Credit: Kez Hedges

There’s something inherently wrong about this. Here I am, a boy born and bred in an RG Reading postcode, and I’m up at Bramham Park, in the middle of the Yorkshire countryside, getting ready for my first non-Reading Carling Weekend.

I mean; people speak with accents up here.

After Thursday night’s lacklustre entertainments, Music Towers is hungry for some proper rock mayhem. Thursday night in Comedy/Cabaret tent, both The Quiet Kill and Sikth failed to impress, with the result of The Quiet Kill’s widespread open auditions to find a singer resulting in awful tuneless bleating from the winner. The usually dependable Sikth made the mother of all boo-boo’s when they unfortunately shouted “How you doin’, Reading?” to the assembled throng.

An abject lesson in how to lose a crowd in 4 little words.

The line-up’s all backward here as well. Surely the rock day should be on the last day? Not that I’m complaining, as Mastodon are a giant scouring pad of a way to open up the main stage – it’s like having all the grease stripped off your eardrums by forty minutes of shredding metal. Follow that up with Killswitch Engage bruising set of sharp-toothed riffs that could give Mike Tyson a run for his money in the ear-damaging stakes, and this shindig is finally getting somewhere.

Over in the NME tent, as the Dresden Dolls burst into their unique cover of “War Pigs”, and it’s not the only cover song they slip into their repertoire today.

“We’d like to play an old English folk song now”, Amanda Palmer drawls. “Feel free to dance, sing along, throw beer over each other, whatever it is traditional for you British to do” before knocking out “Everyday I Love You Less And Less”. Normally if a band was shoring up their set with more than one cover song you’d be edging for the exits, but the Dolls pull it off with a glitzy charm.

Bullet For My Valentine have put in the hours touring big venues as support for Guns and Roses and it’s starting to show – they almost look comfortable up there on the main stage. Sadly today they come across as a poor man’s Trivium, who many would say are just a poor man’s Metallica. But then you're always gonna come up short when you’re on before the mighty Slayer. As Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman tear into “South Of  Heaven”, the sky splits open and it starts to rain. Proof, if ever it was needed, that Slayer are God’s most unwanted children. With the classic Slayer line-up re-united for new album, “Christ Illusion", tracks like “Disciple” and “Postmortem” have never sounded so viciously brutal.
 
My Chemical Romance receive nothing resembling the full—scale bottle assault they received at Reading two days later. If anything, Leeds took them to heart, with the asymmetrically-fringed kids going wild down at the front for new song, “House Of Wolves”. It’s like an emo-Adam Ant, which seems apt given Gerrard Way’s bleached blond crew cut and cavalry jacket make him look like an extra from “Stand and Deliver”.