Sorry this post was so long in coming. It took me about a week to recover
from the festival, from me screwing up my throat by shouting, the lack of
sleep and the hangover. We then went straight back into promoting,
rehearsing and getting stuff ready for schools tour.

Anyway, in case you don't know, we won a competiton run by Nokia to play at
their stage at the Reading Festival. Matt, one of the Lifers, entered the
competiton for us so massive thanks to him..he also got a free phone from
Nokia for his troubles.

I won't bore you with everything that happened to us over the weekend, we've
been to Reading seven years in a row now and all our stories are pretty
similar... they all start "we were drunk and then..."

Most people just wanna hear about playing I guess? Well, it was short, kinda
odd, but fun. The tent wasn't packed, but when you're up against 5 other
stages full of bands that people have actually heard of, I don't think we
did too bad. The weird thing was looking outside the tent and seeing
thousands upon of thousands of people streaming past. Most of them couldn't
even hear us over the roar of the other stages, but to be there playing was
a great experience. It wasn't our tightest set, but considering where we
were, I think we did ok.

In fact, the only problems were the fact that they kept movng our stage time
and day, even right before we played. I understand that they had a lot to
cram in, but it was still annoying...we also would have spent the entire
weekend promoting if they had given us the Sunday afternoon slot they
initially offered.

The other problem was that we couldn't use our own gear. That might not
sound like much, but any band that plays regularly or tours, knows that it
makes every difference. My bass is attached to me at all times, has a tuner
wired in and gives me complete confidence when I play. The one they gave me
fell off it's strap and in that environment it's tricky to put it back in
tune by ear...but hey, what can you do right?

So to answer a couple of the other questions people have asked...no, I
wasn't nervous, we play to more people than that on schools tour sometimes
and it's not something that scares me. No, we don't automatically end up
with a record deal/quit our day-job deal, we won a competiton, not the
freaking lottery. Yes, it was awesome. Yes, we did have guest pases but we
weren't backstage often as it's boring and seeing guys in bands is not my
thing.

Bands that we went to watch worth checking out were the ever-excellent Brand
New (I bored everyone to death with a drunken rant about how good they are),
Funeral For a Friend, Fall Out Boy, New Found Glory, the consistently
brilliant Frank Turner, Paramore, Jimmy Eat World and a whole load of
others.

The only band that let me down were Angels & Airwaves who sucked...hard. Tom
DeLonge has gone insane and is taking that band with him. Prancing around
the stage like a wounded antelope and talking offensive, non-funny,
gibberish between songs...weird.

So anyway, that was our mini adventure. If you have any specific questions
drop me a line at max@onedaylife.co.uk. Right, back to work,

Max x