Leeds Festival 2010

Leeds Festival 2010 - The Main Stage

Leeds Leeds Leeds. Home to boring football songs, Royal Armouries, Brian Clough’s shortest stint in club management and Chris Moyles. But just when you started to wonder whether the place had anything going for it at all, they only go and pull out one of the best summer festivals of the UK calendar.

Friday 27 August

So, thanks to a busy Bank holiday in the car hire office, we finally arrived and pitched up our tent to the sound of The Maccabees and The Cribs on the main stage. We can’t really tell you how good they looked up there, but they made an adequate soundtrack to us hammering tent pegs into the hard ground. We finally got into the main arena about twenty minutes too late to see Nottingham’s own Love Ends Disaster! on the BBC Introducing stage - which was a bit of a pisser, frankly. But we were told by friends they did us proud. So we consoled ourselves with a beer and a gawp at Dizzie Rascal’s antics on the main stage. He appears to have gotten into the rock vibe and hired a bunch of Nickleback lookalikes as his backing band, so tunes like Fix Up and Bonkers have developed a new and heavy live edge.

After this we grabbed a beer and watched The Libertines reunion. I was never a massive fan during that time in the early noughties when they were permanent fixtures on the cover of the NME for injecting drugs and burgling each others houses but, aside from the twatty urine-throwing wannabe cockney-geezer fans they attract, they were alright. Watching them chirpily playing out the likes of Don’t Look Back Into The Sun and Can’t Stand Me Now was quite good fun. I wouldn’t offer them a million quid for it though.

Win Butler of Arcade Fire - photo by George Coppock

Next up were Arcade Fire. Frankly, if you’ve listened to any of their three albums so far for a reasonable amount of time and you’re still not into them then you have no sense of taste whatsoever. From the moment they began to the moment they left the stage they were amaaaaazing! I’m not sure what they put in the water up in Montreal, Canada, but if it makes you capable of penning melodies like No Cars Go, Suburbs and Tunnels then I want to drink some right now. At one point during the gig, Butler remarked that he was surprised to be headlining since they’ve never actually had a hit single. But when you make great whole albums you just don’t need them. They were well worth missing Pendulum, Ash and Bad Religion for on a night packed with decent headliners.

After this we had a few more drinks and went for a boogie in the Silent Disco tent, which had succumbed to non-headphone noise for the masses still wanting to party and dance until the early hours.

Saturday

We dragged ourselves out of our tents on Saturday to catch a bit of comedy on the Alternative Stage with the perverted yet amusing MC Martin Mor and then a random brain dump by the scatterbrained yank Emo Phillips. Walking past the main stage we saw a bit of Maryland boys All Time Low trying to convince the British girls at the front that it was tradition at their gigs to get their tits out. We made a quick escape to the Dance Stage and enjoyed the sonic delights of Holy Fuck for half an hour. I couldn't actually tell you what any of their tunes are called, but I enjoyed them and there bass heavy dance sounds.

Limp Bizkit - photo by Tony Woolliscroft

After a tasty barbecue back at the tent, we settled into watching a bit of Limp Bizkit with Fred Durst playing his usual role of a dad-aged shouty angry teenager. Hits like Rolling, Take a Look Around and their cover of Faith almost masked the fact that he was a forty-something dude wearing a tea cosy on his head. After these came Cypress Hill, who are always likeable, despite the fact that they only really appear to sing about guns, bitches and weed – and thus have the lyrical depth of a pound-shop DVD starring Ice T. Mention must also go out at this point to the group of excitable lads behind us who were absolutely determined to break the pain barrier and build themselves into a human pyramid – which they never really got quite right even after five or six attempts.

