Hollow Earth

Somebody at work said to me they saw New Order at Reading Festival. I piped up - me too! I was rather pleased, but somehow the math didn't quite add up. It turns out he saw New Order in 1998. I on the other hand was there in 1989! Reading 1988 was my first festival actually and we witnessed the stuff of legend, Bonnie Tyler being pelted with bottles of urine.

Unlike the previous year (which in fairness did sport The Ramones and Iggy Pop as well) - even today the line-up for this looks fantastic. It has a real air of the zeitgeist about it in the way precious few line-ups these days seem to. Is that fair? This was clearly a Melody Maker festival, and you can see Stubbs', The Stud Brothers' and Simon's fingerprints all over it: World Dom, The Butthole Surfers, My Bloody Valentine, Spaceman 3, The Sugarcubes, Tackhead and PWEI. Even Living Colour I suppose.

Pitchfork readers might be surprised how low MBV are down the bill. But really it was all about The Mission and The Wonderstuff. This was "Isn't Anything"-era, but even later on MBV weren't much of a draw. I saw them a great many times, maybe as many as five? They were always unbearably loud. At the ULU I remember being quite worn out by the decibels. Is one allowed to say they were actually quite shit live?