Favourite Festival Headliners of 2011

The Great British Summer. Rain rain and more rain to be honest. At least we have our festivals though. Glastonbury; Reading & Leeds; V Festival. Each and every year they showcase the some of the biggest and best bands in the world and in 2011, this was no exception. Beyonce headlining Glastonbury would have been a ridiculous idea 5 years ago but she managed to prove people wrong. Muse celebrated the tenth anniversary of their second album 'Origin Of Symmetry' by playing the album in its entirety. Pulp reformed to give a stellar headline slot at Reading & Leeds. Unfortunately U2's headline performance at Glastonbury was a complete let down for most people as it wad hyped up to be such better.

So my favourite 3 festival headliners of 2011 were:

3. My Chemical Romance - Reading Festival
Although I won't say that I'm a fan of MCR, I cannot deny that they absolutely smashed it at Reading.
Opener 'Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)' proved to be the best start to any headline performance this year. Each song was met with a joyous uproar by fans. The icing on the cake was Brian May joining the band onstage for a rendition of 'We Will Rock You' and a My Chemical Romance classic 'Welcome To The Black Parade'.

2. Coldplay - Glastonbury
Glastonbury weekend. U2 headlined on the Friday. Beyonce headlined on the Sunday. This brought much attention away from Coldplay's Saturday headline slot. However after U2's performance turned out to be such a disappointment, the burden of a great headline performance by a guitar band was put on Coldplay's shoulders. On the night they certainly delivered the goods. They had fireworks; fresh new songs and massive hits. However it was the older songs that really shone. Even though they performed the huge stadium anthems such as 'Viva La Vida' and 'Fix You' well, you've heard them lots before.Older,  more intimate songs like 'Shiver'; 'Everything's Not Lost' and 'Life Is For Living' were the real highlights for me. Even Noel Gallagher thought it was 'spectacular'. A fantastic headline performance.

1. Arctic Monkeys - T in The Park
 If walking on stage to 'Sexy Thing' by Hot Chocolate and then belting out a non sensical album track while you are headlining T in The Park isn't a sign of being confident, then I don't know what is. Having released their fourth album 'Suck It And See' a month earlier, the Monkeys played a whole batch of new material as well as old favourites such as 'Brianstorm'; 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' and 'When The Sun Goes Down'. It was a brilliant performance from start to finish. They even came back on for an encore playing new single 'Suck It And See' and fan favourite 'Mardy Bum'. They were then joined onstage by Miles Kane who played guitar on the superb, and probably my favourite song of all time, '505'. This showed a half a decade's worth of just simply great tunes from a band with a lot more still to give.

So they were my favourite festival headliner of 2011.
Who was yours?
Let me know by leaving a comment or tweeting me @MWB709