Just got back from Wild Beasts at the Obelisk Arena and it’s started tipping it down. After yesterday’s broadly sunny, hot weather, the heavens have clearly decided enough is enough. Still, without wishing to turn this into a Met Office update, let’s just say that the sun stayed out long enough to let us enjoy Wild Beasts. I was certainly quite taken with singer/guitarist Hayden Thorpe’s rather striking mullet and cut-off demin jacket. If anything, it serves to locate them even more intrinsically in an era – the Eighties – with which they clearly have an affinity. The reference points, specifically, are The Associates (particularly Thorpe’s stunning falsetto), Orange Juice and The Smiths. But, particularly when they play songs from their new album, Two Dancers, you could be forgiven for detecting, for instance, the lush grandeur of late period Roxy Music. Thorpe is happy to remind us that this is their third year at Latitude – I can’t off the top of my head think of any band who can make such a claim, so well done chaps. “We started off as young men, playing in the woods,” he says, before they graduated to the UNCUT Arena last year and now, “we’ve come of age” on the main stage. There’s certainly plenty to enjoy here. The nimble interplay between Thorpe’s and Ben Little’s guitars is a joy; tremendous, life-affirming melodies swooping and swooning in the rolling Suffolk countryside. And, while admittedly they might not have drawn the biggest crowd of the day, everyone is clearly enjoying their set. Anyway, I’m going to try and find a tent to keep dry in. I’ve been slightly slack this year in terms of seeing as much comedy as I’d like, so I’m going to see who’s on there. Hopefully, the rain might stop in time for The Vaselines and St Etienne in the UNCUT Arena later. Pic credit: Richard Johnson

One of the highlights of Saturday was undoubtedly Jeffrey Lewis, New York anti-folk hero, poet, comic book artist and general raconteur. He took awkwardly to the small Poetry Tent stage at about half 12 at night, and announced he was going to take the informal setting as a chance to debut a number of new songs. "These songs haven't really been performed before, and they might not ever be again," he said in his nasal drawl. We really hope they are, though - perhaps, Lewis' funniest set of songs yet, the songs he debuted upped the tragi-comic stakes of his earlier material to a near ludicrous level. One of the most impressive tracks was a rapid-fire gangster rap parody about murdering mosquitos in his cabin in Maine, titled (we're guessing) 'Mosquito Mass Murderer'. After a number of very funny and morbid songs, Lewis decided to change tack, saying that people often think all his music is just about death and self-loathing: "So I'm going to sing about something different - this song's about suicide." The resulting macabre track was a hilarious and gruesome account of his (fictional, of course) attempts to kill himself, which included swallowing rat poison (then trying to get his cheque cancelled when he believes the poison hasn't worked), jumping off a bridge (before being contaminated with toxic waste from a passing river barge), and putting a chopstick to your chest and running towards a wall (how else can you off yourself when you're eating chinese food?). A twisted renaissance man and, undoubtedly, some kind of genius, then. TOM PINNOCK

