Like the many thousands who will eventually be here this evening, I’m still on my way to the Hop Farm when Los Lobos play, which is why when I get there, the band’s David Hidalgo, instrumental star of the last two Bob Dylan albums, is already in the hospitality bar, deep in conversation with a couple of confederates. Things moving to a strict schedule here and people going on surprisingly early means I’ve also missed Dr John and have in fact made it just in time for Blondie, who have just stepped out on the main stage to a great cheer. Deborah Harry looks quite magnificent in a platinum blonde wig and voluminous black frock festooned with a lot of lace, belts and chains. “Hello, Hop Farm – Blondie calling,” she yells, with perhaps more genuine gusto than you’d expect from someday who only the day before had turned 65, before the band launch into a laudably lively “Hangin’ On The Telephone”. What follows is a generous greatest hits set of slickly delivered crowd-pleasers, among them “Maria”, “Atomic”, “Rapture” and “One Day Or Another”. Some technical glitch then halts their well-rehearsed momentum and as Harry surprisingly flounders in the sudden musical lull, her patter and small talk falling flat, the air goes out of their set. When they resume with “The Tide Is High”, it’s too sluggish too breathe the same life back into it. But they’re still on their way to a hearty ovation for the closing “Heart Of Glass”, by which time I’m making my way around the edge of the crowd to the second stage, all the way over there on the other side of the festival site. Tomorrow, when there are maybe three, four or five times as many people here, it will take the best part of an hour to get this far through the milling crowd. Tonight, though, it’s actually a pleasant stroll through the cooling evening, darkness now slowly coming to this part of Kent. Richard Thompson’s already on stage. In his black beret, shirt and jeans, the shirt decorated with what look like military ribbons and medals, he looks convincingly like a folk commando in full battle fatigue, someone dropped by parachute behind enemy lines to wreak a little havoc. He’s playing a song called “The Money Shuffle”, the target of which is the international banking community whose general ineptitude has visited such economic woe on the world. He delivers the song with the venomous relish you might associate with something similarly caustic by Warren Zevon, indignation bordering on an edgy fury. An irresistible version of “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” changes the mood, which turns more reflective still with a lovely reading of “The Sunset Song”. “This is from my last incredibly successful LP,” he offers by way of sardonic introduction, a line you suspect he’s been ruefully using since he started making records. A dynamic “”1952 Vincent Black Lightning” follows and after that “Persuasion” and a snarling “Crawl Back (Under My Stone)”. “This is a song about sexual frustration, like most of my material,” he’s saying now, setting up the bleak and hilarious “Johnny’s Far Away”, whose colourfully rousing chorus the audience joins in on with such full-throated enthusiasm, it makes you wonder how many other songs about separation and serial infidelity could inspire such a mass sing-a-long. I’m reluctantly about to leave at this point because van Morrison’s due on the main stage in a few minutes. But then Thompson starts playing “Wall Of Death” from Shoot Out The Lights and as much as I don’t want to miss a minute of Van, I can’t drag myself away from a performance as compelling as this and as it anyway happens I’m back in front of the main stage just as Van starts. He’s sitting at a piano, resplendent in a white suit that probably fit when he bought it and a matching hat. He looks positively regal, soul royalty with the imposing heft of Solomon Burke and a voice that remains a thing of time-defying wonder. He’s feeling his way into a magnificent version of “Northern Muse (Solid Ground)", a sweet meandering through many familiar aspects of his music. And now, here’s a surprise: a funky, sultry take on “Brown Eyed Girl”, ungrudgingly played, as if this beautiful summer night has taken the edge off even his legendary truculence. The audience accept it as the rare gift it might actually be. And here’s something else I wouldn’t have expected, a long, mesmerising version of “Fair Play”, the opening track from Veedon Fleece, that drifts and circles, falls back upon itself, any given moment from the original script likely to inspire some digressive extrapolation, gusts of extemporised brilliance, no telling where any of this will go. His voice glides breathlessly through changing stratospheres as effortlessly graceful as something with wings riding currents of air. It ends when he decides it’s over, with the clipped instruction to someone called Chrissie to say goodnight. Van’s surlier side, whatever the weather and even on a might as magical as this, is never, I guess, that far away. And after a beguiling “The Mystery”, from Poetic Champions Compose, we get an angry “Keep It Simple” and the bitter rant of “Talk Is Cheap”. Then there’s a gorgeous “Have I Told You Lately?” which gives way to a seething “Tear Your Playhouse Down”. The extended joyful vamp of “Moondance” is perfect, of course, in this setting, a cool swinging celebration that carries over into “That’s Entertainment”, which in turn is followed by the questing beauty of “Philosopher’s Stone”. A stalking bass line introduces “Baby, Please Don’t Go”, with Van on electric guitar, the song segueing into a jumping “Parchman Farm”, which is followed by a long and unbelievable version of “Into the Mystic” that unfolds slowly, revealing itself incrementally, the few brief minutes of its original incarnation extended in the manner of something like “Almost Independence Day”. As the song drifts into silence, I can’t imagine for the moment he could do anything better. But he does, with the sublime “When The Healing Has Begun”, from 1979’s Into The Music, and then a sublime “In The Garden”, from No Teacher, No Guru, No Method. It’s also his last number, so there’s no encore either. When he walks off stage, the band still playing, he stays there. But there’s nothing - as there sometimes might be - that’s churlish about his departure. He came to do what he does, did it wonderfully and then it was time to go. Now for tomorrow and Bob.

