Metallica - Reading festival

Yes, Kirk Hammett's solos can be a little irritating and whiny; yes, Lars Ulrich makes you want to clobber him to death with his own drumsticks; yes, Rob Trujillo doesn't quite 'fit' yet and, yes, James Hetfield shouts “Oh yeah?” far too often – but it works perfectly every time.

Reading saw something like my fifth or sixth live Metallica performance, which meant that I could afford to stand somewhere in the middle of the crowd without the pressing need to get drenched in other peoples' sweat and carpeted in stray hairs at the front. Maybe I'm getting too old for that kind of thing unless it's really necessary.

Kicking off the two-hour set as nightfall descended on the final day of the festival, Metallica plunged straight into Creeping Death – a powerful crowd favourite, and gave it full gas from the word go with a giant TV screen as the stage backdrop.

As has come to be expected Hetfield et al showed that time is still not taking its toll despite almost three decades in the business and they gave the opening number their predictable all.

But the crowd just didn't seem to get it. There was no energy, no passion for the music, very little head-nodding and no... atmosphere. Absolutely none at all. It was weird.

In a desperate attempt to find some people who weren't hard of hearing, myself and my partner decided to make our way further forward, which ordinarily would have been a major undertaking incurring much aggro and several punches to the back of the head.

But this time there was nothing, and the few hundred people we brushed past simply stepped aside as we made our way forwards, eventually stopping within bottle-chucking distance of the stage, bang in the centre.

(This YouTube video was neither shot nor uploaded by your Worcester News and contains language that some people may find offensive)

A few moments later as the band finished its second number, For Whom the Bell Tolls, it became obvious that the atmosphere hadn't improved at all even though we were in a prime spot to be thrown around all over the place by the surging crowds, which were conspicuous by their absence. Looking around I could even see someone rolling a cigarette at waist level and someone shouting “where are you?” into his mobile phone while looking pointlessly around him.

Yet Metallica ploughed onwards and upwards, through Harvester of Sorrow and Welcome Home (Sanitarium), giving yet another prime – but unappreciated – example of how a festival should be played.

Now desperate to avoid our worst gig ever, we headed left a bit, right a bit and forwards a bit, each time coming across nothing but folded arms, tapping feet and disinterested chatter.

Until 25ft behind us we eventually found a raging circle pit – and everything changed. The missing atmosphere had found its way to a couple of tiny pockets in the crowd, where there was the intensity and urgency normally found across thousands and thousands of people at any other Metallica gig.

With such a force concentrated in so comparatively few people, the pit was a furious mass of flailing arms, stamping feet and felled headbangers as the good-natured fighting (an oxymoron if ever there was one) fed off its own energy.

As our pit opened and closed randomly and regularly throughout the gig, occasionally circling but mostly just a mass brawl, we fought relentlessly, dragged the toppled to their feet, pulled others into the melee and threw them back out again. Not everyone's idea of fun, admittedly, but a superb laugh nonetheless.

Meanwhile Metallica – now a secondary consideration to what had turned out to be one of our best ever gigs – played a set list of old favourites, mostly from the pre-Black album days, and probably because they realise the oldies are certainly the goodies and that their newer stuff is, you know, a bit rubbish.

(This YouTube video was neither shot nor uploaded by the Worcester News and contains language that some people may find offensive)

When it was all over and the final chords of Seek and Destroy faded along with the fireworks, the band did its traditional crowd-appreciation-wander-around-the-stage, lobbing drumsticks and picks for the fortunate few scavengers.

And that was the time we reflected on what had just happened, drenched in other peoples' sweat and carpeted in stray hairs.

Maybe Metallica are too predictable these days. Maybe they have headlined too many festivals. Maybe they have closed too many weekend events. Maybe, just maybe, they are now commonly known as 'Metallica, again'. And that's not a good thing.

But, on the other hand, it's just possible that there were too many Killers fans in the crowd and too many who had turned up to Reading just to see if Pete Docherty would make the same effort for the Babyshambles set.

I'd like to think that the crowd was too diverse to expect the same energy as I've found at the Download festival, for example. I'll let you know next time. It probably won't be long.