 60 years.
This year’s line-up also featured a rich array of rap, grime and drill performers, mostly from London. One early highlight was Croydon native Loyle Carner, who sprinkled his soulful pop-rap set with gentle self-help sermons about breaking the cycle of trauma and rejecting toxic masculinity. Even if his songs were a little too mellow in places, who could resist a big-hearted crooner who runs cooking classes for kids with ADHD called Chili Con Carner?
West London rapper Central Cee also delivered an impressively hyper set, thronged by a huge posse onstage, some of them riding bicycles. His coiled-spring intensity was compelling, even if his scowling delivery and pent-up aggression felt out of step with Reading’s communal party vibes.
Stepping in to replace Lewis Capaldi this year, Reading regulars The 1975 played their self-titled 2013 debut album in full, dutifully churning through songs so devoid of character they could have been written by an algorithm. In a change from his recent foot-in-mouth antics, the band’s charmless singer Matt Healy managed not to mock any ethnic minorities or trigger any lawsuits, though he did share a smirking quip about his habit of making racist jokes.
Rina Sawayama has recently called out Healy’s oafish behaviour publicly, despite being signed to the same record label. Sharing a festival bill could have been awkward, but the uber-glam diva made no mention of the 1975 singer during her high-impact set, which crackled with punky, queer, feminist anger and witty, whip-cracking, catwalk-strutting charisma. Performing with an all-female band, Sawayama slayed Reading on a level that Healy never will.
The festival’s main-stage headliners were a variable bunch this year. While Geordie songsmith Sam Fender radiated genial stage presence, his Springsteen-lite social-realist anthems sounded more ploddingly earnest than emotionally engaging. At the opposite end of the escapist fun scale, the Killers delivered a reliably slick, hit-packed blockbuster set only slightly marred by booming, clattering sound problems. The Tom Cruise of glossy synth-rock, Brandon Flowers proved as eerily ageless and irrepressibly bouncy as ever. He even invited a teenage guest drummer onstage, but only after carefully checking he was not Russian, thus avoiding a repeat of the band’s recent geopolitical faux pas in Georgia.
In contrast to this maximalist Vegas showmanship, Eilish demonstrated how intimacy and vulnerability, spare arrangements and breathy sobs can still create spine-tingling arena-rock spectacle. She and her two-man band, led by her brother Finneas, took the largely female audience on a tear-jerking emotional rollercoaster ride, from futuristic electro bangers like My Strange Addiction to the surprisingly bleak Barbie soundtrack ballad, What Was I Made For?
It was a mighty finale to an uneven but historic Reading, where kick-ass avant-pop Barbies effortlessly outshone the dull indie-rock Kens.
