Memories of Reading Festival 2007

The 2015 Reading and Leeds Festivals kick off tomorrow. This means that Britain's railways will soon be clogged with eager young campers who have spent the past few days practising their tents and wondering whether or not Gaz will manage to smuggle in that bottle of Smirnoff he's been saving all summer.

While they brace themselves for the weekend ahead, I'd like to take a moment to tell you all the story of my first visit to the Reading Festival...

My first Reading festival was an ordeal before I'd even boarded the train. Under the impression that the Carling Weekend was a mandatory rite of passage for newly-minted sixteen-year-olds, I had booked my ticket within seconds of the box office opening, all the while assuming that my friends were simultaneously sat at their computers, F5-ing the Ticketmaster website, doing the exact same thing as me.

In Search of The 21st Century Beatles

Big news! Chris Martin likes One Direction and, judging by the comments on NME.com, people aren't best pleased:

Now, I've already documented my viewpoint on matters like this, and when I was brainstorming ideas for today's blog post, I considered straight-up trolling the 'but they don't even write their own songs!' camp. I very nearly wrote an evil little thing about how One Direction are basically the same as The Beatles - something tailor-made to get The Gatekeepers of Musical Authenticity all riled up.

I eventually decided that 'Are One Direction The New Beatles?' wasn't an article I wanted to write, but I still see plenty of similarities between the two acts. I'm sure that many other people have made this point, but for all of their envelope-pushing, The Beatles had obsessive fans, feature films, and loads of hits, just like 1D.