The 1st festival, at a site in the grounds of Temple Newsam, including Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Blur was in 1999. The event is ‘twinned ‘ with the Reading Holiday so the same line-up popping up at both locales over 3 days. The Reading festival goes back to 1971 as a Nationwide Jazz and Blues Holiday . For 2011 Muse, My Chemical Romance and The Strokes have been confirmed as the headliners. A weekend ticket would have cost £80 for that 1st 1999 Leeds event. Sadly , the early years of the festival in Leeds were frequently as outstanding for argument as for the musical fireworks. As an example in 2001, with Eminem’s appearance taking almost all of the musical reports, police were pelted with stones and other missiles when violence exploded at the end of the festival. A group went on a rampage of what the police called “mindless violence and damage” in the campsite. More difficulty followed next year, Kate Skelton ( then a student in Leeds ) expounded “a unpleasant mixture of alcohol-fuelled mob mind-set and one or two gasper lighters led straight to the burning of toilet blocks and vandalism on an enormous scale.” So it was under a cloud that Leeds Festival moved to its current home, in Bramham Park, for the 2003 event. Acts appearing that year included Metallica, Linkin Park, and White Stripes.
Melvin Benn, MD of promoter Mean Fiddler, attempted to assure local residents over the switch. He claimed : “Moving to Bramham has given us a chance to have a new start and has given us a chance to try new stuff. “it was actually the correct time to move.” The new location of the festival was initially opposed by the Parish Council of close by Thorner.
But regardless of 1 or 2 teething issues and heavy-traffic volumes on the close by A1 and A64, the festival has looked to get a calmer home and the additional earnings generated by the event has been a perk for the Bramham estate. Talking in 2009 Nick Lane Fox, the estate’s owner ( who admitted he had never basically been to a festival before one moved to his home ) told Look North. “The estate was almost breaking even if the festival came along and gave us an extra earnings.
We could essentially then plan in a formal way.” the 1st improvement was to turn cultivatable land round the estate into grassland, buildings have been revived, culverts dug and an urn replacement project is pencilled in! BBC Leeds internet site has been at each Leeds Holiday and Layla Painter has been the site’s journalist for 6 of those years.
What have been her festival highlights? Layla announces : “In 2006, the 1st time Kaiser Chiefs titled the primary stage to roars of ‘Leeds, Leeds, Leeds ‘, it was the local kids made extremely good and the group loved it. “And also I can recollect watching the action on the 1st ever unsigned stage when the Raw Talent show was ready to highlight the great unsigned bands in Yorkshire. Wearing Wellies “And what would a festival be like without complains about the weather? One year it rained so heavily it looked everybody was wearing wellies and reveling in the mud.” Now decisively established in its place in the UK’s summer festival whirligig Leeds 2011 will anticipate inviting around seventy thousand revellers as common. Giving a bit of help to new bands on the unsigned stage, now part of BBC Introducing, is also an important piece of Leeds Holiday with its multi-stage music making.
