It’s Reafing Festival weekend. The streets of the town are full of people in wellies and the supermarkets contain stacks of cheap lager the size of Canary Wharf. It all reminds me of the last Reading Festivals I went to back in the early 1980s, when I was the same age as the people going now. Reading has always been a teenage rite of passage.
It’s a reminder of the fact I’ve been a Marillion fan for 33 years this weekend, after seeing them half-way ip the bill in 1982. They were back the following year as special guests on the Saturday night, opened with Grendel. They blew Black Sabbath and their fibreglass Stonehenge off stage. Little did I imagine their music would still be a big part of my life more than three decades laer.
It’s remarkable how many of the bands from the 1983 bill above are still around. I saw Marillion a few weeks back, headlining the Prog stage at Ramblin Man. Pendragon played the same festival. The Enid were at HRH Prog. Magnum, Pallas, Big Country, The Stranglers and even Man are still on the circuit.
This year’s Reading Festival bill includes Metallica, who have been around for 30 years. Can you imagine 1980s festivals having 1940s crooners and big band jazz on the bill?
Motörhead are a British institution. Their name and logo have become so iconic that high street department stores sell their t-shirts to people who probably can’t name a single song with the possible exception of “Ace of Spades”. But after Lemmy’s recent health issues saw a tour cancelled not once but twice, and one or two lacklustre recent festival appearances, there have been doubts as to whether Lemmy is quite as indestructible as we thought, or that they are still the primal force they once were.
Since their emergence in the mid-1990s when the genre was at its lowest ebb, Spock’s Beard have become elder statesmen of the third wave of progressive rock. With their twelfth album “The Oblivion Particle”, the second to feature Ted Leonard on lead vocals, they show no signs of running out of ideas.
Though sometimes labelled as “post-rock” or the catch-all “alternative”, the instrumental four-piece The Fierce and the Dead are happy to describe themselves as a progressive rock band.
After taking a break in 2015, The Cambridge Rock Festival is back for 2016, at the festival’s established site of Haggis Farm Polo Club just outside Cambridge, on the 4th to 7th August 2016.