The week’s gone by at such a clip, we’re nearly at the end of it and I still haven’t, I’ve just realised, written about this show, which was frankly too good to let pass without comment, however belated. The Gaslight Anthem had out in a great shift the day before in Hyde Park, where they were supporting Pearl Jam. But at the Academy, in front of their own fans, they are, as you would have hoped, sensational. The show is spectacular from the start. The Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” is blasting from the PA when the lights go down and the band come on, plug in, ready to go. As “Gimme Shelter” reaches a suitably climactic pitch it gives way in a dramatic sort of cross fade to Alex Rosamilia’s declamatory guitar introduction to TGA’s own “American Slang”, which is the title track of their new album, of course, if you’ve been on holiday or something, or otherwise distracted. It’s a brilliant piece of theatre and the deployment here of one of the Stones’ most iconic songs gives a hint of the company The Gaslight Anthem would like eventually to see themselves in, that pantheon of what there must be a more elegant phrase than ‘acknowledged rock greats’ to which they unashamedly aspire, every show they play an addition to their burgeoning reputation, another line in the legend thy are writing about themselves. Incredibly, it just gets better from here. The set that follows is a thrilling mix of key tracks from the new album and re-vamped crowd favourites from their back catalogue, which is already bristling with stuff you’d miss like something amputated if they didn’t play it. Thankfully, they aren’t stingy when it comes to the older material, which as fans themselves they know a lot of people will have come to hear, as excited as the bulk of the crowd are to hear the American Slang material making a bow for the first time live. And so blistering recent songs like “Stay Lucky”, the stupendous “Bring It On”, “The Diamond Street Church Choir”, “Boxer”, “The Spirit Of Jazz” and “The Queen Of Lower Chelsea”- over half the new album – are generously interspersed with tracks from previous album The ’59 Sound. Among them: “Old White Lincoln”, “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues”, “Miles Davis & The Cool”, “The ’59 Sound”, “Great Expectations”, “Casanova, Baby!”, “Film Noir”, “Here’s Lookin’ At You, Kid” and “Backstreets”. They even find time in a show whose breathless pace is at times staggering to re-visit a few even older songs – “Blue Jeans & White T-Shirts”, from the Senor And The Queen EP, for instance, and “Last Of The Jukebox Romeos”, played as one of five encores. It’s apparently inevitable that whenever they are written about The Gaslight Anthem end up being compared for many obvious reasons to Bruce Springsteen and he continues clearly to be an influence and inspiration. But you can hear more than echoes of The E-Street Band in what they play, which at times, especially on the call-and-response vocal exchanges of “Bring It On” and the multiple false endings of “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” resembles a full-on soul revue, Sam Cooke waiting in the wings to come on and raise the roof. During a positively ceremonial version of “The ’59 Sound” I scribble something in my notebook to the effect that increasingly tonight it’s like listening to The Who in their absolute pomp. About five or six songs later, Brian Fallon tells a dismayed crowd there’s time for one last number, which I presume will be “The Backseat”, which if it, it then strikes me, has been given a completely new intro. It’s not, though. What we are suddenly listening to is a stunning appropriation of The Who’s “Baba O’Reilly”, a song as much as anything by Springsteen or The Clash that could have been written for TGA to play. And play it they do, as indeed they play everything. Which is to say, as if lives depended on them.

