Now, this is going everywhere... it's all about pretty much every band I saw over the entire weekend... including the ones of relevance to you... and some of the opinions here aren't necessarily complementary. Just take the bits you want to read, and skip the rest. It's 3,000 words, so just hit Ctrl+F and skip to the bands you're interested in.

OK. Let's just be blunt. I've been up for about three or four day solid so this is all going to be a rush. Over two sites and three days, with a little juggling, the Reading festival (and its twin in Leeds) draws the British festival season to an end, in what can be little else than a desperate last gasp for pleasure and infamy. Rumours abound. Someone has been stopped trying to enter the main arena with a kilo of hash. A Kilo! Surely Liam could've had that much helicoptered in himself. One thing is for sure. Thanks to Reading council's attempt at roadworks and a mutual madness, Reading is enveloped in ten mile traffic jam. It takes us two hours to get to the traffic jam, and six hours to get onto the site from there. Traffic comes to a standstill. Cars are parked, mobile discos started in the road. Beer handed out and dancing in the street. Gangs of fans take orders and all walk off in search of chip shops to bring dinner to the masses. Arriving on the site things aren't much better. Awash with mud, everyone is tired, hungry, and desperate for sleep. When we wake, we see that Tents have been at it like rabbits all night long and are sprouting up everywhere.

After the entire festival decides to go into town for one last decent wash and meal, the second absurdity begins. There is only one booth on site that provides wristbands for the 80,000 punters. Queues are two miles long, and thanks to the shockingly high number of forgeries, it takes two hours to get a wristband just to get into the site. So much for seeing the Doves. Into the festival site itself, one massive stage at the far end, so loud you can hear it from the city centre, and a proliferation of other tents. Masses teem around the site, eating cowburgers, ice cream, looking for pizza, and looking like individuals in Slipknot t-shirts. Merchandise stands are stripped clean by parasites looking for cotton fixes. Three persons, one of whom is myself, strap on white boiler suits and dust-masks and inflatable guitars and rock the dance tent with Status Quo sychronised dancing in a wholly successful attempt to avoid the majority of pisspoor bands on the main stage.

First band up are ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION, who successfully introduce their brand of Asian Rock-Dub-Shouty-Politico nonsense to a small amount of converts and a large amount of the curious. There's something deeply disturbing about their name though. Imagine a band called White Rock Coalition. Or Wog Funk Slaves.. for example.

LIMP BIZKIT get all dumb on our festival asses and manage to bore me to tears with a bunch of be-shorted, heavily tattooed dumb jock jerk rock. Lots of Reading loves it. Making noise and waving their hands in the air and rocking like true muthafukcas. Whilst a millionaire yells about his angst in the way only the truly deluded can.

BLUETONES are so bland and inoffensive, it's actually offensive. They play a set of barely familiar stadium indie that bores and appals in its lack of vision. How one of these can adore Bill Hicks yet produce such mediocre art is really somewhat puzzling.

FOO FIGHTERS bring a much needed injection of Rawk with a capital R to the main stage. I must admit to not being a huge fan of the band, but show themselves to be absolutely incendary. Songs you've never heard before sound instantly familiar, and romps such as I'll Stick Around, For All The Cows, and the brilliant Stacked Actors, produce a crowd so intense steam comes off it and the band spend most of the set stopping and slowing down their songs to ensure that nobody gets hurt. This band are almost telepathic the way they improvise and amend their songs to fit the mood of the day. During This Is A Call, when the dancing is at it's most violent, the band suddenly switch tempo to play a 70's funk paced section to give the crowd a break and allow security to drag out a couple of casualties.

PRIMAL SCREAM are next : It's hard to top the Foo Fighters but the Primals manage to do so. Fellow label mates with Oasis, the Scream also feature Mani (ex-Stone Roses) and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, both of whom have been at least very influential to the headliners. All things are forgotten when the Scream start. They are tighter than a nut spotwelded into the worlds tightest corner, burning with articulate rage at the vision of Britain in the year 2000. Swastika Eyes is a sleek stealth bomber of a song, dropping a payload of fury at the apathy of the world. "Military industrial / Illusion of democracy / Swastika Eyes" - a chorus built for the top 20. Mani makes repeated references to his previous band's appalling final gig at the same site four years earlier, and shows himself to be one of the best bassists there are, as the songs flow and around him, using the bass as a melodic instrument, leading songs to new places, especially during the dark and brooding Exterminator. During the finale, as a brief cover of New Order's "In A Lonely Place" melds into the blissful "Higher Than The Sun", and "Loaded" - the definitive 90's party anthem - the Scream show us that it isn't all anger and fury. It's simply that there's so little joy. Mani lifts Loaded to another level with several new basslines he adds to the songs, ignoring the original pivot of the song.

