overview

The end of the festival season is approaching on the horizon, and the last few chances for city slickers and office dwellers to divest themselves of fluorescent lighting and post-it notes in favour of tents and warm cans of lager, has finally come about.

This year’s Leeds and Reading line-ups reflected the UK’s current infatuation with the type of music known as emo, which thanks to a certain colossal community/networking website is likely to be the style of music, dress and way of thinking everyone will remember the naughties for.

As far as emo bands are concerned the usual suspects were all present, including band of the moment ‘Panic! at the Disco’, the catchy but ultimately irritating ‘Fall Out Boy’ and the stupidly named ‘My Chemical Romance'.

The festival wasn’t completely over-run with emo tykes though, and keeping with the tradition of digging up past masters ‘Pearl Jam’ were headlining the Friday, and art-rockers ‘Franz Ferdinand’ joined the forever impressive Muse as the headliners for Saturday and Sunday respectively.

Diversity has never been particularly high on the Carling Weekend agenda so it wasn’t a surprise that other genres were included to the bill as a mere token gesture, take UK garage artist ‘Dizzie Rascal’ for example.

It took me some time trudging round Leeds in the early hours of Friday morning, scratching my head with a glazed expression, looking for somewhere to pitch my tent that wasn’t occupied by a drunk Yorkshireman, before I finally remembered that Leeds Festival isn’t actually in Leeds, but instead tucked away at Bramham Park, slightly to the northeast of the city, and also famous for the 32nd three star international horse trials, apparently.

I eventually arrived on site to be welcomed by the really really really friendly night stewards who were above all really really friendly, although despite being really really friendly, and itching to help you, they didn’t actually know anything. At one stage I was told the ‘Yellow Campsite’ was either infront of me, behind me, or I might actually be in it – very helpful indeed, but I don’t want to knock them too much as they were really really friendly people.

Over friendly night stewards may well have been the first evident step Leeds had taken in minimizing the problems caused by rioting in the past, and the security certainly was far more relaxed than in previous years, reducing that militant vibe that you sometimes find at major festivals that have hired a legion of brain dead Robocop wannabes.

Weather fears were dispelled as quickly as the clouds, and zombified festival-goers would emerge from their canvas caves in search of the nearest refreshment, which was more often than not, beer.

The arena layout at Leeds is absolutely fantastic, and it certainly does make a mockery of some of the other major UK festivals. Unlike V where the gates open and everyone makes a mad dash for the main stage so they can crack open their bottles of white wine, stick up their parasols and claim there 2ft square plot of ground in their very own name, Leeds has a very clever and accommodating setup – directing people towards the main stage but lining the path they take with the smaller, lesser known stages. In fact the very first stage you see is the Unsigned Stage and countless times I saw people streaming towards the main stage only to catch a wiff of the musical equivalent of grandma’s home cooking and shoot off to catch some rare gem. This was happening all the time and brings me to my second observation about the Leeds crowd – they LOVE their music!

It may sound like the worlds most blatantly obvious observation, I mean who would go to a music festival if you didn’t love music? But the Leeds crowd love it on such a scale it’s crazy – even the smaller stage openers were getting packed crowds, eager to support the plethora of talent emerging from some of the less likely places. The crowd were also in fine voice and everyone seemed to know the words to every song of every band, even if that artist hadn’t even released anything yet. If live shows are feeding off the illegal downloading catalyst then it just proves that illegal downloading is not as damaging as some money-grabbing artists and record industry labels may lead you to believe.

One complaint about the festival – and it’s a compliment as much as it’s a complaint, concerns the sheer volume of people that were in the arena right from the moment the gates opened. The capacity had increased by a further 10,000, moving from 57,500 to 67,500. The site could handle it, just about. The only problem was that the tents were so crammed it was sometimes impossible to get anywhere near any of the bands on stage and quite often arriving at the Radio 1/NME stage for a band meant being forced to stand outside and peer in, or alternatively sit in front of one of the poorly placed screens and listen to the music from the Lock Up Stage while you watch the Radio 1/NME proceedings – which seemed a little weird to me.

There were some fantastic performances over the weekend and the overall quality of the acts at this year’s Leeds festival was superb. There weren’t any performances that particularly stood out from the rest, but more a concurrent level of quality music, which was the core reason why this year’s Leeds festival was so successful.

The atmosphere carried on well into the night – it was obvious that whereas Glastonbury never sleeps and V only ever sleeps, Leeds was somewhere in the middle – only sleeping when it seemed entirely necessary, and the result was a great party vibe that lasted well into the early hours of the morning.

All across the site there were miniature parties taking place, whether it be outside the Duracell Powerhouse tent, crammed in the Aftershock Tent or just outside one of the little CAT gas cannister exchange stations. It never felt like there was a shortage of things to do at this year’s Leeds Festival and for such a corporate event that sells itself on the line-up this can only be a good thing.

The one thing that threatened to tarnish a potentially awesome festival was forever leering over the event like an embarrassingly austere parent present at a kids party, and when Sunday finally hit I was nervously anticipating what is in danger of becoming a tradition – the Leeds festival riots.

Thankfully Leeds festival was blessed with fantastic weather right until the right moment. Sunday evening was welcomed in with heavy showers and quickly put an end to anyone’s moronic visions of exploding gas canisters and burning toilets. More a case of rain stop riot than rain stop play.

However, I do believe that coincidental weather aside, the atmosphere at this year’s festival was so much friendlier, and the support for the ‘Love not Riots’ cause, as well as the over friendly but clueless security, and extended late night entertainment, all lead to a friendlier, virtually trouble free event.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Carling Weekend myself, but this year Leeds Festival was ran so brilliantly, and maintained such an excellent vibe, that I think I will be making it a permanent fixture in my festival calendar for many years to come.

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