| Reading Festival facts | - Reading Festival started life as a jazz festival in 1971
- It takes three and a half weeks to construct the festival site
- Two million pints of lager is drunk during the three days
- There are more than 800 toilets on site
- In 2000, two couples were married on stage
- One of Primal Scream's dressing room demands was to have a life-sized cardboard cut-out of comedian Les Dennis
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For those who were too wasted to remember their Reading Festival experiences, the town’s museum has launched an exhibition displaying 30 year’s worth of memorabilia that might jog a few addled brains. Among the posters, T-shirts, photos, autographed programmes and set lists hangs the star of the show: Kurt Cobain’s smashed up guitar from Nirvana’s historical 1992 appearance. Other highlights include a signed Foo Fighters guitar and a leopard-skin catsuit belonging to none other than…yes you guessed it, Justin Hawkins of The Darkness. You can see photos of exhibits in our photo gallery via the links on the right.
 | | Signed Foo Fighters guitar |
The opening night attracted luminaries from the music world including Reading’s Pure Reason Revolution, recently signed to Sony, former NME editor Steve Sutherland and special guest Steve Lamacq, who has compered at the festival for the last ten years. It also saw the festival’s creator Harold Pendleton shake hands with current organiser Melvin Benn of Mean Fiddler after an 11 year rift, caused by a power-battle over the Richfield Avenue site.
 | | Set lists |
Lamacq in his speech to the 240 guests must have spotted Reading’s Pop Idol contestant Susanne Manning in the crowd when he explained that one of his compering tricks is to tell a bad joke.
He said: “An example of one is: ‘How many Pop Idols does it take to wallpaper a room?’, ‘Depends how thinly you slice them’.” Naturally the room roared with laughter. The exhibition is called Music, Mud and Mayhem and is on display at the Museum of Reading in Blagrave Street until Sunday 28th November.
Opening times are 10am to 4pm from Monday to Friday and 11am to 4pm on Sunday.
The book Music, Mud and Mayhem: 30 Years of the Reading Festival is on sale at the museum priced £6.99.
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