A rare-as hen’s teeth solo set from Thom Yorke kicked off proceedings on the Obelisk Stage at midday. The Radiohead frontman performed a set on guitar and grand piano, drawing on tracks from his debut solo album, 2006’s Eraser, a handful of Radiohead tracks, and some lesser-known tracks, including one new composition and a few seldom-played gems and fan favourites Yorke described as “left on the shelf”. The side-of-stage screens were switched off, suggesting Yorke is still not entirely happy under the camera’s gaze, but that aside, he was avuncular and chatty, bantering about Grace Jones’ G-string – “Could I pull one of those off?” he asks, and going on the crowd response, well, maybe – expressing dismay he wasn’t playing down by the riverside, and at one point, simply beaming “I’m having a lovely time!” The Radiohead songs, like “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” and “Everything In Its Right Place”, were made possible with deft use of a loop pedal, Yorke playing quick snatches and then looping them back, filling out songs bit by bit. Eraser was represented by brooding, largely electronic cuts like “The Eraser” and the overlooked “Harrowdown Hill”, Yorke’s harrowing song about the death of Dr David Kelly, the former UN Weapons inspector who died in mysterious circumstances in 2003. The currently nameless new song, meanwhile, was debuted on acoustic guitar, Yorke singing about “self-defence against the present” atop spiralling arpeggios recalling the sophisticated guitar-work of In Rainbows. The crowd called him back for an encore, which culminated with a run through Radiohead’s great lost song, “True Love Waits”. Elsewhere this morning, author and journalist Jon Ronson continued the mood of conspiracy theory and middle-class ennui, reading from his book Them: Adventures With Extremists - currently being made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and George Clooney - and relating a few anecdotes from the writing of his new book, which apparently involves him interviewing psychopaths in Broadmoor. Somehow, he even managed to make this gently funny, but such is Latitude. LOUIS PATTISON

So Saturday's been and gone - but (in no particular order) here's the UNCUT team's top ten highlights of Latitude's second day... 1. Simon Armitage The most important poet since Andrew Motion, perhaps, but there's more - he's also got the personality and humour of a stand-up comedian and the obsession of the hardiest music fan. Perfect for Latitude. 2. Passion Pit Hyped-up electro troupe turned the Sunrise Stage into a euphoric rave with their Supertramp-meets-LCD Soundsystem pop thrills. 3. Camera Obscura A real classy turn on the Uncut Stage from the Scottish indie institution. As tuneful and witty but thankfully less fey than the likes of Belle & Sebastian, Tracyanne Campbell's voice was truly a thing of liquid beauty. 4. Spiritualised's noise ending You can't beat a good noise jam, and Jason Pierce's gang didn't disappoint, summoning a skronking five-minute noise coda of shrieking guitars and beaten organ at the end of their Uncut Stage headline set. 5. Grace Jones A typically mental set from the legend, including asking if she was on the moon. 6. Jeffrey Lewis New York's punk-folk poet showcased a bunch of never-before-played new songs in the Poetry Tent on Saturday night. Death, suicide, self-loathing - but truly hilarious. 7. Marnie Stern The First Lady of guitar-tapping indie weirdness was on good (and drunken) form on Saturday, rocking up her sound, talking about her private regions and generally being entrancingly wayward. 8. Doves A wonderful and deeply-textured set in the Obelisk Arena from the Manchester heroes. 9. Michael Jackson dance competition Grace Jones' aftershow in the Cabaret Tent saw a moonwalking contest in tribute to the late great. UNCUT thought we'd leave it to the experts, though... 10. A woman wearing a papier mache moose head Must we say more?

There's less of the pushchairs and families at this year’s Latitude, but the site seems busier than ever - enough people to give Broken Records a pretty large crowd on the main Obelisk Arena stage. The gently hyped band have been described as the Scottish Arcade Fire ad nauseum for a reason, and today’s set, well tailored for the main stage, is suitably epic. Using acoustic guitar and accordion in the same way the Canadian group use hurdy gurdy and violin, the band thunder along on tracks like ‘Nearly Home’, all bluster and brawn under Jamie Sutherland’s histrionic voice. Undeniably powerful, but quite a lot to take in on a sunny afternoon. The Airborne Toxic Event don’t fare so well immediately after on the same stage. Another band using strings, this time alongside a more conventional rock backing, the group’s ultra-serious paeans of life’s darker sides, like single 'Gasoline', can come off as a little hammy. Much better is DM Stith (pictured above), who draws a disappointingly small crowd to the Sunrise Stage. Looking small and unassuming in a grey zip-up hoodie, Stith’s voice is a warbling, cutting holler, swooping between notes and bending vowels in its unique pronunciation. There’s no doubt the songs on his debut ‘Heavy Ghost’ are great, but it’s the arrangements which really impress – behind his sometimes scratchy but soft guitar playing, a violinist trills out complex ebbing lines like a whole quartet, while Stith’s drummer is almost like the folk equivalent of Can’s Jaki Liebezeit; forever moving and rolling without ever playing a standard beat. After the closing ‘Fire Of Birds’, performed solo by Stith with some spectral violin accompaniment, we head over to see The XX on the Lake Stage. The four-piece, lined up along the front of the small stage, seem a little nervous, though – perhaps at the thought of not playing in some hipster basement venue. Saying nothing to the audience, they run through their set of moody, almost shoegaze-y, electro faultlessly. Hand-triggered electronic drums create all the right taut beats, the guitars twinkle and echo just the right side of tentative and the soul and RnB-influenced vocals are equally sugary and sultry. The only problem is that every song is effectively exactly the same. While that never hurt The Ramones, AC/DC or Motorhead, etc. The XX have only limited stage presence to pull them through. Right, off to Spiritualised... Check back later for more dispatches from Latitude. TOM PINNOCK

