Welcome back to Troika after a lovely summer break! Hope you all had a good one too.
Last weekend, Family Hicks went to the Reading Festival for a day. Now that the children are 12 and 14, we’ve been doing a few gigs with them, and thought it was time to try a proper festival, and the Saturday Reading line-up had something for all of us.
I was looking forward to seeing bands I knew well like Metallica, Royal Blood and Baroness, but I thought for this Troika that I would cover the bands that I ‘discovered’ at Reading.
- "Happy Song" - Bring me the Horizon (contains sweary swears)
Sheffields’ Bring me the Horizon are one of my daughters favourite bands, not to mention fashion label (lead singer Ollie Sykes runs Drop Dead clothing). Up until Reading, I’d never heard anything of theirs that I really enjoyed, and despite some choice comments that Ollie made to the crowd, this opening number was so gutsy it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It was that good! Nothing to with the fact that all their new album artwork is based on Pictograms… - "All the Sad Young Men" - Spector
This song turned up on my first ever Spotify Discover playlist, and at the time I thought Frederick Macpherson’s vocals sound very much like Tom Smith from the band Editors. Spector played the NME/Radio 1 tent mid afternoon and having seen them live I moved away from the Editors comparison. Very clever lyrically, and a visually a very different band! - "Tryer, you" - And So I Watch You From Afar
As I arrived early to get a good position to see Baroness, I caught the very last song of ‘And So I Watch From Afar’s set. They’re a four-piece from Belfast who occupy a space not a million miles away from Explosions in the Sky, in the sense that they do mainly guitar-based instrumentals. They were definitely a good live band, and kicked myself for not seeing the whole set.
There were of course, lots of bands that I missed that day, so perhaps I’ll do a ‘best bands I didn’t see at Reading 2015’ one day?