The Reading and Leeds festivals are part of the Carling Weekend, the only three-day dual site festival in the world.

With weekend attracting a notoriously boisterous crowd, Pollstar spoke to festival organiser Melvin Benn to find out if he had any plans to change security measures in the light of the Roskilde tragedy. Benn said he was happy with the arrangements in place.

“We have undertaken fresh risk assessment of crowd sways and crowd surfing,” he explained. “Plans that we had in place were as good as we could get without making the audience seated … or trying to prevent crowd sways or surfing altogether. We certainly had a good strong look at Reading, Leeds and Glasgow, and we have got extra security staff, but that’s more because of the nature of the acts. We would have hired these anyway.”

On the subject of crowd surfing, Benn said he wouldn’t follow the example of Mojo Concerts in the Netherlands, whose Lowlands Festival takes place over the same weekend and features many of the same bands.

“I don’t know of a busier pit than Reading,” admitted Benn, “and crowd surfing is living on the edge. But we have an operation that is judged to be safe. The bands do encourage it and you have to have professionally trained people to deal with it. But we have no intention of banning crowd surfing. It wouldn’t be an option. The tragedy has put us all on guard and under pressure.

“But by not doing things, it doesn’t mean we’re blasé. In the U.K., we have got a pretty good safety record worldwide. In the absence of clear directives from what happened at Roskilde, we wouldn’t want to change things just for the sake of it.”

More than 60 acts ranging from American noisemakers Royal Trux to Brit-rock darlings Stereophonics will perform during the festival.

The music starts Friday with a lineup including Asian Dub Foundation, Limp Bizkit, Primal Scream, and Oasis. Saturday’s bill features At The Drive-In, Deftones, Beck, Elastica, and Gomez, among others. The final day will see Blink-182, Placebo, Black-Eyed Peas, Slipknot, Rage Against The Machine, and many more.