Set : Swastika Eyes, Shoot Speed/Kill Light, Pills, Burning Wheel, Insect Royalty, Kill All Hippies, Blood Money, Rocks, Exterminator, Kowalski, Accelerator, Higher Than The Sun-In A Lonely Place, Sick City, Loaded.

OASIS: Onto Britain's longest running soap opera. Now I must admit to liking Oasis a lot. Well. I like their songs. Noel and Liam have become caricatures. Liam thinks rock'n'roll is all about getting drunk and falling over. Noel thinks Rock'n'roll begins ends and finishes with The Beatles. Here's where the crux of the problem lies. The band are, put bluntly, sloppy, under-rehearsed. Especially as the last time the singer and guitarist even spoke, let alone played a song together, was a month ago. New boys Gem (who was, in my opinion, born to be in Oasis) and Andy Bell gel well with the rest of the band. Gem in particular fluidly sits in the line up as if he's always been there and tosses out solos far beyond anything Noel could play so that Noel quietly takes Boneheads former role of rhythm guitarist. It would be a great shame if this particular line up didn't record a new album. However, bar the backing, there's something very very wrong at the core of Oasis. Bluntly put the brotherly rivalry looks as if it is now verging on loathing. The opener - Fucking In The Bushes - hints at the kind of music Oasis could make if they wanted. Instead of the retro anthems they do an astonishingly good job of releasing, FITB is a brave, multiheaded, funky monster that hints well for the future Oasis could take. If they wanted to.

It goes wrong as soon as Noel and Liam walk on stage. Presenting an identical set to the rest of their world tour, (with the minor change of a thrash metal ending to Gas Panic!!), it soon becomes more interesting to predict when the two bruvvas are next going to have an on stage spat as thunder cracks around them , sound is blown away by torrential wind, and rain soaks the crowd. If they could just get on with the business of playing live instead of fighting, they would be a much better band. Liam calls Noel a crackhead, offers members of the audience out for a fight, spits in the camera. And it's all rather boring actually. Predictable. Safe. There's not even any hint of any excitement, as if they know somehow that this is the sad, inevitable end, and that Oasis are already a nostalgic look back, hinted at by the presence of just a third of the new album in the set (three songs), and a couple of covers that are at least a quarter of a century old. Then it's all over as Thunder and Lightning explodes over the field and the crowd feel, well, a little empty.

Set:
Fuckin In Da Bushes, Go Let It Out, Who Feels Love, Supersonic, Shakermaker, Acquiesce, Step Out, Gas Panic, Stand By Me, Roll With It, Cigarettes and Alcohol + Whole Lotta Love, Don't Look Back In Anger, Live Forever, Hey Hey My My, Champagne Supernova, Rock N Roll Star.

Saturday next:

Another trip into the city centre for food, drink, a pub lunch, and a much needed wash. I arrive back at the site to miss Deftones (not necessarily a bad thing), and catch ELASTICA. Their spunky brand of sex-fuelled rock is enjoyable, like say... Fucking In The Bushes, but the limitations of the blueprint are becoming clear. Justine flirts immensely with the crowd ("ooh, my pants are falling down... I've go my spiderman underwear on... tell me if you can see it"), buggers up Connection with a chorus that just goes... "ooooh bollocks", and a clutch of new songs - Bitch Don't Work, Nude, and No Good - offer promising hope for the future. After a glimpse inside the heart of Justine on the naked My Sex, it's all over.

Set :
Bitch Don't Work, Connection, Mad Dog, Annie, Line Up, Nude, Stutter, Da Da Da, Operate, No Good, Your Arse My Place, Human, Car Song, Generator, Waking Up, My Sex

SFA:
Yep. Saw them. Comedy horns, Bizarre welsh accents. Didn't light my fire. Time for a burger I think.

