Travis Scott arrives onstage at Reading Festival, peering out from behind a pair of white wraparound shades, with his mystique in rude health. Earlier this weekend, the rapper’s headline set on the Leeds site controversially finished 30 minutes earlier than billed, with one fan speculating that he was licking his wounds after being struck by a rogue blast of pyro. One paper even claimed that disgruntled punters were demanding their money back from the stunted performance.
Why was the show cut short? You can discount the pyro theory immediately: this is a man who famously fell through the stage at a Drake show and got straight back up to mosh again. The 34-year-old has even outrun the controversy of his disastrous, tragic 2021 Astroworld Festival, where 10 people died due to a crowd crush (Scott later said he’d have stopped the show if he’d known about “the severity of the situation”). His ongoing Circus Maximus tour is an unstoppable juggernaut: last year it became the highest-grossing solo rap tour of all time, raking in $209.3million (£154million) from 1.7million tickets shifted across 76 dates.
Reading’s ingenious solution to the shortness of this festival-closing set is simply to move the start time back by 30 minutes, though the Houston rapper once again upends expectations by gracing the stage a little early. He arrives in a lavish burst of pyro and fireworks – the kind of budget-busting display that most headliners would save until the end of the show – and doesn’t allow the opulence, energy or mayhem to let up for the next hour. Beyond the odd expression of gratitude, the rapper doesn’t say much; he doesn’t need to.
As he paces along a silver bridge that connects mountainous boulders clustered across the stage, the jumbo-sized crowd becomes a seething mass of moshing bodies, camera phones flailing up and down and a huge pit opening up to the left of the stage. The drama reaches fever pitch when red lava sloshes around Scott on the video screens, fireworks explode into the sky and he rides the metallic beat of a whiplashing ‘Sicko Mode’.
Or is it when the crowd becomes a sea of middle fingers before breaking into even more of a frenzy as ‘FE!N’’s vicious hook crashes relentlessly in? Or when Scott thrashes down the walkway that leads into the middle of the audience, four vertical blasts of white smoke flaring around him while he waves his arms as if conducting the kids screaming their lungs out?
In the end, it’s almost impossible to choose a standout moment from this hour of inspired malevolence, an unhinged spectacle that feels genuinely transgressive for its scale, ambition and frisson of chaos. Scott’s is easily the wildest crowd of the weekend, the riptide only letting up for the beautiful ballad section of ‘MY EYES’ (one of his “favourite songs” from latest album ‘Utopia’) and the audio clip of Donda West, Kanye’s late mum, that precedes a blast of the disgraced rapper’s ‘Praise God’.
The inclusion of that last track is obviously bleak, but it’s steamrollered by the enormity of the sense of occasion. As fireworks pulse out from the stage, which Scott has now departed, the video screens fizz with blue static, like a thrilling, terrifying electrical storm that’s finally petering out. It’s hard to imagine anyone feeling short-changed by this apocalyptic show.
Travis Scott played:
‘CHAMPAIN & VACAY’
‘DUMBO’
‘BUTTERFLY EFFECT’
‘HIGHEST IN THE ROOM’
‘Mamacita’
‘STARGAZING’
‘BACKR00MS’
‘KICK OUT’
‘Type Shit’
‘Nightcrawler’
‘Upper Echelon’
‘THANK GOD’
‘Praise God’
‘MY EYES’
‘90210’
‘I KNOW?’
‘SHYNE’
‘TOPIA TWINS’
‘NO BYSTANDERS’
‘FE!N’
‘SICKO MODE’
‘Antidote’
‘goosebumps’
‘Oh My Dis Side’
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