So, the fourth edition of Latitude is over and you've been home for the hot soapy shower-of-your-life after four nights camping in a field in Suffolk - here, then, is Uncut 's Ultimate Latitude Review! We've been blogging our way throughout the weekend, so catch up with all the news, gossip and photos here! Obelisk Arena headliners Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Grace Jones and Pet Shop Boys all performed highly-charged volatile sets - with Pet Shop Boys's disco-inferno-lised cover of Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" standing out particularly vividly. Over in Uncut's Arena, we were privileged to have Gossip, Spiritualized and Bat For Lashes topping the bill across the weekend. Other music highlights for us were, in no particular order:Thom Yorke's solo perfomance on the main stage, a rare appearance by The Vaselines, Wild Beasts and Doves' sunset performance, hugely reminiscent of Elbow's similar slot at Latitude last year. Uncut also caught up with shows by !!! and Editors as well as host of newer artists on the Uncut, Sunrise Arena and Woods stages, including - *Alela Diane, The Rumble Strips and Gurrumul *The Gaslight Anthem *Broken Records, DM Stith, Airborne Toxic Event, The XX *Camera Obscura and Passion Pit *White Lies *Wildbirds And Peacedrums, Marnie Stern and St Vincent *Band of Skulls *Squeeze *Regina Spektor *The Pretenders *Fever Ray *The Mummers *Divine Comedy's Duckworth Lewis Method *Chairlift, 1990s and Amazing Baby As well as the music of course, the Literary, Comedy and Poetry tents were packed throughout - particular favourites included Edwyn Collins and Grace Maxwell's moving conversation about recovery from serious illness, Radio 4 regular Jeremy Hardy, Simon Armitage and Vivienne Westwood. On the blogs, we've once again, also compiled our favourite snippets of overheard conversations - click here for part 1, part 2 and part 3. Hope you laugh as hard as we did, can you do better though? Send us your best Latitude eavesdrops! If you, too, were at this weekend's Latitude (July 16-19), or even if you weren't; You can catch up with all of Uncut's online coverage at the dedicated Latitude blog where you'll find all sorts of photos, witty observations and reports from the weekend. There will be a also be a full review following in the September issue of Uncut , out on July 31.

“Thank you, photographers,” says Nick Cave to the snappers in the pit in front of the stage, pointing to his right cheek. “Only print the ones from this side of my face.” It’s a rare moment of light-hearted banter, although he does later decline a punter’s song request, claiming the track in question has “too many chords for old men like us!”. It would appear he and The Bad Seeds are a little fatigued, after promoting Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! for the best part of 18 months, but they’ve still got just about enough in the tank to bring Latitude to a memorably electrifying close. Cave is, of course, no stranger to Latitude, having menaced leafy Suffolk with Grinderman last summer, and tonight he’s compensating for not even glancing at the Bad Seeds catalogue on his last visit. An opening “Tupelo” sets the tone for what’s to follow, a dizzying ride that veers between Biblical terrors, regretful murderers, unrepentant jailbirds, and tender lovers administering to broken hearts with bourbon and sulphur. “The Ship Song” triggers an emotional swaying right across the Obelisk arena, as the sun takes its final bow behind the trees, and “Red Right Hand” reaffirms its claim to be the most disturbing audience singalong of all time. “We Call Upon The Author To Explain” is just terrifying, all scowling choruses and sky-shredding feedback that must have spooked whatever reader had the misfortune to be on stage at the literature tent on the other side of the site during those fearsome five minutes. Oh yes, they would most definitely had heard it... Cave looks as dapper as ever, although he’s dispensed with the Zapata ‘tache of the last couple of years, and special mention should go to the visual counterpoint provided by his hirsute gimp foil Warren Ellis, with whom he indulges in the now traditional mock stage scraps, played out to the runaway train charge of the Bad Seeds with a boiler full of coal. We’re denied an encore, despite it being another half-hour before curfew, perhaps an indication that tiredness and touring has taken its toll on the players. Briefer than usual, but brilliant as always. Nick should now allow himself the rest he’s long overdue, then get cracking on another album, before making his way back here next year to complete a triumphant hat-trick of Latitude glory. Set List: Tupelo Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! Red Right Hand Deanna Midnight Man The Ship Song Henry Lee We Call Upon The Author The Mercy Seat There She Goes, My Beautiful World The Weeping Song Papa Don’t Leave You, Henry Stagger Lee TERRY STAUNTON

