The tickets for the two huge music festivals in Europe, Reading and Leeds, have gone on sale from December 3rd.

The two music fests are taking place next year on the bank holiday weekend of August 26th-28th, 2011.

The Reading festival began in 1960 as a spin off from the National jazz and Blues Festival and is the world’s oldest popular music festival still in existence. The Rolling Stones and The Who were among the first of the bands to play on its stage. The event was enormous and continued more or less annually until 1976, when it all just seemed to fade out. It turned into an immensely popular event that hosted the wonders of New Order, Jesus Jones and The Sugarcubes whilst they were at the peak of their success. Grunge heroes Nirvana played the main stage in 1992- a concert that proved to be their last. Scandal has always been at the forefront of Reading festival, being host to shockers like the clash between The Prodigy and The Beastie Boys.

In 1999, Reading festival spawned a sister site in Leeds where the bands would play the same line in both locations on alternating days. With more than a little help from sponsor gargantuan Carling, the festival was turned into the ‘Carling Weekend’. The first year saw all bands play the Leeds site the following day to the day they played Reading, with the Reading leg running from Friday to Sunday and the Leeds leg running from Saturday to Monday. However in 2001 the current system where the line-up of Reading play Leeds the following day, with the bands from Leeds’ opening day playing the final day in Reading, was introduced.

Compare and buy tickets online from a wide range of concert tickets, theatre tickets and sports tickets offered By Big Ticket Shop.

This year’s line up is rumoured to include the whos of who of new age rock starting with the Muse, Kasabian, Foo Fighters, My Chemical Romance, The Strokes, Slipknot, Vampire Weekend, The Offspring, 30 Seconds to Mars, Incubus, Mumford and Sons, Florence and The Machine, Feeder, The White Stripes, Metallica, The Libertines, Guns N’ Roses, Blink-182 and New Order.