I was looking through an old Red House Painters file a while back, and came across a review of their debut album in which Allan compared Mark Kozelek’s songwriting to that of Dino Valente. I remembered this earlier today, listening to the new Sun Kil Moon album as I walked to work, thinking about how Kozelek has become one of those artists who seems to reference themselves far more than any other artists. The capricious, undefined shape of Valente’s solo songs remains a decent comparison, and the electric jams on “Ghosts Of The Great Highway” and “April” certainly trudged in the wake of Crazy Horse, to greater and lesser degrees. But “Admiral Fell Promises” has none of that protean thud, and seems located more than ever in Kozelek’s distinct soundworld. This time, his fourth album as Sun Kil Moon is a solo and acoustic affair, though not one that sounds quite like the solo, acoustic and often live sets that Kozelek has put out under his own given name. For a start, Kozelek often discreetly multitracks his vocals. More importantly, he plays nylon string Spanish classical guitar throughout. It seems like a mere technical point, but the difference is striking: Kozelek’s songs have historically unravelled in a way in which, personally speaking, actual instrumentation is barely noticeable. Consequently, when the album begins with “Alesund”, it begins not with the reliably reflective Kozelek embarking on one more lengthy emotional exploration, but with a meticulous guitar flourish. The heroic consistency of his songwriting is unaltered, but the shape of the songs has subtly shifted; there are passages of courtly virtuosity that punctuate the inexorable flow of things. As usual, though, the effect is cumulative. I’ve been living with this album for a good while now, loving many of the songs, but missing the drawn-out electric firestorms that provided variety on those first and third Sun Kil Moon albums. Now, as the songs really start to bed in, the tight unity of “Admiral Fell Promises” feels logical and satisfying. I’ve written before, I think, about the compelling impact of Kozelek’s music over what is now nearly 20 years: its measured, insidious power; its unwavering consistency; its role in my life and on my iPod as a calm, meditative failsafe. “Admiral Fell Promises” doesn’t disappoint. I always suspect Kozelek gathers a bunch of salient songs together rather than writes a new batch when he puts together a new record, and certainly, the title track at the very least has been popping up in his setlists for about a decade. I find it very hard to explain precisely why one Kozelek song is preferable to another – some mystical alignment of progressions and poignancy, maybe – but the standouts currently feel like “Half Moon Bay” and “Third And Seneca”. The latter, especially, is tremendous, possibly in the same melodic vein as “Unlit Hallway”, one of my favourites from “April”. Some of these songs seem to be predicated on life as a musician (“Church Of The Pines” touches, I think, on the act of writing a song). But while, in the hands of some other musicians, such pensées can come across as self-indulgences, sometimes even whinges, Kozelek handles the territory with subtlety and grace. “Third And Seneca” seems to be a kind of impressionistic travelogue, meandering around the bays and hotel rooms of North America, looking out over Puget Sound, leaving Hollywood, thinking always of San Francisco. It’s a measure of Kozelek’s vivid and persuasive art, perhaps, that he always ends up making me nostalgic for that last city; as if a place I’ve visited a few times is as significant to me as a hometown.

The sticker on the front of my promo of Superpitcher’s second album describes Aksel Schaufler as “Cologne’s melancholy techno-pop maestro”. It has been about six years since the first Superpitcher album, but Schaufler’s worldview doesn’t appear to have improved much. If Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor sometimes comes across as an indie boy lost on the dancefloor, Schaufler’s persona is akin to a sociopath on the verge of a panic attack. “Walking down the street, all alone,” begins the first single, and degenerates from there, to a height of blank despair which involves “everybody’s always too drunk. To fuck.” Built around this, the music is quite magnificent: an ornate expansion of the Kompakt label’s microhouse/minimal techno aesthetic, which steps tentatively into new territories. So while the instrumental “Moon Fever” is a gorgeous trinket, very much in the style of the cosmic music box pieces found on the “Pop Ambient” comps, “Voodoo” and the title track of “Kilimanjaro” are odd, skanking beasts, digi-dub endeavours somewhere in the neighbourhood of another German production outfit, Rhythm & Sound. “Black Magic”, meanwhile, is a luxe, jet-trash-friendly iteration of minimal techno, still retaining the wounded romance of Superpitcher’s melodic default setting even amidst all the finely-tooled sonic giltwork. Svelte, lovely music throughout, then, but I’m sure Schaufler’s voice and his lyrics – nagging, repetitive, often so facile that, intoned again and again, they take on a kind of surrealist tinge – will prove to be a sticking point with people. There are moments when the wounded indie boy schtick becomes a distraction: on “Country Boy”, the way he drawls “Black sheep of the family” reminds me unaccountably of Luke Haines. But then, again, the whole thing can work wonderfully. “Kilimanjaro”’s stand-out track, at least after the first half-dozen listens, feels like “Friday Night”, a sleek and faintly menacing piece – echoes of Fever Ray, perhaps - that begins with Schaufler bleating, “It’s Friday night, and I’m not dancing.” This goes on for a bit, until he expands on his issues. “Sugar girl where are you now?” he ponders, before disconsolately concluding, “Probably smoking blow.” All the while, the fabulous music is building up momentum, so that by the time it starts peaking (about five minutes in), a chorus of bored girls have arrived to chant, “Lack of entertainment” over and over again. Pathetic, and very funny, and quite the best track I’ve heard in a while.

