Credit: Found on Internet

V Festival - 19 & 20 August, Hylands Park, Chelmsford & Weston Park, Staffordshire

Let's be honest, there was really only one reason to go to the 2006 V Festival - Radiohead. 

Co-headliner, The Pope of Mope aka Morrissey, has lost his allure since finding love in the vicinity of the Vatican and cheering up a bit.  But Thom Yorke and his band remain resolutely rooted in misery and pain and so can produce a musical manic-depression that is effortless and all-consuming.

You do not have to be a massive Radiohead fan to get their live performance. One thing the band have never been accused of in all their 15 years is being accessible. But their hypnotic live performance makes it is so easy to be drawn in by the neurotic twitch of Idioteque, the beatific Karma Police and adolescent angst anthem Creep.

Did I say Creep? A fair share of the Chelmsford audience on Saturday knowingly nodded their heads before the band took to the stage, “They never play Creep.”

It turns out they do, they've played it nearly 200 times since its 1992 debut.  Those of us swarmed - and at times lost - in a field in Essex, dizzied by lights, did not know this - and when the opening bars crept in for the encore it seemed like a seminal moment.

That is the thing about Radiohead, they make everything - even an average festival - seem so very special.

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Not everyone at V agreed.

The next day a few random punters could be heard muttering they had not liked Radiohead. It transpired they were Hard-Fi supporters.

In fact, the chat-up line de le festival appeared to be “Are you fans of Hard-Fi?” The Staines boys certainly produced a climax of some sort judging by the cheer which greeted the end of their Main Stage set. And I was NOWHERE near the Main Stage.

Emissaries sent to watch The Feeling - if I had gone the feeling could have been The Nausea - also reported a brimming crowd over at the secondary Channel 4 stage. The self-confessed exponents of cheese-pop were apparently perfect festival fodder - and outshone both The Delays and Starsailor, who followed them on stage.