The vision of half a dozen St Etienne fans waving Foxbase Alpha placards near the stage of the Obelisk arena confuses at first, until some sympathetic soul obviously whispers in their ear that they’re at the wrong part of the site, and they embarrassingly shuffle off towards the Uncut arena. For this is the hour of Editors, who may employ similar synth-like keyboards to Bob Stanley’s crew, but for less summery purposes. There’s a moody serious to Editors, as they emerge almost unnoticed, their dark clothing disappearing into the barely lit stage, like GQ makeover goth camouflage. With scant verbal acknowledgement of the crowd throughout, Tom Smith leads the band through a series of staccato twisted anthems that can’t help but recall the likes of Joy Division or a particularly grumpy incarnation of Echo and the Bunnymen. Smith’s vocals have previously (and frequently) drawn comparisons with Ian Curtis’s but his style seems more mannered, contrived even, and they’re ultimately the culprit of the group’s downfall. The crowd receive them with enthusiasm, but there’s little in the way of specialness in Editors’ music; it’s powerful, expertly-played, but lacks that unidentifiable spark to project them onto a higher plain than any one of a dozen bands who’ve climbed the same ladder at the same pace over the last five years. A third album, In This Light And On This Evening, is due in September, but tonight’s set concentrates on its two predecessors. “Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors” manages to stand out, the lyric suggesting a humanity and insight that’s hard to come by across the rest of their cookie-cutter indie rock selections. TERRY STAUNTON

Latitude closed tonight with headline sets from two of America’s greatest dance bands. Fresh off a flight from Berlin, !!! wind up proceedings on the Sunrise Stage with an wild, sweaty set under canvas that sees this New York dance troupe playing to their strengths. Received wisdom has it that this is a band firmly in the NYC disco/post-punk tradition, but really there’s as much Sandinista-era Clash and Happy Mondays to these tight basslines, scratchy guitar dissonance and loping baggy grooves. Certainly, frontman Nic Offer is as much a Bez as a James Murphy, an endearing goof who exists as much to keep the crowd writhing as to dispense anything meaningful on the microphone. And while this means that !!! may not have the studied cool of hometown buddies The Rapture or LCD Soundsystem, I’m pretty sure neither of those bands have quite the goofy good humour to inspire an impromptu conga line. Then finally, it’s back down to the Uncut Stage for a climactic set from the Gossip. They keep us waiting, an interminable soundcheck delaying onstage time by a good 20 minutes – although that very few shift to check out a very audible Nick Cave on the adjacent Obelisk Stage says a lot about the Ditto appeal. And then, she’s here, scarily glamorous in styled up black hair and pink polka-dot dress: “Do you have an attitude, Latitude?” The set mixes up material like "2012" and "Heavy Cross" from the band's synthier, disco-tinged new Rick Rubin-produced album Music For Men with older, rawer numbers like "Listen Up!", but really, this show will be memorable for Ditto's game attempts to close the gap between band and audience. Hauling kids over the barrier, commanding security to "Let them dance!", before long the photo pit is a sea of bodies, bodies that one by one bound up on stage (although Ditto can't get anyone to have a go on the microphone - still, given the competition, can you blame them?). They wind up, of course, with a rabid take on "Standing In The Way Of Control" and an impromptu a capella burst of Queen's "We Are The Champions" in honour of those booted off the stage. Justly deserved, but it's hard not to consider Beth's declaration that this will be their "last UK show in a while". Certainly, their absence will leave a distinctly Ditto-shaped hole - and it's hard to think of who's out there who can fill it. LOUIS PATTISON