The first thing you would have noticed arriving in Hyde Park last Frday to see Pearl Jam is how many more people there appear to be than were here for last year’s Hard Rock Calling weekend, the size of the crowd, a hint of mob surliness and the press of people at the front of the stage something of a concern later for a visibly worried Eddie Vedder. It’s almost 10 years to the day, after all, since nine Pearl Jam fans were crushed to death during the band’s performance on June 30, 2000, at the Rosskilde festival, over there in Denmark. No wonder at one point he looks so rattled. For the moment, though, everyone is in good spirits, enjoying the good weather and The Gaslight Anthem, who’ve just appeared to a huge cheer. Brian Fallon is struggling with a heavy cold, a prohibitive hoarseness apparent even as the band kicks into “American Slang”. With a headlining show the next night at Brixton Academy, they may actually have been relieved to be playing such a relatively short set, although you couldn’t say they hold anything back, especially Fallon. You would have understood him perhaps trying to preserve his voice, nurse it through the next 30 minutes to make sure it’s in the best possible shape for Brixton. But as always he gives it everything he’s got. “American Slang” is the first of five songs from the new album that shares its name and is followed by first UK outings for “The Diamond Church Street Choir”, “Bring It On”, “Queen Of Lower Chelsea” and “Boxer”. The four songs they play from breakthrough album the ’59 Sound, which they toured almost to death following its 2008 release, are much reinvigorated for not having been played much for the best part of a year. “Old White Lincoln” has been funkily rearranged, while “The ’59 Sound” and “Great Expectations” are re-visited with a relish that was probably beginning to wane when they played their last UK show of 2009 at the Reading Festival. I’d been expecting them to close with “We Did It When We Were Young”, which brings down the curtain on American Slang. In the event, they roll out the dependable “Backseats”, to no complaints from anyone. By the time Pearl Jam come on at around 8.00 pm, the sun and too much to drink has had a worrying effect on some of the crowd and there’s an edgy mood. Bottles are flying and bouncing off people’s heads in scenes reminiscent of some ghastly by-gone Reading, and not far from where I’m standing there are a couple of fights, one guy – who turns out when I speak to him to be an Uncut reader – flattened by an oaf in an ale-soaked blue singlet and tattoos. There’s a huge surge towards the front of the stage that coincides with a triumphant opening salvo of “Given To Fly”, “Why Go?” and “Corduroy”, Vedder quick to ask the crowd to calm down, ease back, make room for each other. The seething mass in front of him seems to settle, and as instructed take three steps back, Eddie himself beginning to relax as they do as they’re told, swigging from a bottle of red wine and looking crisp and dapper – for the moment, anyway - in a Devo T-shirt, underneath a crisp black and white checked shirt. “I don’t mean to sound redundant,” he announces, repeating his message to the crowd to chill, “but your safety is more important than me being boring.” The band know what the vast rump of people have come to hear and duly oblige, six of the songs that follow taken from Ten, the album they will always be remembered for and which evidently means most to the many thousands here tonight, a staggeringly good “Once” a very early highlight. The set doesn’t, however, feel predictable for all the familiarity of what they play and is enhanced no end by some genuine surprises, like the cover of Joe Strummer’s “Arms Aloft In Aberdeen”, from the posthumously released Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros’ album, Streetcore. “Better Man” from Vitalogy is a good, but curiously underwhelming set-closer. But, hey, it’s only 9.30, and Pearl Jam aren’t due off-stage until the 10 o’clock curfew, so there’s a half hour left yet for encores, which come plentifully, “Alive” played at last, alongside a rousing “Black”, “Porch” and the equally venerable “Yellow Ledbetter”.