GRAHAM COXON: You can take the guitarist out of Blur, but you can't take the Blur out of the guitarists. Graham follows his two solo albums, the appalling, amateurish "Sky is Too High" and eclectic, focused "Golden D" with only fifth ever solo date. Backed by Dave from Blur on drums, and half of Idlewild, he pounds us with a set drawn from the angular, spiky, shoutier ends of his solo work, clearly inspired by the US hardcore punk of the 80's he loves so much and infused with a refreshingly vibrant take on the thrashier end of Blur's recent material such as B.l.u.r.e.m.i. and Song 2. "Fame And Fortune", "That's When I Reach For My Revolver", and the enjoyably juvenile "What the Fuck are You Looking At?" turn the Radio One Tent into a veritable swimming pool of thrashing bodies.

BECK steals the evening with the tightest, most enjoyable show I've seen in a very long time. His band - all wearing faux 70's afro wigs, sunglasses and fake funk coats dance across the stage, hold a conga, the kayboardist has a rotating keyboard that flies across the stage, and when he's not playing that, he dances all over the place with a 80's-style keyboard guitar, and the horn section shimmy across the stage when they're not playing. Beck himself has the corwd eating out of his hand with a call-and-response section, and the band opens with a trio of crowd pleasers in the shape of Loser, Jackass, and Mixed Bizness, before slotting in sections of Bowies' "Let's Dance" and James Brown's "Sex Machine". Beck holds a solo guitar set for a plaintive "Nobody's Fault But My Own" and the DJ Swamp plays a DJ Set during the encore break that involves Kraftwerk and a synth version of "Eye Of TheTiger" caused simply by juggling two oldskool funk 12"s at different speeds. The end of the set sees Beck indulge in tour ending hi-jinks, it being the last show of a 12 month world tour. He comes back on in a bright yellow Orange jacket emblazoned "Incident Controller" and as his band indulge in a keyboard solo and throw themselves across the stage, he tapes up the stage with "Police: Do Not Cross" tape and manages to tape up every camera person on stage. The keyboardist drapes himself headfirst over his instrument periodically jerking with fake electric shocks, as the keyboard is spun around like a kids roundabout. The guitarist wheels himself by scooter across the stage and the bassist crawls across the stage inside an american football outfit with horrendously outsize padded shoulders as the police sirens flash, the sirens wail and the audience wonder what the hell is going to happen next.

PULP are the final act and, for only their third gig in two years, are surprisingly taut and tight. They open with a maudlin, melancholy Common People, perhaps born of the realisation that whilst he might want to, he never will, sleep with Common People, like you. Playing a greatest hits set of bona fide classics such as Babies, Do You Remember The First Time?, Sorted For E's + Wizz, Something Changed, Help The Aged, This Is Hardcore, etc. Pulp tap into the darker side of the night. The newer material, in the form of the versatile Weeds, the incredible "Men" with a definitive hit chorus "you look so beautiful tonight / the whole world wants to sleep with you girl / men are only after one thing she said", and the optimistic Sunrise shows that Pulp can still do it. Even if the newer stuff is only slightly more optimistic than the Hardcore era material, it still cuts to the bone. As the evening comes to a close, Pulp abandon their setlist and take requests... finishing the evening with the glorious First Time and the sordid, innocent Babies.

Common People, Weeds, Something Changed, men, Help The Aged, Sorted For E's + Whizz, Feeling Called Love, Mini Timperly, The Fear, Junkie Towers, This Is Hardcore, Sunrise, Party Hard, Do You Remember The First Time?, Babies.  

And so to Sunday. Not much in the way of bands today, excepting a veritable line up of who's who of US new-metal. In fact, barring Daphne and Celeste every band on stage has graced the cover of Kerrang!.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE are the first act I see of the day, who enforce a rigid disciplined set. It's like watching Che Guerva fronting Big Black. They even throw in covers of MC5's Kick Out The Jams and the Rolling Stones Street Fighting Man. They still sound like Rage originals, primarily because they could play I Should Be So Lucky and make it sound like a vitriolic call to arms. They're a one horse band. Every song is identical. Same key, same speed. But what a song to have as a blueprint.