To the UNCUT Arena, then, and the Vaselines and St Etienne. Two bands who, although wildly different in sound and execution both, astonishingly, emerged from the same kind of cultural environment. I’m talking, of course, about C86. Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee formed the Vaselines in Glasgow in that year, and were part of the Glasgow scene that also gave us the Shop Assistants, the Pastels, Primal Scream and any number of other bands to jingle a jangle with some nice hairgrip harmonies on the top. In a previous life, St Etienne’s Bob Stanley ran the Caff label and fanzine that was closely modelled around the Sarah label, another key piece of the C86 jigsaw. Indeed, St Etienne’s great, los,t second single, “Kiss And Make Up”, ticked a number of C86 friendly boxes, having been a cover of a song by Sarah band the Field Mice, while a version of it was in fact released by Sarah. Anyway, without wishing to get into the rather tedious forensic detail of all this, let’s talk a bit about the Vaselines’ set. This is, as you may know, one of a handful shows they’ve played since getting back together in April last year. Best known, perhaps, as one of Kurt Cobain’s favourite bands (his only daughter, Frances Bean, is named after McKee), they’re testament to the enduring brilliance of a lot of these C86 songs – a movement criminally overlooked, it strikes me, but in fact hugely under acknowledged for its importance on the development of the UK indie scene. So, “Molly’s Lips”, “Son Of A Gun” and “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam” are blessed with a simple, beautiful pop sheen. Kelly might whip up a quite impressive noise on his guitar, but his and McKee’s unerring ear for melody is unavoidable. No song, incidentally, seems to last for more that 2 minutes 30 seconds, which is further evidence of the band’s astonishing song writing skills. Entertainingly, for a band so associated with a specific tweeness, their between song banter is hilarious, and pretty foul mouthed. “American accents give me the horn,” says McKee. “Is there anyone here with an American accent? Oh, and it’s two things. It’s not just the accent, you’ve got to have a really big dick as well.” You can take the girl out of Glasgow, it seems, but you can’t take Glasgow out of the girl. Of course, this isn’t the kind of language you’d expect to hear from St Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell. As always, she exercises considerable, almost regal grace as she strolls on stage at the start of St Etienne’s set, dressed in what looks like a sharp black suit. It’s interesting to note, perhaps, how Kelly and McKee have mostly stayed within the original parameters of the C86 scene; yet Stanley, along with Cracknell and Pete Wiggs, too it in a completely different direction. In a way, I suppose, it’s a similar trajectory to Primal Scream, who also evolved beyond their C86 origins to embrace dance music. In fact, St Etienne provide Latitude with a much-needed injection of pop fun. There is a heavy reliance on their brilliant debut, Foxbase Alpha, so we get “Nothing Can Stop Us”, “Spring” and a storming, bass-heavy version of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” that has the rammed UNCUT Arena bouncing with collective joy. The latest single, “Method Of Modern Love”, is clearly indebted to Kylie Ann Minogue OBE’s “The One”, but we shall let that pass – after all, Kylie did cover “Nothing Can Stop Us” once. And, one day, I’d love to hear "When Are You Coming Home?", the unreleased Kylie/St Etienne collaboration from the 1994 Kylie Minogue album sessions. In fact, it’s interesting to see the way St Etienne developed beyond their Balearic origins, as evidenced here by “Burned Out Car” and “He’s On The Phone”, which are both pumping Euro pop House numbers. A great version of slow-motion techno “Like A Motorway” works for me. Anyway, Nick Cave’s on in a minute, and I fancy buying some artisan cheese. That’s all from me this year – Allan’s down the front for Magazine, I hope, Louis should be blogging about Gossip and then Terry’ll be wrapping things up with his Cave blog later. I hope you’re enjoyed reading our witterings! Cheers.

I’d been telling anyone who’d listen over the last few weeks and more in the build-up to Latitude that New Jersey’s The Gaslight Anthem in the right circumstances might be the surprise hit of the festival, especially after headline-grabbing sets at Glastonbury and Hyde Park, where they were joined onstage by Bruce Springsteen, who in turn had Anthem frontman Brian Fallon share the spotlight with him and the E Street Band on “No Surrender”. I’d imagined Gaslight Anthem coming on against a nuclear sunset, the sky aflame and an audience blown away, the next 45 minutes talked about by many for years to come. Of course, it doesn’t happen according to my pre-written script. It’s absolutely bucketing down when they come on. There’s basically only me and my friend Helen and a few score hardcore fans in front of the stage, most of them hooded against the rain and looking like members of a sinister religious cult or the roadies on Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps tour and things frankly don’t look all that promising in terms of the moment of festival transcendence I’ve been cheerfully predicting. Then they kick into “High Lonesome” from break-out album The '59 Sound and things start to brighten, the sense of a moment being seized about to be taken and already there are more people around us that there were a couple of minutes ago, people as they will always be drawn to the sound of great music, which is what we are listening to. The Gaslight Anthem, broadly speaking, share the same mythographical universe as The Hold Steady, a world in which rock’n’roll as played by the people who believe like they do that it can heal the most wounded and forlorn among us will save the fucking day. Their musical template is as thankfully as uncomplicated as their faith in the noise we love, lots of Springtsteen and as much Clash, London Calling as much an influence as Born To Run. Which makes for an increasingly inflammatory set, “Casanova Baby!” now drawing even more people into the Obelisk Arena, the place filling up like a pub at closing time, the bell about to go and everyone thirsty for more. “He’s got a great voice for a little fellah,” Helen, who’s never heard them before, tells me half way through the next number, “Old White Lincoln”, whose chorus the growing crowd are now tempted with some gusto to sing along with, even though I doubt many of them have heard it before. And so it goes, song after song, as unfamiliar as each may be to the many more people who by the moment who are joining us, making the world by the minute a better place to be, “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues” now blowing the clouds away, the sun coming out, Helen dancing, and everyone else too, the joint, as it were, jumping, and no one wanting this to come too quickly to an end, even as that that end is looming, the band now playing a version of “Great Expectations” you know is setting up a roaring climax that comes with a sweeping “Here’s Looking At You, Kid” and the great “The Backseat”. Allan Jones

