The great Reading Festival ticket rush is right around the corner, which is causing people of no?discernible?music taste to wet themselves with glee while the rest of us look on in astonishment that this festival manages to sell out year after year.
The Reading and Leeds festivals are one of those bizarre anomalies that perplex music fans the world over. How can a company put on a festival with weaker line-ups, higher ticket prices and more problems than we're legally allowed to mention and yet continue to draw a huge demand for tickets?
The answer is obvious. Hipsters.
For many of our hipster brethren, Monday will go like this:
Wake up at about 10 and eat an ironic breakfast before donning a checked shirt, some skinny jeans, some bright Nike high tops and one of those Mongolian hat things like that Dappy fella from N-Dubz wears. Grab the lomo camera you picked up in Urban Outfitters, sling it in your unisex courier bag then grab your fixie bike with the unfathomably short handlebars and cycle dangerously towards your Shoreditch based media hub.
After several hours of posing, listening to some obscure band none of us will have heard of, blogging, not eating and drinking a lot of black coffee, head back home and anxiously wait for that magic moment when Reading tickets finally go on sale.
Your stomach is in knots, you HAVE to be there, not because of any of the bands that are on the line-up. Hell, they won't have even announced the headliners before tickets sell out. No, you have to be seen there, it's the place to be, the place that will ensure everyone looks at your instagram page and follows you on twitter, giving your pathetic existence some shallow sense of meaning.
Then comes the rush. The clock hits 0 and all hell breaks loose. The ticket sites crash almost instantaneously and you scramble through forums looking for the magical backdoor links that take you straight to the ticket purchase page. But what's this?
All the forums have hidden the links behind password protected private forums. OH NO!
Looks like you\’ll be resigned to sucking someone off behind Netto because they maybe, possibly, might be related to the neighbour of someone who used to be married to that bloke that works in Festival Republics PR department.
The rest of your night will be spent seething as those social networks you spend all day looking at (even though they're like so totally mainstream and you only have an account because you were into it before everyone else) fills up with statuses from your friends and fellow bedroom DJs/Artists/Photographers/Social Media Experts (delete as appropriate) about how they managed to get tickets and it'll be so totally LULZ.
Welcome to the death of music. Reading Festival is thy name.
Follow hecklerspray on Twitter or join our Facebook group or BUY ONE OF OUR STUPID T-SHIRTS!
Rockgeek says
Spot on
You forget to mention SEE tickets, Viagogo or Melvin though!
Tom J says
Never have I read a more faithful examination of a Reading festival-goer. Well done good sir.
Micky Bananas says
Excellent piece…like an episode of Nathan Barley…fab!
Reading gets more and more mong filled year by year, be it the hipster twats you mention, or the divvy students with their LEAVER XX (insert year here…so sad if it’s from 3 years ago and you are still so desperately socially inept to be wearing the same sweatshirt for that long) shirts on, acting all anarchic on the last night and trying to burn the place to the ground.
The idiots really are taking over…
Hipster123 says
This article is… shite. What a lot of garbage to be spawned from one hipster in denial’s twatty brian.
MattWhite says
This oddly sounds like me.
Well, I drink black coffee and go to Leeds Festival regardless of the line-up.
But wait…I drink black coffee because I don’t like coffee with milk, and Leeds Festival is always a decent weekend away with a few mates, and there’s always a few bands worth seeing.
Cookie Monster says
And America collectively wonders how a reading festival could be in possession of anything other than an ugly head (having spent the last 10 minutes sounding through the title of the post).
Erm says
That is completely untrue (the line-up features to many mainstream bands to attract hipsters) but it is an absoloutly hilarious portrayal of a hipsters day.
Dave says
I do get royally peeved at the countless posers that go the reading/leeds just to show how cool they are getting wasted without their parents watching over them, and the arrogance of melvin not announcing any bands before the sale to ensure the festival sells out before punters can make an informed decision as to whether its worth going. But there are genuine music fans who go for the, dare i say it, music… Rage were amazing, as were the prodigy, bloc party, rise against, nine inch nails, brand new, the gaslight anthem and many many more. Not all of us pathetic shallow hipsters, some of us just like the music ;)
op is a fag says
ermm no this is an indie festival. fair enough there has been hipsrer bands before like arcade fire but apart from that reading has a lot of mixed genres.
John says
Come on, get a life….
Yeah there’s the odd 16 year old ‘hipster’about but really come on…. the pot seems to be calling the kettle black here, Firstlyyour writing a blog, the very thing you say a hipster does, Secondaly I don’t think anyone you’ve described has ever listen to Metallica for example. Thirdly doesn’t the lineup sell out due to the very popular lineup that has a little bit of smething for evreyone each year. I think you need to perhaps leave your laptop sometime pal and go outside.
Alex says
I don’t think reading actually attracts hipsters. Most of the audience are teenage, sexually frustrated middle class kiddies…. who are “like totes obsessed with mumford and sons and <3 their dubstep, like chase and status yah" a festival more likely to attract a hipster would be something like field day , 1234, or something else similar.
Toad. says
And here i was thinking that festivals were supposed to be a fun place to go. Who ever wrote this is obviously bullied by a hipster.
Rockgeek says
Sounds like some people were offended by an article on the internet. Outstanding.
Rockgeek says
Wow, such a funny username.
RF is/was/sold as a rock festival. RF having mixed genres is like saying you’re a professor of English at Oxford
Rockgeek says
Yeah, obviously…
Rockgeek says
Get a life – says the person getting angry about an internet article
Rockgeek says
HA!!!