Reading Festival

Well, after a month of partying and no sleep, I went back to England for a nice weekend of rest. Nah, not really. I arrived at the Reading Festival at about 3am on Friday morning after a whole evening of travel. I had to go into Helsinki, get the train to Tampere, fly to London and be driven to Reading. Suffice it to say, when I finally got there I was in no mood to party and went straight to bed in the tent that my friend Sam had put up earlier, along with Charles.

Me having fun at the festival. Look how excited I am!

The place seemed surreal, walking past the thousands of tents at night, smoke and fog billowing over them, shadowy drunk people everywhere - if I wasn't so tired I think it would have been pretty scary.

It was actually easier to sleep in the daytime

My first bad experience came in the morning - the toilets. There's something soul destroying about festival toilets. If you think you've seen some pretty nasty stuff, well, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen a festival toilet. Any dreams or ambitions you've ever had are crushed once you gaze into the hole of doom. This was best put by some graffiti I saw scrawled on one of the walls - "Warning: Don't look down. And it has nothing to do with vertigo."

Toilets aside, the first day was great. We headed to the arena at about 2pm and ended up staying there until the end of the final act at midnight. The Subways were the first band I wanted to see, and they were great. Later on, Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand put on amazing shows that had the whole crowd of 50,000 people singing along. The atmosphere was amazing. After the music I met up with some friends from school that I hadn't seen for a while and hung out at their tent for a few hours.

Charles' and Sam's opinion on the current band differs somewhat

The next day was the big one for us...Muse were playing. I've been a big fan for a while now and I've heard so many reports on how great their live shows are so I couldn't wait to finally see them. Before that we had Feeder and The Streets, both of which were great. Then came the Arctic Monkeys who are probably the biggest band around at the moment. The crowd went mental, which is normally good but unfortunately I was at the very front, centre stage. I had a great view, but being in front of 50,000 crazy fans moshing about violently is quite a painful and tiring experience. For Muse, which I knew would be even more intense, I made sure to move back a bit..into the main moshing area, for a rest, which is a strange thing to do but it was actually much better there. They put on an amazing show - my face was thoroughly rocked off. I didn't think anybody could beat Radiohead live (especially as they're my favourite band), but Muse were just so spectacular that I think they've done it. They held the attention of every single person in the crowd, which is quite an achievement, as even some of the other big bands were complaing that the crowd lacked energy.

Me waiting for the music to start
(Yes I know I have no pics of any actual bands...sorry)

After Muse (and about 5 hours of continous standing in front of the stage) I headed to my friend's tent. We lit a campfire (well actually, we stole a campfire) and ended up drinking until about 5.30am then I went to bed for another 3 or 4 hours sleep - about the average I got on each of the 3 nights annoyingly.

On Sunday I stayed at the arena until about 2pm and then packed my stuff and set off for the airport for another night of travelling. So finally I can rest. Oh wait...I have to start university this week!