Taking to the Main Stage next were more American's in the form of the geek heroes, Weezer. Sometimes you find a band at a festival who you think are okay, day to day but who totally blow you away live. Weezer were that band for me. On record they are twee and amusing, but as a live show they are like a happy juggernaut. More than happy to mess with people’s heads they did a cover of Lady Gaga's Poker Face (with Rivers in a blonde wig) that was a mash-up with MGMT and also that Wheatus song that everybody thinks is done by Weezer anyway. Obviously they played a lot of their own stuff like Hash Pipe, Buddy Holly and The Sweater Song too.  Aceness!

Rivers from Weezer enjoying a bit of crowd love - hoto by Tony Woolliscroft

We weren’t too fussed by the rest of the main stage line-up for the day (Paramore and Blink 182) so we headed for We Are Scientists on the NME stage instead. A festival favourite, they were good fun and got a happy crowd singing along with them. Then we caught a bit of Roots Manuva in the Dance Tent, with good old Rodney Smith in fine form, complete with full backing band. We headed off towards the end to catch the last couple of tunes by Klaxons, who were given a decent send off by a glowstick wielding crowd. It's Not Over Yet... it is now.

Then we went back to the guest bar until the early hours and  watched in amusement as my friend Ian got really drunk and danced on a podium whilst his missus and cousin watched on with equal amounts of amusement, disgust and shame. Haha! 
 

Sunday

When the final day of a festival comes around you’re usually rather hungover, but still anxious to see as much as you can before it’s all over. So I dragged myself out of the tent to catch a bit of Gogol Bordello on the Main Stage. The Familia Undestructable were in fine form and their blend of ragtag gypsy folk and death metal blew away any remaining cobwebs that the coffee hadn't managed to eradicate.

We then had a glance at the always lively NOFX, before checking out The Big Pink, who a friend assured me are quite good – although I thought as a live show they were wankety wank. The cover version they introduced and then sang without ever revealing the title of was probably the worst thing I heard at the entire festival (including the noise from the bloke in the tent next to us who snored like a tractor).

After this we cheered ourselves up with a lively performance from The Mighty Stef on the Introducing Stage, before we were back to top morale thanks to a bit of Notts as MC Wariko and his lyrical partner Rinse got the Alternative Stage crowd chanting about routine bodily hygiene (“You say shower, I say soap…”). This was followed by an audio feast from the uber-talented human beatboxer Beardyman, who played through a range of chart and underground hits using just his mouth and some pedals. You have to love that shizzle.

Queens Of The Stone Age - photo by Simon Moss

After this it was back to the main stage for a full-on audio assault from the always awesome Queens Of The Stone Age. Fronted by Josh Homme, they rinsed through classics like Feel Good Hit of the Summer, No-one Knows and Go With The Flow as you would expect from a band who have now been together for a decade. If you've never seen these live then you need to do it before you get too old.

We then played the guessing game, along with 60,000 other people as to how late Axl Rose's karaoke version of Guns'n'Roses would turn up, after hearing he was half an hour late for his set at Reading the previous night. He kept it fair by giving us about the same lack of respect for punctuality here too. When he did finally arrive on stage with no apology,  he looked like a cheap Axl impersonator in a Bo Selecta mask.  Amusingly, he then kept changing from one crap t-shirt and jacket combo into another every three or four song, like he was in Take That or somet'. Oh, and he had a comedy 'tash. The set was finished with him coming back on at the end moaning incessantly about fighting 'the police' for getting his set cut short (despite it being obvious to everyone except him that he was just late, again). The rest of the ‘new’ band looked like they had graduated with honours from the LA branch of guitar wank school. And it was absolutely freezing being there in crowd in the Yorkshire winds.

Despite all this, they were absolutely brilliant and I am so glad I saw them before they inevitably implode again. The angry and bloated walrus that Axl has become still possesses one of the defining vocal talents of the last twenty five years. His backing band might not contain Slash, Izzy and Dizzy these days, but they were still on point with all the old songs – and they even chucked a bit of Pink Floyd, James Bond and Pink Panther (seriously!) into the set too. Winner!

Leeds Festival took place at Bramham Park in Leeds from 27-29 August 2010.

Leeds Festival website

 

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