A burst of interest in live performing means music festivals are cool again: from the chic Secret Garden Party last weekend to the folk delights of the Green Man festival, they are springing up and doing well. But few have had the endurance and popularity of the Reading festival, which starts today.
Reading can trace its origins back to the national jazz festival in 1961, before moving to the Berkshire city in 1971. The festival at first favoured prog rock and heavy metal but in the late 1970s dabbled in punk, resulting in clashes between the two sets of fans. The 1980s saw a downturn in popularity before the Mean Fiddler group and the emergence of Britpop came to the rescue. It absorbed the struggling Phoenix festival in 1998, branched out to a sister site in Leeds by 1999, and now holds 80,000 spectators - with this year's tickets selling out in just one hour. With their roots in rock and goth, some find Reading-goers unsavoury when compared with the studied bohemianism of its more glamourous rival, Glastonbury.
Unpopular bands earn their stripes at Reading by playing through the occasional hail of urine-filled plastic bottles. The band Good Charlotte survived trial by urine in 2003, as did Fightstar last year. The gangsta rapper 50 Cent suffered it in 2004, eventually abandoning the stage after a deckchair sailed past. In 1998 an on-stage spat between the Beastie Boys and the Prodigy gave spectators what this weekend's 80,000 attendees will most crave: the perfect "I was there" moment.