What’s The Best Festival Performance You’ve Ever Seen?

With our special festival preview out this week, that has the lovely Friendly Fires boys on the cover, we’ve been talking a lot about the greatest ever festival performances in the office.

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Whether you were lucky enough to watch Nirvana at Reading back in 1992, when Kurt gave a mind-blowing performance of the likes of ‘Dumb’ and ‘All Apologies’, or maybe you got to see the Flaming Lips bring their furry animals and paper mache costumes with them to Glastonbury in 2003 – they’ve both made it into our list.

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Looking a bit further back, what about Bob Dylan at Newport Folk Festival in 1965? He upset fans by bringing his first plugged-in performance to the bash after two years of lo-fi, intimate sets, but most of us can only dream of witnessing any of those appearances at the legendary festival. Take a look at our 50 greatest festival performances ever gallery and see who we rated as the best in history.

Bob Dylan

One of my personal favourites was Jeffrey Lewis at Standon Calling last year, when one hundred lucky fans packed themselves into a yurt to witness the New Yorker play a suitably quirky set of material from his huge back catalogue and even a rap about mosquitoes. I didn’t stop smiling the whole way through. And I’ll never forget getting to watch The White Stripes at Reading in 2004, my first ever festival at the age of 16, where I vowed to pretty much live in a field and watch bands while wearing wellies for the rest of my life.

We kicked off 2011’s UK festival marathon with Camden Crawl last weekend, which already had some contenders for best show of the year including the ever entertaining Dananananaykroyd at the Jazz Cafe. You can read our blog and let us know what you thought of the weekend here.

So what is your favourite ever festival performance? Let us know by commenting below.

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