DAPHNE AND CELESTE are at the signing tent now. I can't see anything of them. Following their bottled eviction from the main stage, the crowd turn their scorn upon the signing tent and assualt the two teenypoppers with any soft objects they can find. They leave before signing a single autograph.

Into the final stretch now. SLIPKNOT look brilliant. Pure utter pantomime. I can't hear them mind you. Maybe that's for the best.

Instead, I watch a storming, celebratory set from the UTAH SAINTS. It's the third gig of theirs I've seen this year, and both my friends who see it call them 'the second best band of the festival'. The set is tighter, more streamlined than Glastonbury, benefiting from extra time spent rehearsing and the final mixing of the album. :Love Song is first. This we know, but its still a great big bulging song, rising and rising to orgasm. Even the vocals, which at every other gig have been wrong for this song, are crystal clear. The crowd, initially sceptical after such an absence feel the power of the beats and the tent bulges with sweat. Next up - What Can You Do For Me? - takes the tent to bursting.

And then... Power To The People and Power To The Beats! Built on a firey Chuck D sample, it sounds like the classic it already is. It hardly seems seven years since they were last a major force in music. It shouldn't be so long next time. I Want You - well, we all know this song. Built on a formidable Slayer riff the pit just keeps getting bigger and the chant gets louder... Utah Saints... Utah Saints... as the projections (dancing Buddhas, cities, Jerry Springer episodes and landscapes) fit perfectly into the rhythms of the music.

Soul legend Edwin Starr reappears for Funky Music. Like normal, Edwin cocks it up. But it doesn't really matter. He's the loudest voice on the planet according to the Guinness Book Of Records.

Punk Club is next. It's an absolute stormer. A sample Michael Stipe lists off cities... "London, Los Angeles, Washington, Seattle, Paris, San Francisco... Punk Club"... over a hypnotic, irresistable backing that swerves, cuts, dives and builds like a classic. It's bloody brilliant. I can't wait for the album. In fact if anything, it sounds like the Suede / Rollo remixes that have so far remained criminally unreleased.

Something Good. All know this. And then onto Rock, that just gets better. And better. And better with each listen. Built on a riff from AC/DC's "For Those About To Rock" that is endlessly looped and speeded up, the track builds and builds , and explodes just as the loops switches to "Fire! Fire! Fire!". It's the best Utahs track I've heard. For Those About To Rock... We Salute You.

UTAH SAINTS:
Intro, Love Song, What Can You Do For Me?, Power To The Beats, I Want You, Lost Vagueness, Funky Music, Punk Club, Something Good, Rock  

PLACEBO. Thank God for Placebo. I can pack my tent and leave the site before the traffic jams kick in. When we return their still peddling their filthy unimaginative voyeur rock to the disturbed, individuals who constitute Slipknot's reheated leftovers.

IAN BROWN:
And onto the last act of the festival. Ian Brown. Without him there would be no Oasis. With a new band, including former Stone Roses guitarist Aziz Ibrahim, a man who could play any song ever, it's a far cry from the flat V99 performance he gave a year ago. His band is tight, benefiting from two drummers, and the near perfect balance of man and machine. Love Like A Fountain is a relentless beast. And the rest of the set, bar a cover of Michael Jackson's classic Billie Jean, is drawn from his superior Golden Greats album. A new track, the curt, bluesy, Anything You Want is in the set, but sounds more like b-side fodder than a brand new classic. As the set ends, Aziz brings out the flashy riffs from Morassi before heading into the final strait of Dolphins, Corpses and a medley of My Star / Dear Prudence that brings the festival to a close. There might've been an encore. I didn't care. We all wanted to go home, and so we did.

Love Like A Fountain, The Fisherman = First World (medley), Set My Baby Free, Golden Gaze, Billie Jean, Anything You Want, So Many Soldiers, Morassi, Getting High, Dolphins Were Monkeys, Corpses, My Star, Dear Prudence.

BABY BIRD
Oh yes, and walking past the finale of Baby Bird's set, the singer yells incoherently at passersby "this is the last gig we'll ever do.". OK then. Bye.

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