One of the perks of playing a music festival -- if you're in a band, is getting the opportunity to see other groups, and occassionally rub shoulders with the rock elite. One of the dissapointments though can come from being booked to play at the same time as a main stage headliner, the very plight Pete Doherty's indie outfit Babyshambles were up against at England's Reading and Leeds festivals this past weekend.

"We were playing at the same time as Rage Against the Machine so we thought we were probably going to be playing to an empty tent," Babyshambles bassist Drew McConnell told Spinner. "It was completley packed."

In fact, the group's set, made up of material from their 2007 Astralwerks release 'Shotter's Nation,' helped bring in fans by the hundreds as they spilled outside the NME/ BBC Radio 1 second stage to catch the group. And while he was thrilled by the turnout, McConnell admitted he would have liked the opportunity to see his teen heroes.

"I was bummed that I wasn't going to get to see [Rage]. I grew up in Spain and I saw them a bunch of times in the '90s when I was a kid," he said. "They were a huge influence on me musically and politically. They made people question things and made people talk about how f---ed up America and Europe's foreign policy is. They're just a massively influential band on many different levels."

This wasn't the first weekend McConnell missed meeting his heroes, too.

"I walked past Tom Morello at a festival in Sweden but he was in the middle of a heated ping pong game. So I thought, 'I'll leave him to it,'" McConnell recounted. "He seemed pretty into it. But yeah, I wanted to do the whole, 'Hi! You're my hero,' but it just wasn't the moment."

And for fans of Babyshambles, in America at least, they'll have to wait some time before bestowing in-person praise on the British group. Due to their frontman's drug convictions, there are no avenues open to Babyshambles presently for Stateside entry.

"If your government changes its laws on work visas and their policy on people who've been in jail on narcotics charges, then [we'll come over]," he said. "If we get really big and we can afford expensive lawyers to poke holes in the air with people, then yeah. But until then, probably not."