Unfortunately, the Uncut Arena is running late, so we only manage to see a sliver of Tricky's set before we have to dash off to see some other acts - we can definitely confirm it was pretty bonkers, as you'd expect from trip-hop's most eccentric talent. He begins with an instrumental version of Eurythmics' 'Sweet Dreams' which, with its buzzy synth-bass, clattering percussion and pummelling backbeat, sounds somewhat like Nine Inch Nails. Next up is a typically trip-hop number with tinkling cocktail-bar piano and menacing backing vocalists, followed by a deathly slow song featuring sparse drum hits and grainy synth chords. A pretty heavy, doomy set, then, but we're forced to rush over to the main stage to catch some of Phoenix. The French fashionistas are first and foremost a party band and it suits this evening perfectly - the sun's come out and the rain seems to have stopped for good. Pushing their synths, drum loops and keyboards to the background, the group, led by Thomas Mars, pin much more of their sound tonight on fuzz bass and taut, sharp guitars. Along with their preppy, elegant sartortial style, you could almost be watching a parallel-universe Strokes. 'Lisztomania', the opener on their new album 'Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix', kicks off the set, before they break into older, and no less infectious, material like 'Run'. It's all a bit of a glorious sugar rush - you may not take away much to dwell on from Phoenix's set, but you'll know you had a damn good time. TOM PINNOCK

As the sky threatens to rain, we head into the safety of the Uncut tent to see Alela Diane. The American singer-songwriter, joined by a four-piece band, including a subtle backing singer, performs her woozy country-tinged songs to a good-sized crowd. Her voice is a very fluid instrument, picking up the slack where the songwriting may not be memorable enough - her pronunciation of 'canyon' alone on one song is enough to sustain attention for the whole track. 'White As Diamonds' gets a big cheer from the crowd, but it's the tribal, meditative closer 'The Ocean' that really hints at the more interesting avenues Diane could pursue in the future. The rain's coming down thick and fast, so the tent fills up to bursting point - a good bit of fortune for Aboriginal singer Gurrumul, up next. Backed by a string quartet, double bassist and classical guitarist, the blind singer's tracks are a little bit too 'Pan Pipe Moods' - if it wasn't for his voice, that is. Soaring over the (far too) tasteful strings and folk-derived guitar picking, Gurrumul's voice is a tremulous wonder, stretching from guttural rumbles to almost unnerving animal-like cries. It's a moving performance. Perhaps Gurrumul's putting in all his reserves today because (as his double bassist says) the monsoon-like conditions remind him of home. An act who don't quite get the same comfort from the rain are The Rumble Strips. Out on the main Obelisk Arena stage, they start their set with only a small crowd due to the harsh weather. The sun begins to peek out, though, as they continue and the audience swells. Their earlier material features their best songs, for example, 'Girls And Boys In Love', but it's their newer, Mark Ronson-produced work that impresses most live, due to the fuller instrumentation and more reliance on keyboards and strings than horns. As much as they deny it, there's a real Dexys feel to their music - in the sprightly rhythms and Charlie Waller's sonorous, soulful voice - and it's both their strength and their weakness. As the sun comes out during 'Motorcycle', though, Latitude's loving it. TOM PINNOCK