We’re back home after three days in a field by the Thames, clothes have been washed and hangovers nursed, so it must be time to discuss who rocked Uncut’s world at the Carling Weekend: Reading Festival and who rocked the boat of musical excellence… Best Band: Arcade Fire They might have played many a festival this summer, including the Uncut-sponsored paradise of Latitude, but the Fire still have it in them to surprise, pouring out a river of aural genius on Saturday night. Songs like ‘No Cars Go’ and ‘Black Mirror’ sounded even more apocalyptic than usual, with arty feedback trails marking the string-soaked soundscape. An honorary mention must go to The Hold Steady who, due to Klaxons’ magnetic pull, bravely battled through their set in front of a tiny crowd on Sunday night. Best Show: Smashing Pumpkins It’s good to have them back. On the basis of their performance at Reading, it’s safe to say Billy’s come back with the most fire in his belly since, ooh, at least 1995. Festival sets have got to be snappy and packed with the songs the festival-goers know, and so the Pumpkins decked out their performance with a treasure chest of hits alongside tracks from ‘Zeitgeist’. The white suits, unbelievable UFO lightshow and full moon hanging above the site all added up to a transcendent hour and a half. Best Song: Kings Of Leon - 'Charmer' It was a close call to pick and choose – Kings Of Leon’s set on Friday was laced with some of the greatest rock songs of recent years. Their Pixies rip off ‘Charmer’ wins the day purely through the fervour of its delivery, Caleb screaming like Black Francis with his finger in the car door, while the drums do ‘that Bone Machine thang’ so well. Best Dressed: Klaxons We like to pretend it’s all about the music, but a show isn’t the same if a band just comes on in their day clothes – Led Zeppelin wouldn’t have seemed half as mystical without Page’s dark magick suits and Plant’s ‘golden god’ mane, while Roxy Music’s retro-futurist garb undoubtedly elevated them to greatness. Gradually dropping their neon-clad outfits over the last year, new ravers Klaxons emerged to a more-than-rammed NME/Radio 1 tent on Sunday night sporting a selection of black and silver attire and accoutrements. Very classy, very space-rock, don’t cha know. Worst Band: Fall Out Boy As if having to suffer their god-awful emo-pop wouldn’t have been bad enough, Pete Wentz and co. dropped in a bunch of horrendous covers to their Reading set, suggesting a career as a sub-standard function band awaits. Fancy hearing R Kelly’s ‘Ignition (Remix)’ anyone? What about Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’? Huey Lewis And The News’ ‘The Power Of Love’? No, thought not. What do you think of Uncut’s picks of the festival? If you think we’ve missed the best band of the weekend or failed to catch the greatest song, leave a comment and let us know. Words: Tom Pinnock Arcade Fire pic credit: Andy Willsher KOL pic credit: Jo McCaughey Fall Out Boy pic credit: Andrew Kendall

I mentioned in yesterday's blog about how much of a fan I am of Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow's vampire noir that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. To be honest, it's been flapping round by brain all day like a rabid bat, so I thought why not write about it... In 1987, the vampire film most people I knew were into was The Lost Boys. My female friends fancied Keifer Sutherland and a lot of my male friends thought he was kinda cool. I liked the fact Echo & The Bunnymen had covered The Doors' "People Are Strange" on the closing credits. Around that time, I remember being round at a friend's. We were of an age when, if someone's parents were away, everyone congregated round their house, usually to have a party, get up to all sorts of mischief. We used to watch a lot of videos, too, our teenage cineastic tastes mostly, and predictably, informed by sex (Risky Business was a favourite here -- everyone I knew fancied Rebecca DeMornay) and horror. I remember walking into my friend Mark's front room at the precise moment when, on the TV, a station wagon, engulfed in flames, ground to a halt on some desolate highway and, inside, two charred and blackened figures smiled unrepentantly at each other through the smoke and flames, held hands, and muttered in agreement "Good times... Good times..." before the film cut to an external shot of the car exploding. This was my introduction to Near Dark, a film I've watched and rewatched dozens of times since. I guess what first drew me to Near Dark was that it seemed miles away from the MTV popcorn of Lost Boys. The film took place predominantly at night, long shrouds in the shadows, everything enveloped in sulphurous, nocturnal yellows and washed-out blues, characters' faces the colour of ashes. The