Meeting up with another friend from Portsmouth meant missing some of the earlier bands on the Sunday, but we managed to hear a couple of "tunes" by Fear Factory - the sort of band you'd probably want to listen to if you want to piss-off your parents indoors, or as another way of relieving teenage stress rather than compulsive masturbating.  >Grand Theft Audio just made me wish that 3 Colours Red were still together - would've been nice to hear them fire off a couple of the old 3 Colour's tunes, as it's a shame there's no way of hearing them live anymore, and Grand Theft Audio's tracks sounded fairly nondescript.

I'd wanted to catch some dance tent acts this weekend, and did so with the Freestylers, who are old-school to the last, but nevertheless good fun and professional, with the new 'Pressure Point' material belittling the 'We Rock Hard' classics.  Meanwhile, back on the main stage Queens Of The Stone Age premiered some new material, as well as displaying the bassist's wedding tackle whenever he needed to lift up his guitar and concentrate on some tricky notes.  Not an appetizing thing to see on the massive video screens!  Why does he do it?  The songs were simple, yet amazing - I've already been blown away by them once this year in Portsmouth, and look forward to the next album, which hopefully will feature guest vocals from ex-Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan, as did this gig.  Only caught a couple by Lowgold, which was a shame after their fine 'Just Backwards Of Square' album, and enjoyable Wedgewood Rooms performance earlier this year.

It's nice to keep abreast of new trends and styles, so I'd been insistent on seeing Wookie this weekend.  Not your typical festival act, with the music being supplied purely from a laptop computer, but ex-Soul To Soul member Wookie is considered the benchmark sound of UK garage, and the beats clash and clatter with rewarding shuffle timings, and the soulful sounds and harmonies (sometimes bordering on boy band territory) provide a contrasting prelude to Marilyn Manson's raucous and over the top stage act.  Mr Manson is one of those artist that I find worthy of seeing live, but not of buying the music.  His music exudes much that was bad about glam rock, and treads little new ground lyrically, but the stage act was fantastic - it's not often you see a vocalist's legs extend to some 30 feet, with them looking down on you from above!

Finally, at the end of the festival, the performer most of us had bought the tickets for: Eminem.  It was great to get to see him live at last after missing out on the Docklands tickets, but it ended up a bit underwhelming when half the set was made up of D12 collaborations.  Yeah, they are good and they made some killer tracks, but we were all here to see Eminem, not his posse (who had originally been scheduled to perform beforehand on another stage).  So we got a small selection of tracks from 'The Slim Shady LP' and 'The Marshall Mathers LP' - 'Under The Influence', 'Stan', 'Criminal', etc. - but, alas, no 'Real Slim Shady' (I was SO looking forward to 'putting one of those fingers on each hand up' along with 40,000 other people)!  His talent as a rapper and lyricist is unquestionable, and D12 were good too, but I think the crowd were generally a little disappointed that they didn't get more of his solo material.  Still good though!

So some 31 bands later, I'd had a great time, and not got too wet or too smelly (not that anyone mentioned, anyway)!  I like to think the weekend as a whole prepared me in some small way for my pending life as a mature student, and can't wait to go back to Reading next year (provided I have enough of my student loan left to get me there)!