It was time to dodge the surprisingly large crowd, navigate the increasingly muddy ground and head back to base camp. Now usually I would be darting back and forth between venues to catch as many acts as I can, but it dawned on me that this time it would be different. Imagine trying to drag over ten kilos of gear over what must be miles of mud, soaked through, for a whole day. It just wasn’t going to happen. So I went back to my must-see list and decided that was all I was going to see and photograph, unless of course the rain stopped and the sun came out as the BBC had promised. Well, we all now know that that the ‘holier than thou’ BBC is just as capable as anyone else of telling porkies…

Thankfully my next stop was The Editors on the main stage, and a trip over drier ground and prefabricated walkways. I saw the band for the first time at last year’s V when we reckoned that were one of the festival’s highlights. In Tom Smith the band has a talented vocalist and an original, with a highly animated performing style. Tom made a great guest appearance at the fabulous Bella Union 10th Anniversary gig at the revamped Royal Festival Hall last month, playing alongside Midlake (review elsewhere on our site).

The band also released a new album which has met with a rather mixed critical response, but features the special anthem ‘Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors.’ The band chose to open their set with the familiar and best from their last album, and with the crowd providing particularly strong backing vocals it seemed a wise choice… Along with Elbow, I believe that Editors are underrated and are one of the few newer bands that we still be hearing in several years time. And live they have few peers, as they proved at V