Reading/Leeds: what our writers thought

"Here it is again, yet, it stings like the first time…", sings Alkaline Trio boss Matt Skiba. Despite the fact that one of his best friends died this week of a massive brain hemorrhage, Skiba stuck it out and spat out his second splitting stories over his Mike Ness world of power chug guitars. The Lock Up stage was a richer place for having seen the dark, eyeball rock of Agony and Irony's Calling All Skeletons and the nailgun pop punk of From Here To Infirmary's Private Eye.

There is a certain affinity for Biffy Clyro 'round these parts... they've always been a consummate DiS band; full of angles, melodies and yells, slowly increasing in size over the years while continuing to appeal to their rabid community. This has, also, been the band's year as far as festivals are concerned. Their sixth Reading appearance (although it feels like it could/should be more) sees an accomplished late afternoon mainstage show. Smashing through the start with Puzzle's 'Saturday Superhouse' and pop guzzler 'Who's Got A Match?', the band end with the pounding drums and slow growing guitars of 'Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies' and Blackened Sky's oldie '57'.

Emmy The Great has a voice that will break your heart and sew it back together within the same song. Her world of indie folk has long been ignored by the industry and masses, while anyone she has ever spent an afternoon with has been lauded as a fully employed pop star (Noah and The Whale, Dev Lightspeed Champion, Johnny Flynn etc.). But this, her first official turn at Reading, is a great moment, a beautiful run of strings and harmonies. If this year's festival will go down for its major hardcore turns, Emmy should have had the biggest circle pit of the festival.

Kate Hewett

There are some definite organisational 'issues' at this weekend's Leeds Festival. Primarily the attempt to cram an unfeasibly large number of bands into an improbably short space of time. Nonetheless, it's the bands who face a certain amount of adversity who fare the best.

Take Yeasayer, for example, whose measly 15-minute turnaround leaves them electrocuting themselves on their own kit. Or Foals, who find themselves somewhat unceremoniously banished from the stage before the end of their set as a result of a delayed start.

Yeasayer play an absolute 'blinder', never letting on that anything is amiss, their sound perfectly pitched to wake up each and every bleary-eyed festival-goer who should happen to step into the now-gargantuan Radio 1/NME tent this Friday morning.

Foals, on the other hand, tackle their difficulties in a somewhat more petulant manner. Drawing on the crowd's enraptured enthusiasm for their set thus far, they stoically refuse to leave the stage, even after organisers begin turning their equipment off. Yannis darts around, mic in hand, in an attempt to beat the sound guy to every remaining switched-on amp, whilst Jack Bevan continues to batter his drumkit right up until his forcible ejection from the stage.

Similar goings-on abound on the BBC Introducing stage where, on Thursday night, Leeds-based label Dance To The Radio open the festival with a showcase of exciting new talent. Unfortunately, the stage's top two bands - Scottish ensemble Broken Records and Grammatics - have to contend with the eleventh hour inclusion of a 20 minute surprise set from the Pigeon Detectives. A definite crowd-pleaser, certainly, but when allowed to play on undisturbed well beyond their allocated set time, the new princes of ruffian-pop leave their more sensitive counterparts with little more than a quarter of an hour apiece to play with.

Lucky, then, that both bands are more than capable of cramming a set's-worth of imagination into little more than three songs each. Indeed, Broken Records' noisy, chaotic, multi-instrumentalism and Grammatics' thoughtful, intelligent art-pop serve only to remind us just what's great about the host city's music scene.

The spirit of triumphing over adversity extends, even, to the Main Stage, where British Sea Power find themselves facing a paltry crowd mid-afternoon on Sunday, following a somewhat bizarre scheduling decision.

A band who have spent a number of years cementing their live reputation, it seems nonsensical to take them out of their comfort zone rather than having them headline one of the smaller stages - a challenge they've proved themselves more than capable of meeting over the years.

As they embark on a Do You Like Rock Music-heavy set, though, it becomes apparent how unfounded our fears that they couldn't meet the dual challenge of the Main Stage and a somewhat lacklustre times lot were. Arriving at a stunning, stripped-down rendition of 'No Lucifer', the Brighton-based quartet have no trouble reiterating just why they're one of our great live bands.

And that's the impressive thing about this weekend: in spite of the numerous technical problems overcome throughout the course of the four days, and in the face of a largely uninspiring line-up, Leeds Festival once again manages to come up with more than enough to impress.