First pop music festival

The first National Jazz (& Blues) Festival was staged at Richmond Athletic Association Grounds in Surrey, UK, on 26-27 August 1961. Although the first festivals featured renowned jazz stars like Chris Barber, Ken Colyer, Mike Cotton, Johnny Dankworth and Terry Lightfoot, rock bands such as The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Small Faces, Cream and Deep Purple were appearing on the bill by the mid-late 1960s. The event later became known as the Reading Festival after moving to its permanent home in 1971 and continues to this day alongside its sister festival in Leeds, attracting almost 90,000 revellers annually. The National Jazz & Blues Festival/Reading Festival has been staged every year since 1961, although in 1984 and 1985 the local council reclaimed the festival site in Reading for development and the event had to be cancelled when an alternative venue could not be found.

Over the years, the National Jazz & Blues Festival/Reading Festival has welcomed headline acts such as The Rolling Stones (1963 & 1964), T Rex (1968), Pink Floyd (1969), The Jam (1978), Black Sabbath (1983), Nirvana (1992), The Stone Roses (1996) and Guns N’ Roses (2010).

The first events were billed as the National Jazz Festival. In 1964, it became the National Jazz & Blues Festival before being renamed the National Jazz, Blues & Rock Festival when it moved to Reading in 1971, Reading Rock (in 1976) and finally the Reading Festival.

The one-off Spalding Rock Festival, aka Barbeque '67 (see sources), has been labelled the world's first rock festival, but due to the fact that the National Jazz & Blues Festival featured rock bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who before 1967 it is this festival that should be rightly be regarded as the first festival to feature popular music acts on the bill.