vampires -- Jesse Hooker (Lance Henriksen, emaciated and hellbound), Severin (Bill Paxton), Salmonback (Jenette Goldstein), Homer (Joshua Miller) and Mae (Jenny Wright) -- are by and large a surly bunch, particularly Jesse, who had little by way of character traits beyond a short temper and mean disposition. They were in stark contrast to the rather effete crew in The Lost Boys, who looked like they spent more time fixing their hair (an appalling selection of mullets and shaggy perms, as I recall) than drinking the blood of innocents. Jesse's lot just looked mean as nails. They weren't charming, cultured sensualists like Anne Rice's characters, and bore no relation to The Lost Boys' feral gang of too-cool-to-die punkers. They were drifters, travelling in a Winnebago with blacked out windows, scraping by on a fairly one-note existence, scavenging and killing. I was struck, too, by the way the film was driven by atmosphere, shot in a way that was incredibly stylish, but didn't susbcribe to the kind of notions of cinematic style operating circa 1987. The prevailing tone was choleric, Tangerine Dream's score motorik, impassive, no hit singles to be found here. There were some fantastic scenes, though, that felt like Bigelow was making art. In one, the vampires are holed up in a motel room, the law surrounding the place. A ferocious firefight begins, bullet holes piercing the room's walls letting shafts of light penetrate the gloom, gun smoke rising and twisting in the air. It looked quite beautiful through the bullets and chaos. It was also very violent, but not needlessly gratuitous. There's one scene that demonstrates just how unremittingly baaaad these vampires are, in which they descend on a bar and, while The Cramps' version of "Fever" plays on the jukebox, systematically and brutally wipe out the clientele. Severin, here, has a wonderfully black way with one-liners: "Finger lickin' good," he bellows as he licks thick, arterial blood from his hands. In fact, Paxton, along with Henriksen and Goldstein had appeared, a year previously, playing marines in Aliens, directed by Bigelow's then-husband James Cameron. It's hard to work out who influenced who -- there's so many parallels between the two drectors, some shared aesthetic. At their best, they're both excellent genre directors, and they even appear (coinsciously or not) to replicate scenes from each other's films. It would, you imagine, be harder for Bigelow to succeed in a male-dominated industry (I can only think of John Carpenter's collaborator, Debra Hill, as another woman working in films at such a prominent level during that time). It makes Bigelow's achievements in Near Dark (and, later, with Blue Steel, Point Break and Strange Days) all the more impressive. There's been talk for a while about a sequel, original co-screenwriter Erik Red saying earlier this year: "If [Near Dark] was Bonnie & Clyde and Jesse James, the sequel is The Hatfields and The McCoys. It has a shocking opening and action sequences you won’t believe, including a spectacular showdown finale on a freight train at dawn." I'm not inclined to leap up and down with joy at the thought of this. Near Dark is a cult classic in its own right, and I think its legacy is best preserved without the need for a sequel. And not bad for a film where the "v" word isn't mentioned once... There's a Special Edition DVD available from Anchor Bay you can get here.

There’s nine-minute songs, endless guitar solos, an awe-inspiring light show... Smashing Pumpkins' headline appearance at Reading Festival was pure prog - but was it bad cabaret or awesome future-rock spectacle? Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin and the session musicians come on just after 10pm. First thoughts: thank God the guitarist isn’t wearing his Dracula collar and cape. Second thoughts: this is some hard rock groove they’re pumping out. Opening song ‘United States’, the nine-minute opus on their comeback album ‘Zeitgeist’, is all stoner rock low slung guitars and a blindingly brilliant light show. Throughout the whole of their set one of the best things about the performance is the lights. It’s as if the band are playing in an arcade machine designed by Philip K Dick, all flashing lights, metallic gantries and giant spotlights pointed at the audience and surging up far into the sky. By the time the third track, the legendary ‘Today’, bursts out the crowd are going insane. While it’s admirable the band returned with a new album rather than merely retreading past glories, the songs we all want to hear are the classics, and we get quite a few – a frenetic ‘Zero’, a slow-burning ‘Bullet With Butterfly Wings’ and a sublime acoustic version of ‘1979’. The band are tight but thankfully not too slick, and Corgan’s guitar work is lightning quick and virtuoso without being showy or at all ‘classic rock’. There are a good too many extended jams, though, including one particularly, ahem, ‘original’ section where the band backs down leaving Billy to perform ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ solo. By the time they close with the thundering euphoria of ‘Cherub Rock’, all indiscretions have been forgotten. Whether you see Smashing Pumpkins in 2007 as their own tribute band or as a welcome addition to their legacy, it’s pretty much difficult not to be impressed by the power and sheer rock ferocity of their set, endless guitar solos and all. Were you there? Let us know what you thought. Words: Tom Pinnock

