Living at home with my parents at the time, me and Steve managed to cadge a lift to Reading 94 from my grumpy dad who went on about shite music the whole journey, bless 'im. We had purchased tickets beforehand on Steve's sisters credit card and this was our first festival. We had a million and one bands under our belts, but still no event that threw about fifty of 'em together in one mad mishmash of a weekend. Rain, Beer, Drugs, More Beer, More Rain, a few more beers, definitely more Drugs, and we were ready to see ...
The bandz are actually as vivid now as they where then, which surprises me. Anyway I saw :- The Flaming Lips (very loud and very cool), Gang Starr (rubbish), Hole (poignant and rocking), Pavement (amazing), Cypress Hill (v. stoned, and v. cool), Sebadoh (rocking the forest), Lush (iridescent, incandescent waves of phasing pulse guitar. And those harmonies!), Radiohead (cool), Senseless Things (very average, boring), Elastica (clangy, shouty, good), Madder Rose (jangly indie guitar and rocking on the choruses), Compulsion (rocked and smashed all their stuff), Shed Seven (poor, very poor), Tiny Monroe (boring to watch. To be fair to them we where sitting down skinning up for the whole set.) Salad (very good), Possum Dixon (really, really bad! We listened to three songs then left), Scarce (Saturday lunchtime punky poppy noisecore. I discovered them and went on to champion them to this day.), Red Hot Chilli Peppers (crap. A week sound and I didn't really like them anyway. I thought I was going to get shot when I showed my band sheet to Thad and Eva!), Senser (loud, snotty and abrasive, cool), Afgan Whigs (mellow and tender), Helmet (loud, snotty and abrasive, not cool!), Jesus Lizard (Rocked), and the Tindersticks (made me want to kill myself.)
And lo, my first foray into the murky, confusing, ecstatic, plain fucked up world of the festival was complete. The definition of the word 'complete' in this case was remembering a few bands, drinking beer, meeting some goths called Andy, soandso, and blah, special piggybacks(tm), poppers (everyone does them at a festival!), a mountain of reefers, drinking a different beer, and another one, and another one...
the rt.hon. Beemer.
-x-