Reading and Leeds Line-Up 2021–2025: Who Played

By Alexandra P. · Published 2026-09-20 · 7 min read

Founder of Gigvault — the concert tracker for live music fans.

Reading and Leeds are one festival with two postcodes. The same bill plays Richfield Avenue and Bramham Park on the same August bank holiday weekend, and the acts simply swap days between the sites. You know who closed the Main Stage, but the fifteen sets you actually stood through on Saturday afternoon blur together within a year. This post lays out the record we hold for 2021 to 2025, year by year, so you can find the names again and tick off the ones you saw.

Every figure below was counted on 20 September 2026 from the edition pages on Gigvault. They are names on record, not a claim to completeness: a festival with a dozen stages always has more acts than any list catches, and our Leeds record in particular still lags behind Reading for some years. More on that further down.

Reading and Leeds line-up 2021–2025 at a glance

Across those five years the Reading record holds 688 different names. Add the earlier editions and the current one and the Reading Festival page lists 1,897 acts over 17 editions; Leeds stands at 911 over 12. The 2026 edition, which ran from 27 to 30 August with Charli XCX, Dave, Raye, Chase & Status, Florence and the Machine and Fontaines DC at the top of the bill, is on the festival pages with 154 names and is not repeated here.

2021: the comeback year

After the cancelled 2020 edition, 2021 was the first big UK festival weekend back, and the bill reflected the pent-up demand: six headliners across the two main stages, with Biffy Clyro stepping in for Queens of the Stone Age. Our record has 175 names for it, from Stormzy and Post Malone down to the smallest tents.

2022: the year Rage Against the Machine did not play

Rage Against the Machine were announced as headliners and pulled out; The 1975 took the slot. Our 2022 record lists The 1975, Arctic Monkeys, Dave, Bring Me The Horizon, Megan Thee Stallion and Halsey and runs to 188 names — the longest list of the five years, helped by a full import of the undercard in September 2026. Wolf Alice, Fontaines DC, Bastille, All Time Low and 100 gecs are all in there.

2023: The 1975 again, this time for Lewis Capaldi

Lewis Capaldi withdrew from his headline slot a few weeks before the festival and The 1975 covered it, which makes them the only act to headline two consecutive years in this stretch of the record. Billie Eilish, The Killers, Sam Fender, Foals and Imagine Dragons complete the top line. We hold 139 names for 2023, including Central Cee, Loyle Carner, Steve Lacy, Wet Leg and Declan McKenna.

2024: Liam Gallagher, Blink-182 and Lana Del Rey

2024 brought Liam Gallagher back to the top of the bill for the second time since 2021 (he had also been booked for the cancelled 2020 edition), alongside Blink-182, Lana Del Rey, Fred Again.., Catfish and the Bottlemen and Gerry Cinnamon. 148 names are on record, among them Raye, Spiritbox, 21 Savage and Fontaines DC, back after 2022.

2025: four headliners instead of six

2025 moved to four headliners — Chappell Roan, Travis Scott, Bring Me The Horizon and Hozier — and the record for it is 158 names at Reading and 148 at Leeds. Bloc Party, Enter Shikari, Limp Bizkit, Becky Hill, Conan Gray, AJ Tracey, D-Block Europe and Amyl and the Sniffers are all listed. If this is the most recent edition you went to, open the 2025 page and the names you saw will jump out at you.

The acts that kept coming back

Because the two sites share a bill, an act that plays Reading and Leeds once has already played two festivals. Some did it far more often. In the 2021 to 2025 record, 111 names appear in at least two of the five years. The busiest:

• Bakar — 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025, four of the five years
• Ashnikko — 2021, 2022 and 2024, and on the cancelled 2020 bill
• Beabadoobee — 2021, 2022 and 2024, and also on the 2020 bill
• Sea Girls — 2021, 2023 and 2025
• Becky Hill — 2021, 2023 and 2025
• DJ Target, Noisy and Jaguar — three years each

These are the acts most likely to be sitting unrecorded in your history: you saw Bakar once, you are fairly sure, but which year? The edition pages settle it, one year at a time.

The cancelled 2020 edition

The 2020 festival was cancelled because of the pandemic, but the announced bill — Liam Gallagher, Rage Against the Machine and Stormzy at the top — is kept on record with 91 names. Nobody saw those sets. The edition is there so the announced line-up is not lost, not so you can tick it off; if you had a ticket, the honest entry is nothing at all.

The archive: 1996 to 2005

Gigvault also carries ten earlier Reading editions, from 1996 to 2005, with 1,343 names between them. A few anchors for anyone who was in the field back then:

• 1996 — The Stone Roses, The Prodigy and Black Grape headlined; our list has 133 names, including Garbage, Sonic Youth, Placebo and Super Furry Animals.
• 1998 — Beastie Boys, Garbage and Page & Plant headlined; 153 names on record, with Foo Fighters and Ash among them.
• 2000 — Oasis, Pulp and Stereophonics headlined; 84 names, including Eminem, Blink-182 and Muse.
• 2001 — Travis, Manic Street Preachers and Eminem headlined; 173 names, with Green Day, The Strokes, System of a Down and Marilyn Manson.
• 2003 — Linkin Park, Blur and Metallica headlined; 177 names, including The Darkness, Franz Ferdinand and The White Stripes.
• 2004 — The Darkness, The White Stripes and Green Day headlined; at 238 names this is the longest single-year list in our whole Reading archive.
• 2005 — Pixies, Foo Fighters and Iron Maiden headlined; the record for this year is thin at 42 names, so expect gaps.

Leeds began as the twin site in 1999 at Temple Newsam and moved to Bramham Park in 2002. Our early Leeds record is patchy — 125 names for 1999, then only 11 and 14 for 2001 and 2002 — which brings us to the caveat.

Why the Leeds numbers are lower

Look at the table again: 2022 shows 188 names for Reading and 108 for Leeds; 2024 shows 148 against 110. That is not because Leeds had a smaller bill. The two festivals share one line-up, and for every year in the table, every Leeds name in our record also appears in the Reading record for the same year. The difference is that the Reading editions for 2022, 2024 and 2026 were topped up from a fuller source in September 2026 and the Leeds editions were not yet. Until that catches up, if you were at Leeds and cannot find an act on the Leeds page, check the same year at Reading — the act almost certainly played both.

A smaller wrinkle: lists are kept as names, and the same band occasionally appears under two spellings (Fontaines DC and Fontaines D.C., for instance). We are cleaning those up, but a count of 154 may be a count of 152 real acts. Treat every figure here as “on record”.

Turning a weekend into a record

On Gigvault a festival is not one entry; every act you saw is its own concert, with the right date, the right site and the right edition attached. Open the edition page for the year you attended, tick the acts, and they land in your history alongside your club shows and arena nights. Five years of Reading at ten sets a year is fifty concerts — probably a bigger share of your live history than you have been giving it credit for.

The festival tracker works the same way for every festival in the database, and if Reading was only one of your August weekends, Download and the other UK festivals linked from Gigs in the UK & Ireland are waiting too.

Sources

• Headliners by year, the 2022 and 2023 replacements, the 2020 cancellation, the Leeds sites and the 2026 dates: Wikipedia, “Reading and Leeds Festivals”, checked 20 September 2026.
• Venue and the 2027 dates (26–29 August 2027, Richfield Avenue): readingfestival.com, checked 20 September 2026.
• All act counts and the returning-act list: Gigvault edition pages for Reading Festival 1996–2026 and Leeds Festival 1999–2026, counted 20 September 2026.

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