Pendulum performed their hit “Tarantula” for the last time at this year’s Reading & Leeds Festival.
The rave rock icons seemingly performed the song for the last time on the third and final day of the Reading festival as they took to the main stage this afternoon (Sunday 25 August).
After opening with new track “Napalm,” which they debuted earlier in the week alongside Joey Valance and Brae, the band played classics and fan favorites “Propane Nightmares,” “Come Alive,” “Nothing For Free,” and more before introducing the track as the penultimate song of the set.
“This is the last time we’re playing this song,” frontman Rob Swire told the crowd before launching into the hit. “We’ve played it for 16 years… it’s time to bury it.”
Elsewhere in the set, Swire and co. also expressed their support for Reneé Rapp, whose main stage performance had to be cut short due to a technical issue, before ending with a performance of her 2010 hit “Watercolour”.
The performance at this year’s Reading & Leeds takes place shortly after the band had a conversation with NME about their latest single and revealed that they were initially pressured by their label to make a song with a stronger focus on drum’n’bass.
“The label basically came to us and said, ‘Do more drum’n’bass.’ As you know, I have a weird relationship with that! We decided to make it as heavy as possible, rather than make something that would fit into DnB sets. We wanted to do it our own way,” said Swire.
Looking ahead, he added: “I want to go a lot harder. I know drum ‘n’ bass is coming back and everyone on our entire work team keeps saying ‘you guys need to get on board and start making DnB that fits Hedex’s set’, but that’s just the last thing I want to fucking do.
“I feel most comfortable when we’re in between worlds. As soon as it becomes metal or DnB, I get a weird feeling about it. The middle is the perfect zone for us. I want to go a lot harder if we can.”
R&L 2024 kicked off on Friday (23 August) and has so far seen headline sets from Blink-182, Lana Del Rey and Fred Again.., with Liam Gallagher set to close out the main stage in Reading tonight.
Meanwhile, in Leeds, Storm Lilian brought “extreme weather conditions” to the festival site, leading to the cancellation of several performances on the first day of the event. The festival’s health and safety team deemed the BBC Radio 1 and Aux stages too unsafe to use at all this weekend.
Check back at NME Find the latest news, reviews, interviews, photos and more from Reading and Leeds 2024.
