So Sick, So Sick of Being Tired...

Needless to say this post shall be Reading based. And as most posts of mine are generally formed by text, I'm obviously talking about the festival you damn pedant.

It is now Tuesday and I still haven't recovered. There's nothing like spending four days and nights in a field, sleeping on hard ground, drinking beer and eating absolute rubbish to drain you of every last ounce of energy. But as always, it was great fun. Even if I'm currently wandering around in some kind of dream-state.

As always, I had planned my days. And as always that didn't work out, party due to tiredness, partly due to drink but mostly due to lazyness induced by these two factors. To begin with however, I stuck to my plan. To start, Anti-flag. A very entertaining band, but with one issue. I had seen this set before. At Give It a Name 2008. Seemingly down to every word spoken between songs. So I watched for a bit and then wandered off to inadvertantly catch Biffy Clyro leaving the Introducing stage having just played an acoustic set.

Damn.

Next up was get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. Being my fifth time seeing Mr Duckworth and his entourage, I knew what to expect, but as ever they didn't fail to impress. Sticking where I was, I waited for what was one of the highlights of the line-up for me. Taking Back Sunday took to the stage and within minutes I knew something was terribly wrong. I had been intrigued to see what they'd been up to since Fred left, especially seeing as I wasn't his biggest fan having much preferred John Nolan. It turns out Fred was a more important part of the band than I ever gave him credit for. The band were messy, Adam's vocals were ridiculously weak and the new backing vocalist and guitarist was so soulless I barely remember what he looked like. A disappointing show indeed.

I decided to cheer myself up with a big of hill-billy punk. Tiger Army have always been a bit of an unknown force to me. And having watched them properly, I still can't understand the love some people hold for them. It was also a little disappointing that the bassist's double-bass had broken and he needed to use a normal one. It's pretty much the reason I went to see them.

Really needing to see a good act by this point, I put my faith in Biffy Clyro. Naturally it wasn't misplaced and they were as good as ever, although I do miss watching Biffy in a small venue. Mon the Biffy!

Having refuelled I headed to the Lock-up Stage to catch Less Than Jake before I popped off the catch Rage. It turned out that Pennywise and L.T.J. had been swapped around and hundreds of people who'd been expecting some happy ska were forced from the tent by Pennywise's, well, noise really. So off to Rage it was. And they were very impressive. Not the best band of the weekend but definitely worth seeing. Now, off to drink away this damn headache.

And so, day two. Knowing that Set Your Goals had pulled out, there was very little for me to see until later on in the day but I managed to catch a bit of Seasick Steve, a gentleman that I wanted to watch purely on the strength of his name alone. This was followed up by a hell of a lot of punk. Flogging Molly were fantastic. Thrice were impressive, althought he crowd was full of idiots and Alkaline Trio, well, they surpassed all of my expectations. Having seen them on Wednesday night at their own gig, I doubted that a festival performance could improve upon their set. But it did. The songs were better, the sound clearer, the atmosphere electric and the response they got was almost touching. Overall a pretty impressive day for music, nicely topped off by a surprisingly enjoyable set by the Killers. A stomach ache this evening. Nice.

Ok. Day three. Things are flagging a bit. And not the best nights sleep. A two hour trip to buy some bags of meat for our end-of-Reading BBQ and a lot of sitting down thinking about going to the arena. Eventually we ended up watching Hadouken! who were average and then some comedy by someone who I think was called Adam Bloom who was very funny and Christian Reilly who was also funny. Then some raving to Pendulum who were good, but nowhere near as good as the other two times I had seen them and then the finale. Tenacious D! (No. Not Metallica. I'm not a big hairy man with piercings.) Tenacious D were awesome. Funny and worryingly musically talented as well. They should have been headliners and I don't doubt that they would have managed it had the organisers not been cop-outs and got Metallica who'd headlined three years ago as well. A little unoriginal of them if you ask me...

Anyway. I'm back now. And normal service of reviewing comics/games/films shall resume tomorrow. If I'm awake...