Review: Leeds Festival 2010 Day Two

When: Saturday 28th August 2010

Reviewed by: Kelly Murray

Day two dawns in Branham Park, host to Leeds Festival 2010, and before we can neck a hot brew and view today's stage times, we hear Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit fame shouting obscenities from the main stage.

'Gotta Have Faith'  is blearing across the speakers like an order rather than mantra and as if Durst's bizarre take on self-belief wasn't strange enough, we can actually see the misplaced passion on his well-rounded face. Still, if you can't have faith in yourself, who will? 

Cypress Hill makes us get all inappropriately gangster (what, we told you we started the day with a nice cup of tea) before over at the Radio 1/NME tent, Bloc Party's Kele Okereke is launching is solo career in style. Well, thousands of people desperate to see how you cope without your band is sort of stylish. Though he fails to draw in the big tunes as he did with BP. Maybe it's going to be a 'grower' but at the moment, Kele is sounding a bit too clinical to get us dancing our way through a Saturday hangover.  

Inside the sweaty Festival Republic tent are The Like, a quartet of beautiful Los Angeles' based ladies who play pop-rock whilst donning 1960's get up. Yes, it's as cool as it sounds, but for some reason today, the girls don't seem to be up for crowd interaction and it results in a somewhat lacklustre gig. Don't worry, we still love you, you chic hispters (and not just because we want to borrow all of your clothes, honest). 

Back at the Radio 1 stage, Band Of Horses are playing so wonderfully that we're enduring a slight Kleenex situation. From the moment the bearded rockers play 'Funeral', we're almost a pile a tears of the grassy floor, Alex Mac style. 'Is There A Ghost' and 'Great Salt Lake' only confirm what we suspected: it is mildly awkward to well up next to a total stranger who simply wants to borrow a lighter. Damn!  

Weezer. Oh Weezer. Just the very sight of you is making us feel like a teenager bunking off school to make mix tapes. With a  hilarious mash up of Lady Gaga's 'Poker Face' (complete with wig) and MGMT's 'Kids', Weezer provide some very welcome festival humour during an already-brilliant gig. Fast becoming a weekend highlight, the LA band reel off hit after hit including 'Buddy Holly', 'Undone – The Sweater Song', 'Beverly Hills' and 'Hash Pipe'. And, for the sake of humility, they cover Wheetus' 'Teenage Dirtbag' because UK journalists often think it's originally a Weezer song! Hugging crowd surfers and climbing onto every fence in sight, chief song-writer Rivers Cuomo is a genuine delight to watch. We bet he'd be awesome on karaoke.    

Following Weezer, teen heroes Paramore face the music. Although their audience is the youngest we've seen so far, there's a strange Mexican body wave surfacing through the middle of the crowd, making for some impressively rowdy action! 'Brick By Boring Brick', 'Ignorance' and 'Misery Business' have the entire crowd singing word for word. Perhaps it's moments like these that make festivals that little bit more special than your average gig. Magnified by the fact that this is the very festival and stage every band wants to conquer. 

Blink 182 are with us before we know it. Lighting up the black sky with rude jokes and constant laughter, the thirty-something trio immediately let it be known that they may have had a hiatus, but they certainly have not grown up! The amazing talent that is Travis Barker just got that bit more ridiculous by playing his huge drum set upside-down. Yeah... you read that correctly. The man is a machine! It must be pretty awesome to have started  a band in your bedroom 16 years ago with your best friends, called it quits and then reunite for one of the biggest comebacks you can imagine, feeling nothing but appreciation or the loyal fans. 

'All The Small Things', 'Miss You', 'What's My Age Again' – which Mark Hoppus joking dedicates to himself “Because I'm old!”, are every bit as youth-reviving as we imagined they could be.  Day two is done and dusted, and we're leaving with some serious pop-punk butterflies!