With nothing on Thursday billing to grab you by the throat and force you to pay attention, the masses leisurely set about acclimatising themselves with the compact and well laid out site, and then embark on the evening's perpetual hunt - the unsuccessful parched souls stalking the happily lubricated few in the hope that they will lead them to the single open bar on site.Friday has no such problems, the only dilemma is choosing which band with whom to open the festival. Local 3-piece Dinosaur Pile-up getting the nod ahead of the fun Mariachi El Bronx - their chugging grungy guitars filling the NME tent with catchy hooks and layers of feedback. The biog describes them as 'Terminator 1 kicking the shit out of a solid-steel Rambo' - if you somehow squeeze in references to Foos, Weezer and Pavement, it will be spot-on.
Next are Delphic, who struggle to get going - seemingly too caught up with twiddling knobs and electronic gizmos, they over indulge and don't connect with the audience until, perhaps spurred by the frantic 'wind it up' signals from the wings, they launch into new single This Momentary and really kick-on, finally justify their pre-festival hype. Unfortunately though it's too little, too late. There is a distinct feeling and nothing on earth will make this stage run late today!
To finish off the morning session it's off to see Chuck Ragan in the 'Dance' tent - which comes as a shock to numerous people lured to the dance but confronted by his folky foot-tapping country music and rasping tones.
The afternoon buzz is generated by the curious 2-hour 'gap' on the NME stage and who might be filling it; the popular money seems to be on The Cribs repeating Kaiser's feats from last year. It is with great surprise then that, at 4.15 Josh Homme's unique vocals float their way over to my ears on Liggin' Hill and are pounded home by Dave Grohl on the sticks. The realisation that the special guests are in fact Them Crooked Vultures takes a nano-second to register and plans to meet people in the bar are hastily abandoned (sorry). This is a super-group of phenomenal standing - no-one can argue with god-like qualities of Josh and John Paul, but Dave Grohl's consistent position at the pinnacle of rock for the best part of 2 decades manages to put even them in the shade. The music itself is less than the sum of its parts, but with these guys on stage you cannot possibly be disappointed.
Following a much needed lay-down, it's back out in to the enveloping darkness for the Prodigy - the aging ravers who returned to form earlier this year with their latest album 'Invaders Must Die'. You can't doubt their energy and tenacity, but the spark that made their 1997 appearance so intense is long gone. There are brief reminders during the likes of Breathe and Firestarter and some of the even older favourites, but Maxim can't find his Warrior Pepole tonight.
The evening is rounded off by the Arctic Monkeys, but the freely flowing beer and lure of Hollyoaks bingo (the stars the CH4 soap are out in force this weekend and I was one McQueen short of a set) provide enough of a distraction to push the Monkeys' underwhelming headline performance to the periphery.
