Reading Festival's filthy habit: a history of bottling
It’s a grey mid-afternoon at Reading Festival in 2004. Finnish sort-of goths The Rasmus – who had a grating hit with In the Shadows earlier in the year – are up next. Punters sprawl across the grass with a beer, recuperating ahead of the final night shenanigans. The Rasmus appear, their pop-metal guitars buzzing away innocuously as the sun dips out from behind a cloud. As a flock of birds soar overhead, frontman Lauri Ylönen waves and opens his mouth to sTHWACK!
An open beer bottle filled with urine has hit him in the face.
A pause, and suddenly there’s a hailstorm of bottles crashing into the stage, the band, the line of gleaming back-up guitars, and most likely some luckless teen who’s decided to crowd surf during the first song. The stunned, hapless Rasmus boys carry on limply for a few more bars. They disappear. They reappear and go straight for the hit. They are once again met with a volley of human waste. They give up. Lads: welcome to Reading Festival.
The rock bash, held over three days of the August bank holiday weekend alongside twinned festival Leeds, welcomes over 90,000 tween-ish revellers each year. Since the Eighties, it has proved that a hardy minority of them enjoy nothing better than preserving the festival’s mucky tradition. There have been at least a dozen “bottling” incidents at Reading since Brummie roots reggae act Steel Pulse were met with the opprobrium of bored Stranglers fans back in 1983.
Sometimes, there’s a kind of twisted logic to the targets: Daphne and Celeste (2000), Good Charlotte (2003) and The Rasmus all got bottled due to their perceived invalidity as credible rock acts. Bonnie Tyler (1988) was the crowd scapegoat when Reading attempted to move away from rock and re-position itself as a commercial pop festival. For trying to defend her in that same year, Meat Loaf took a 2-litre cider bottle to the neck.
Other times, targeted acts have merely been in the wrong place wrong time. Rapper 50 Cent (2004) – who was hit with mud and an inflatable paddling pool – and pop-rockers Plain White Ts (2008), for example, were both besieged by punk or heavy rock fans who were waiting for other bands to come on next. Bring Me To The Horizon (2008) succumbed to the fury of Slipknot’s fans after replacing them on the bill. Probably the most unfortunate of the Reading bottle victims to date are The FF’ers, an unsigned band who got pelted at a tiny stage by irate Foo Fighters fans who had turned up expecting to see a secret gig from their heroes.
Reading Festival didn’t start this angsty craze, nor does it have a monopoly on it. The Stooges were famously showered with missiles by hostile bikers during their farewell gig back in 1974, while there have been several incidents at Download Festival, Ozzfest and Holland’s Pinkpop. But there’s something unique about the way punters take to it with such riotous glee at Reading. Perhaps it has its roots in the festival’s tough history – can and bottle fights between attendees were reportedly all the rage there in the Seventies – and tendency to favour outsider punk, metal and rock genres.
Or maybe it’s just that the tens of thousands of teens attending their first musical festival hours after picking up their GCSE results have gone giddy and a bit feral. There’s definitely a Lord of the Flies effect at work; another Reading custom is to set fire to gas canisters in the campsites on the final night. (Gas cannisters, along with fireworks, are now banned).
Depending on your perspective, the waiting, missile-wielding Reading masses are either the ultimate barometer of teen musical acceptance, or real-life trolls, a deleterious menace cloaked in the anonymity of their numbers. I hated it when I used to go to Reading, and I’m similarly po-faced about it now. As a friend delicately put it to me, “Where else is it deemed socially acceptable to hurl p-ss missiles at someone?”
And why ruin the fun of people who might have paid the hefty ticket price specifically to see the band you’ve decided to bottle? Unsurprisingly, almost every act who get the treatment eventually gives up on their set (although the redoubtable Bonnie Tyler fought gamely on). Even less surprisingly, bands are exceptionally reticent to talk about the incidents later, their egos, feelings and faces having taken a battering. But we can safely assume it’s hard to retain your poise when you’ve got an open Carlsberg bottle thundering towards your face while cascading warm human wee out at all angles.
Bottling is also moronically dangerous. Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie was knocked unconscious at Reading 2006, while a despicable incident saw 71-year-old Toots Hibbert hit by a glass vodka bottle at Virginia in 2013. The Toots and the Maytals singer received a concussion, a gash that required six staples, and a lasting fear of performing in public.
The bottling trend seems to have receded slightly in recent years, and Reading Festival’s website does indicate, albeit slightly cryptically, that “throwing of objects in the direction of people” classifies as an offense that will get you evicted. But there’s no telling how the volatile crowds will react to this year’s acts. Nu-metallers Korn or dancehall electro act Major Lazer could be deemed fair game, while my bottling money would be on limp indie-pop act Bastille.
But the capricious nature of Reading Festival groupthink means almost anyone on the 2017 bill might justifiably be quaking in their Doc Martens. Better ask for some plasters and a packet of wet wipes on the backstage rider, just in case.