While my compatriots are at Reading Festival, I've been spending a quiet weekend either enjoying the sun on London Fields or watching the typically variable output terrestrial TV has to offer. It's a dirty job, and all that. Last night began in fairly demonic style. Channel 4 screened Little Nicky, Adam Sandler's comedy in which he plays the Devil's dorky son, out to save his father (Harvey Keitel) from disintegrating once his two other offspring -- including Rhys Ifans -- head off to conquer Earth. Keitel is quite the comic actor, not a patch on his other Scorsese alumni, De Niro, so good in Midnight Run and Meet The Fockers, for pacing, but his Satan has a rather warm, laid back way of eliciting laughs. Sandler, who I admit to finding a fairly uneven comedy performer, finds a good schtick here, as the nerdy little demon finding his heart of gold. I guess it's decent and undemanding Bank Holiday fare. Far better, over on BBC 2, was Witchfinder General, Michael Reeves' last film as director, and something of a cult classic, up there with the Wicker Man as a genuinely original British horror film. Vincent Price plays Matthew Hopkin, the 17th century lawyer turned witch hunter, prowling post-Civil War England in search of flesh to burn. It's pretty much Price's best performance -- a rich, psychological study in evil -- and when pushed to name a great, contemporary B movie horror actor my thoughts turn to Lance Henriksen. I got talking with a friend about Near Dark last weekend at the Edinburgh Film Festival, which I think is Henriksen -- and director Kathryn Bigelow's -- greatest film. It's a fantastic, contemporary vampire-noir, with a young Mid-Western farm boy (Adrian Pasdar, currently in Heroes) drawn into the orbit of a bunch of murderous drifters headed up by Henrisken's sinister Jesse. In one great exchange, Pasdar's Caleb asks Jesse how old he is, and his reply: "Let's put it this way: I fought for the South. We lost." I'll save the rest of my thoughts on Near Dark for a seperate blog, because, frankly, the more I think about it, the more it deserves one. In fact, I'm already mulling over a Lost Boys vs Near Dark face-off sometime soon... Anyway. I also caught some of John Carpenter's excellent Assault On Precinct 13 last night. Carpenter's direction still feels incredibly lean and gripping, as he works his way inventively round budgetary restrictions to create a powerful thriller, with the near-derelict station house on Precinct 9, Division 13, beset by armed teenage gangs. I'm struggling to find an appropriate comparison to draw with David Cameron's crass and lurid vision of "anarchy in the UK" following Rhys Jones' death -- Nogzy and Crocky, perhaps, as vicious and amoral as the "feral" gangs who roam Carpenter's movie. Today, BBC2 showed William Cameron Menzies' Things To Come, based on H G Wells' novel, a superior sci-fi from 1936. There was also the light, modernism reinterpretation of Wilde's Importance Of Being Ernest, with a rollicking performance from Rupert Everett as Algy, and Judi Dench immaculately imperious as Lady Bracknell. Worst, by a long mile, was the ill-conceived remake of The Mean Machine, with Vinnie Jones in the Burt Reynolds role as a disagraced footballer locked up in prison and forming a team of cons to take on the screws in a match. It's crass, charmless and not a patch on the Porridge movie which I really wish the BBC would wheel out at times like this. Surely, that's the best TV sitcom-to-screen transfer of all time..? In fact, though it's only six years old, Mean Machine feels like it's been beamed down from another time, so dated is its lumped Brit-hop/amyl house soundtrack and cast of Guy Ritchie mockney B-listers. Is that a young Danny Dyer I see there? Christ, how come his career's lasted so long..? Tomorrow, at least, promises Anchor Man -- surely the finest mainstream American comedy of the last five years -- and staples such as Ben-Hur and the magnificent Planet Of The Apes, along side Chinatown and Raising Arizona. Well, if the weather doesn't hold, at least I know there's something good on the telly.