The Joy Formidable: Reading Festival 2012

Sketchy details. But in amongst them, some semblance of truth, and the tatters of a few things worth recording for posterity.

Somehow I found myself on a train to Reading Festival early on a Sunday morning. I'm so exhausted, post-Green Man, post-late nights DJing music no one wants to dance to or radio-ing music people don't want to turn off Match of the Day to listen to, that I am hallucinating. Something is flashing in the far corner of my right eye. I think it's a mouse with a sabre.

Another part of my brain thinks it's a disco ball. The discourse between the two different parties of my brain is very rowdy. It's interrupted only when the patterns on the train seat in front of me start changing intermittently - as if they can't tune into the right station. This is Not Good.

It's like Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, without the desert heat or the drugs. Well there will be drugs, but they won't be mine. I don't want or need them.

Less Gonzo Journalism - more Bonzo Gibberism.

This 2nd Class escalator of terrible coffee, gurning jellybean kids and studenty-types with hair so great I hate them, unequivocally, eventually dumps me at a station. All of humanity have arrived here at the same time. I'm powered through the throng by a panic attack that'd flatten an elephant - and a friendly policeman who points me towards the nearest Boots.

A dose of Valerian later, a couple of Berocca and some of that pink stuff that tastes of Germolene for my stomach, and I feel much better in a worse kind of way. What the flipping heck am I doing here? What? Why? Help!

I am here because my favourite band are playing. I hope that everyone involved is OK with me calling them "my favourite band". I don't want this ebola-like accolade to kill them off. I do have a couple of other favourite bands. But The Joy Formidable are my favourite, favourite band. It's best to be clear about this from the off.

They're my favourite because they are big and small at the same time. They have tunes you could prop the universe on, but an emotional integrity you'd trust with your quietest whispers. They lift the soul like a Wonder Bra - and my soul is a FF cup, knackers my back and trips me up at the most inopportune moments.

They make clever, sinuous music that doesn't sound like it was made in a gym by students of obscure scales and scrotal time signatures. Things slip in and out of a Joy Formidable song like the kind of parties I imagine beautiful people have in dark and exclusive nightclubs. These are all similes I will be ashamed of in the morning.

OK, objectively-ish and in clear-ish language... they make a wonderful, exciting noise that reminds me of home and love and adventure.

The fact that we share a hometown is about 5% of it. To be honest, that fact rarely computes. Great band from Mold, touring sold out houses in the States? Pull the other one!

One of my most favourite people on the planet advised me that I should write a little less emotionally. She's dead right. I just can't do it. It's all supernovae and black holes in here.

I walk to the festival site dodging lots of Green Day t-shirts and ridiculous dreadlocks. People smell of hot dogs and both kinds of grass. They're drinking cans of cheap lager and are having a good time. I like most of them but wouldn't want them to sit next to me on the train home.

The train home, incidentally, is at 9:15pm. Don't forget Walton. It's a bloody long walk.

I can't even remember the last time I came to Reading. Not much has changed. If you love music that idiots would want you to call 'alternative', you're either here or you have been here. It's a little too corporate punk for my Austen sensibilities. However I am excited to be here, to be seeing The Joy Formidable.

I breach the 83 layers of security into the site, having had my bag searched twice, and my packet of aspirin inspected very, very carefully. I have a pass. It has 'The Joy Formidable - Dressing Room' printed on it. A month later, it's stuck to my office door. The only pass on it. What a sap!

The Joy Formidable had no plans to play UK festivals this year, but - after a personal invitation from Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters are this year's Main Stage headliners) - they're here. So, in a way, Dave Grohl invited me to Reading. That's the illusion I'm clinging to.

I find the band outside a bus like a spaceship. It's brilliant to see them. They're the kind of people you'd volunteer your cloak over a muddy puddle for, because they would do the same for you. Unlike the majority of cocooned ego maniacs who travel the world in buses like spaceships, they are not twits. Please feel free to use your own vowel.

I go hang (is that right?) with Joy Formidable teamsters Canvasjack and Robin, bump into Jen Long, Laura Bryon and Beth Elfyn. Happy faces everywhere, and bright sunshine beating down. At a UK festival. I must still be hallucinating.

Cutting to the chase... The Joy Formidable take to the stage in a tent the size of their hometown, Mold. A crowd the size of Mold's population go giddy to the opening death sonar bleeps of The Greatest Light Is The Greatest Shade. Some div next to me hurls a pint of pee into the pit. Seconds later he gets hit on the back by what must have been a bucketful of the same. Not one drop falls to the floor. It absolutely soaks his t-shirt and his jeans. It's the finest piece of poetic justice I have ever witnessed.

The band crash wave after wave of incredible noise over a fervent audience. Most of the songs are familiar to me, but there are two whole new songs I have never heard before. 'Cholla' (the new single out on October 15th) has balls with bells on. It's a complex, unpredictable beast - especially on first listen. As I said earlier - big enough to awe you and to lose yourself in, with Ritzy's voice as a life-belt so that you don't drown in the gathering tumult.

Ace, you know. Truly.

'This Ladder Is Ours' builds on an irresistible riff that doesn't sound like it's written in the lexicon of rock music. It has more in common with the finest house music, maybe. An awful lot more distorted, exciting and human. The chorus is a pulley to the highest mountain top. Crowd-energising, but not crowd-pleasing. There's something bravely opaque and challenging about both songs. Not anthemic by numbers; anthemic by craft and guile.

'Whirring' is like that moment in the Fellowship of the Ring film when Sauron sticks the ring on for the first time and starts clobbering. Ten thousand people may be standing, but their souls have been laid flat. I don't know whether you can awe people full of over-priced lager and meat-ish burgers; who've slept in a field for three nights, sleep attacked on all sides. I was awed. Still am.

I miss my train. I drink the band's whiskey outside a dressing room like one of our prefab mobile science labs back at the Alun. We go to see Foo Fighters. We end up on the side of the stage. It's one of the moments of my life. I've had so many in the company of this band in the last couple of years.

My love for them is only a tiny little bit me getting swept up in the excitement of it all. At the core of this is a love (mine) for their incredible music and - in tandem, but not influencing the main consideration - them as people. Everything else is icing; there is little, or no, blue waffle.

At the end of the night, Ritzy, Rhydian and I cross the deserted field where dismantling the festival has already begun. It's a little like the moon if thousands of kids on their school lunchbreak had visited instead of astronauts. They're happy with their day's work, but mostly it's about looking forward. The excitement they have for their new album, 'Wolf's Law', trots next to us in the shadows.

They depart for the tour bus, I disappear to a Silent Disco and a dawn that thrums all the way through to finest reverberations of The Joy Formidable.