Â鶹ԼÅÄ

What's it like to play a festival and have thousands of people scream your band's name? Headliners Arctic Monkeys and Radiohead look forward to this weekend’s Reading and Leeds festivals, alongside the likes of The Prodigy, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and The Gossip.

Liam Howlett: We can’t wait; we’ll come up with something.

Keith Flint: It’s not like we go along with a master plan as such, it has to happen a bit more natural than that for us.

Everything has to be in place, the sound and the actual set and then we just walk out there naturally. We need the platform to go out there and rip it up.

It’s about giving 110% and not letting anyone down, not being complacent and being determined to go and rip it up.

I’ve got to see Arctic Monkeys they’re phenomenal.

Liam: We hung out with them in Australia at the Big Day Out festival. They were on the other stage and we watched them most nights.

Keith: They’re one of only a few bands we can go and watch that hold our attention for as long as they do. They’re real and something to be seen.

Matt Helders: It'll be good to watch them [The Prodigy] before us and pretty scary because they're obviously going to be a bit louder than us.

But I don't think people will be going for the decibels. I think it works out quite well. We watched them a few times in Australia [at January's Big Day Out festival]. We had a great time, they're very nice people.

Alex Turner: "I shared a wonderful plane journey with Keith [Flint] - he's a lovely chap.

Ed O’Brien: We haven’t played there since 1994, Reading’s just down the road from Oxford – it’ll be nice to do that one and it’ll be dark at that sort of time. It’s cool. Although it is Reading - it's rival territory.

Caroline McKay: We’ve been there last year as well, it's going to be great fun.

Paul Donoghue: Yeah, last year was kind of the first festival we’d done that we were really happy with and that the reception we got was amazing. It really blew us away, we’re really looking forward to that this year.

Beth Ditto: The north [Leeds] is my jam, it's like the southern United States up there.

Brace Paine: I always like playing Reading because it reminds me of The Year Punk Broke [1991 music documentary]. It seemed so cool.

The Ramones, Babes In Toyland, Hole… Reading has a magical place in my head because of that. Reading is exciting because of that connection.

Karen O: Memories? A lot of hi-jinx. I don’t know how free I am to speak about it. The first time we played there was so much pressure - the hype around us at that point was at its peak.

For me it was a highly self-destructive performance that year. Leeds was better but Reading was the first one where I blew a fuse in my head.

Brian Chase: The one in 2006 was awesome you [Karen] jumped into the pit, there were the bodyguards in these yellow shirts and just this sea of tens of thousands of people.

Nick Zinner: You [Brian] played the last Reading Festival with one arm.

Brian Chase: I had an arm injury earlier in that tour so the only way I could go on was by playing our set one handed.

Karen O: It’s impossible to predict, so we won’t really know.