Every year, Reading and Leeds rolls around with the promise of one more blowout before summer is over. This year, headliners Blink-182, Lana Del Rey, Liam Gallagher, Fred Again.., Catfish and the Bottlemen, and Gerry Cinnamon will head to Richfield Avenue and Bramham Park over the bank holiday weekend, hoping to write themselves into the history of the fests alongside the legends we’ve collected here. Here are 10 unforgettable sets to get you hyped for what’s to come.
Reading 1992: Public Enemy
The legendary New York hip hop group became the first rap act to headline Reading and did so in their own brilliant, politically-charged and energetic way. While the UK was wrapped up in a royal scandal, frontman Chuck D urged the baying crowds to forget about that and think instead about “homelessness, Aids and racial injustice”. Their firecracker set was a masterclass in giving a fuck about the real issues and tracks like 911 Is A Joke, More News At 11 and Fight The Power showed precisely why hip hop deserved a home at the fest. - JBT
Reading 1992: Nirvana
Nirvana’s Reading set is one of the band’s finest performances of their career and, tragically, the last time they’d ever play on UK soil. In a year stacked with iconic moments — it was also the fest where L7’s Donita Sparks flung a bloody tampon into the crowd as they pelted the grunge icons with mud — this set stands out as truly historic. The band took the stage amid swirling rumours about frontman Kurt Cobain’s declining health, and that distraction may be why they rehearsed only once for the show. But none of that mattered. Kurt’s tongue-in-cheek entrance in a wheelchair, a perfect setlist featuring Lithium, Breed, Negative Creep and, of course, Smells Like Teen Spirit, plus a blistering performance all amounted to the stuff of legend. - JBT
Reading 1994: Manic Street Preachers
Three days before the release of ‘The Holy Bible’, the Manics took to the main stage at Reading without Richey Edwards, whose lyrics would make the record one of the most brutal, suffocatingly intense rock experiences of the 1990s, due to ongoing health problems both mental and physical. “I couldn't tell you what happened,” bassist Nicky Wire told Kerrang! a week before the fest. “I just saw the results. It was pretty frightening to look at. Everybody was scared. I mean, there's a difference between carving ‘4 Real’ into his arm and the point he's got to now. He just doesn't feel like he's got any control.” Wire, frontman James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore played a lean, abrasive set that opened with Faster and PCP alongside a cover of Nirvana’s Pennyroyal Tea a few months on from the death of Kurt Cobain, and a few months prior to Edwards’ disappearance. This was about survival and getting through something for your mate, but it was also a primal example of the band’s power at this time. Not before or since have they sounded so heavy. - HB
Reading 1995: Foo Fighters
This set looms large in the Foo Fighters story. This was only their second UK show — they’d played King’s College London Students’ Union earlier in the year — and the buzz generated by Dave Grohl’s post-Nirvana moves meant that they were set to headline Reading’s second stage, which was known at the time as the Melody Maker tent. It was packed in a manner that was genuinely frightening, with many people spilling out the sides and others scaling the rigging to escape the mayhem below or secure some sort of view. There was a suggestion that they should move the set to the main stage, following headliner Björk, but Grohl wasn’t having it. He told Kerrang! in 2019: “I said, ‘No fucking way are we going to go headline the main stage at the first legitimate show we have in the UK! I mean, I get it, I don’t want anyone to get hurt, but that’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think?’ When you see the security guards starting to pass out, that’s a problem. There were people climbing up the poles and hanging from the fucking rafters, and as far as you could see it was this tight, packed wave of sweaty fucking lunatics with us just trying to get through every song.” - HB
Reading 1996: Stone Roses
It doesn’t have to be good to be significant. This set, headlining Sunday night, proved to be the Stone Roses’ last until their high-profile reunion decades later. By the time Ian Brown hit his first stuttering note the writing was on the wall — following the protracted wait for ‘Second Coming’, which was finally released at the end of 1994, drummer Reni left, with iconic guitarist John Squire doing the same in the spring of 1996. Backing Brown and Primal Scream-bound bassist Mani at Reading were former Simply Red touring guitarist Aziz Ibrahim and sticksman Robbie Maddix, who did their best. I Am the Resurrection was “more like the eternal crucifixion” sneered the NME. For a band who once were the zeitgeist, who defined a moment in popular music, it was a particularly ignominious end. As another band on that year’s bill once sang: the world had turned and left them there. - HB
Reading 2001: PJ Harvey
Despite playing immediately after Iggy Pop, PJ Harvey did this weekend’s best Iggy Pop. Fresh from the release of 2000’s ‘Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea’ she served up a barbed, lascivious roar of a set that took a serrated edge to that record’s studio sheen, dialling up some filling-rattling sounds from earlier in her career as the late afternoon sun baked the assembled hordes. This was about more than the past meeting the present, though. Harvey’s teeth-bared take on her poppiest material — see a cacophonous rendition of The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore that trades its jangle for scorching feedback — was really about performance and control, and the idea that an artist can exist in several states all at once. - HB
Leeds 2005: Arctic Monkeys
When Arctic Monkeys made their Leeds debut in 2005, they did so five months before their debut album ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ was even out and two months before I Bet you Look Good On The Dancefloor stormed the UK charts. Nevertheless, they drew a buzzing crowd that burst out of the Carling Tent, and their eight-song set was peppered with what would become fan favourites, with Mardy Bum, Dancing Shoes and When The Sun Goes Down showing exactly why this band would go on to become triple headliners. The reaction was similar down south. - JBT
Reading 2012: Green Day
Headline slots always draw the biggest crowds, but when pop-punk superstars Green Day played a surprise set at Reading in 2012, attendees flocked en masse. Announced by frontman Billie Joe Armstrong just 45 minutes before they were due to play, organisers and security had to block entry to the tent due to overwhelming demand. Clearly the response was expected, though, as throngs of fans could watch the hour-long set on big screens outside. Welcome To Paradise, Brain Stew, Basket Case and American Idiot were just a handful of the international superhits they played to re-assert their dominance 25 years deep. - JBT
Reading 2014: Paramore
What if everything goes wrong? The first half of Paramore’s set — co-headlining with Queens of the Stone Age — was an explosion of energy, feeding off the heady vibe of adventurous pop reinvention set out by their 2013 self-titled LP. Then, everything went black. A power cut stopped them in their tracks, leading to the moment when Hayley Williams and Taylor York ran through The Only Exception with one acoustic guitar, one microphone and something like 70,000 backing singers. They pulled lighters-in-the-air triumph from the jaws of a defeat that would have made a whole lot of haters very, very happy. “Oh my gosh, I’m never going to forget this,” Williams says, and not because she’d just lived through a waking nightmare. Remarkable. - HB
Reading 2018: Kendrick Lamar
When 2018’s line up was announced Reading & Leeds showed they were able to keep their finger on the pulse well outside of their usual rock and metal milieu, with Playboi Carti, Dua Lipa and Brockhampton preceding a Kendrick Lamar headline spot. Hot on the heels of his fourth studio album ‘DAMN.’, Kung Fu Kenny compiled a masterpiece of a setlist, breezing through DNA, King Kunta and Backseat Freestyle with production value to match his rap royalty status. Although he’d go on to headline Glastonbury just a few years later, Reading still stands out as a defining moment and one that truly concreted Kendrick as one of the best in the game. - JBT
Reading Festival Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Wed August 21 2024 - READING Richfield Avenue
Thu August 22 2024 - READING Richfield Avenue
Fri August 23 2024 - READING Richfield Avenue
Sat August 24 2024 - READING Richfield Avenue
Sun August 25 2024 - READING Richfield Avenue
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