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As high winds batter the beleaguered Leeds leg, a refreshing wind of change is blowing through Reading Festival 2024. Gone, by and large, is the post-pandemic two-main-stage concept that allowed bands just 30-minute sets for most of the day, and made running relentlessly between the two far more worthy of an Olympic sport than breakdancing. Now, that second venue has been transformed into the Chevron Stage, fronted by a canopy of dot-matrix lights that becomes, at nightfall, possibly the world’s biggest rave cage.
Excised, too, are most of the TikTok superstars who’ve repeatedly proved themselves incapable of holding a festival crowd’s attention beyond their six seconds of “trending” fame. Large-scale performances are far trickier, it turns out than mumbling a gimmicky lyric online. What’s left behind has far less of a roadshow feel, as R&L – a pop festival in all but name for the past decade – rediscovers some of its gritty alternative edge.
And it doesn’t come grittier than Belfast’s Kneecap. Declaring themselves “back to annoy them c***s who hate us”, this Irish hip-hop trio storm the main stage on Friday with a decks-master, DJ Provai, clad in a tricolour balaclava and a whirlwind of hype and controversy at their backs.
Named after the notorious IRA torture technique and occasionally rapping about republican themes in the Irish language, Kneecap have shot to infamy thanks to a celebrated fictional biopic featuring Michael Fassbender, currently in the running for an Oscar.
They fully savour the tension. “It’s not the English people we hate, it’s the English government,” clarifies Moglai Bap as his fellow rapper Mo Chara attempts to convince the BBC cameras to film the balaclava-clad moshers in the crowd.
The slogan, “The British Government Is Enabling a Genocide in Gaza”, flashes repeatedly across the stage-back screen as Bap strips to a football T-shirt reading “Refugees Welcome” and DJ Provai cues up “Guilty Conscience”, a thumping, pop-friendly track about meditation, masturbation and being the first one looting Lush when the revolution comes.
Politics bleeds across the afternoon. Neck Deep singer Ben Barlow takes a few minutes ahead of their polemical “We Need More Bricks” to rail against the recent “right-wing uprising”, governmental exploitation, misinformation and wage slavery, dropping in a “free Palestine” for good measure. The internet says this Welsh punk pop band have made five albums in the past decade but you heard the man, who trusts the internet anymore? So utterly 1998 is their goofy power pop that you’d be forgiven for thinking they formed this morning in the hope of scooping up an instant fanbase at Reading’s Blink-182 day.
With Canada’s Spiritbox delivering some brutal pop metal in outfits so black they seem to suck in light, everything is starting to resemble a Reading rock day of old, until Kenya Grace takes to the Chevron stage. The South African-British singer, who topped the charts with “Strangers” last year, is part of an emerging wave of DJ-singer-performers (see also: Nia Archives) out to prove that there’s more to superstar DJs than memory sticks and outlandish face coverings. From atop an LCD DJ podium, she mixes Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll” into some clattering ambient rave, then picks up a microphone and sings as it evolves into the angelic dance pop of “Paris”; likewise “Renegade Master” and her own “Stay”. Let’s hope Chris Moyles doesn’t get any ideas.
Back on the main stage, its screens filled with pink art deco hallways and palm fronds, Two Door Cinema Club rub the balmy conditions in the faces of our Yorkshire cousins. Alex Trimble – I say, ladies – is now a moustachioed, debonair fox of a singer, and guitarist Sam Halliday his Hawaiian-shirted, beach-ready foil. Each song in their set is a frothy alt-pop classic that slips down like one pina colada follows another. The creamy dream-rock of “This Is the Life” folds into the stuttering hook line of “I Can Talk”; a gorgeous “Next Year”, as crushing and uplifting as all the best pop music, virtually melts into the spectacular three-part harmonies of “Do You Want It All?”. These were the originators of modern indie pop and still no-one comes close to the sheer delicacy of their touch.
It’s the sort of uplifting, party-starting set we might have expected from Gerry Cinnamon, who certainly brings sufficient chutzpah. His stage set is that of a Sixties variety show, complete with retro TV cameras and sing-along lyrics. “The Gerry Cinnamon Show” even has an opening theme tune: KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Give It Up”, with the title replaced by his name.
Yet the Scotsman doesn’t quite deliver the celebratory and unifying experience his elevated billing requires. His jaunty folk reels, stomping hoedowns and pop rock charges feel muted tucked between bands with actual drummers – “Ghost” in particular has Springsteen ambitions but no E Street punch. And his emotional roundhouses don’t quite land: “Guess I’d rather have holes in my shoes than be drowning in gold,” he sings on an earnest “Fortune Favours the Bold”, only to look out over thousands of Reading wags holding their Reeboks in the air for a laugh. Things get livelier when he starts singing about the benefits of marijuana in “Discoland” and positively raucous around the line about being “a wee bit less of a w***er” in “Canter”. But he’s about to get blown so far off the stage, he might as well be playing in Leeds.
The sound clash between dual headliners The Prodigy at one end of the field and Blink-182 at the other is positively seismic. On the Chevron Stage, having lost their totemic rave goblin Keith Flint to suicide in 2019, The Prodigy double down on the intensity to compensate. With skulls and arcane symbols flashing across the overhead canopy, webs of lasers fill the arena and beats drop so hard they could crack tectonic plates. They’re out to scorch eyeballs and shatter spines. Maxim now helms the show like a techno sergeant major – “Where’s my warriors at?” he barks repeatedly – but the beat is the star. “Roadblox” and “Voodoo People” are monstrous rave beasts and Flint, represented in demonic silhouette on the screens, seems to have possessed the very spirit of “Firestarter”, delivered vocal-free but in a ferocious, hyperactive frenzy.
Blink, meanwhile, take to the main stage with middle finger salutes raised high and many tales to tell about the special times they’ve had with Reading’s mom. “We like girls and their bodies a lot,” guitarist Tom DeLonge helpfully clarifies, as their stage banter descends into jokes about lubricated larynxes and an erroneous definition of “fingering”.
That their teenage puerility remains intact as they approach their fifties is quite reassuring, following very adult crises for the band including bassist Mark Hoppus’s cancer battle, drummer Travis Barker’s 2008 plane crash and guitarist Tom Delonge’s repeated departures. His return for last year’s One More Time… album allows for this semi-reunion jaunt, but Blink’s longevity is more down to Barker’s powerhouse drumming and the band’s masterful manner with multi-harmonic punk pop melody.
They’ve evolved over their 32 years to include bouts of epic, reflective emotional rock. “Bored to Death” explores the fading of teenage exuberance into tormented adulthood. “I Miss You” and “One More Time” are touching moments of loss and grief: “Do I have to die to hear you say goodbye?” Hoppus sings, partly to his bandmates, on the latter. “Stay Together for the Kids” is a brutal depiction of a broken home, particularly since Hoppus introduces it by telling all of the children of divorce in the crowd, “that s*** was your fault”.
But it’s their closing run of punk-pop bangers including “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things” that justifies their self-proclaimed hype – “The Beatles can suck our d***s,” DeLonge yells, claiming to quote from the Bible. After all the Post Malone, Imagine Dragons and The 1975 of Reading’s recent past, the festival equivalent of a midlife crisis, it seems it’s finally getting back its bite.