They're at it again, those outdoor orators who bring their own brand of insight and wisdom to Latitude. Join us once more in a flurry of eaves-dropping... 1. "Some of the authors in the literature tent are looking a bit shell-shocked. They're way out of their Waterstones sherry and vol-au-vents comfort zone." 2. "You're lucky Clive was too drunk to hit you." 3. "I would imagine the quickest way to find out what he's up to next would be to click on to smugtwat.com" 4. "Steer clear of the pear cider. It's the Sunny D of alcohol." 5. "I want to avoid the girl in the big plastic bubble on the lake. I'm still having nightmares from last year." 6. "Have you seen that guy up on the scaffolding platform making sure nothing kicks off between the campers, like he's a lifeguard or something? Talk about Baywatch for crusties... 7. Toilet door graffiti: "Go home, dad." 8. "What is it with you and noodles? Seriously, have you no other topic of conversation in you at all?" 9. "Can someone please explain the whole Thom Yorke thing to me. People are talking about his little gig like it's the resurrection of Gandhi." 10. "I wouldn't expect you to buy me a drink at these prices, even if you were angling for a shag."

Watching Spiritualized headline the UNCUT Arena at the end of Latitude day two, with an astonishing set of heavy, psychedelic noise, I’m reminded of the first and the last time I saw Jason Pierce play live. I’m reminded of the first time, because as I pile enthusiastically into the UNCUT Arena, which is pitch dark, I start falling over people sitting on the floor. This is almost exactly what happened when I saw Spacemen 3 at what used to be London’s Town And Country Club, where I walked through a set of doors and fell straight over some bloke sitting on the floor – indeed, the entire audience were sitting down. A prone position, you might assume, being the best way to appreciate the medicated drones of Pierce’s first band. The last time I saw Pierce play was at Islington’s Union Chapel, at one of his Spiritualized Acoustic Mainline shows. There, he stripped his formidable back catalogue down to its basic components with quietly devastating effect. Tonight, he goes in the opposite direction. Accompanied by six other musicians, he basically turns up the volume and let everything hit you full on. It is, frankly, brilliant. Standing on the far stage right, wearing a pair of hefty shades, he barely moves throughout the set. Still, he manages to coax an impressively wide and frequently squally range of sounds from his guitars. We get the precise, plangent, echoey notes of “Walking With Jesus”, or a vicious, nightmarish wall of feedback on “Take Me To The Other Side”. It’s strange, perhaps, but when all is said and done about Pierce, I tend to think his talents as a musician are perhaps overlooked. His playing tonight, at least, is phenomenal. There’s a tremendous version of “Think I’m In Love”, beautiful drop bass lines and high-end spangly effects included. A joyous “Lay Back” that loops and grows and finally erupts into a burst of white noise. A fantastic “Come Together”, that similarly climaxes in a blistering whirl of feedback. I guess you could say, one of the key highlights of the weekend in the UNCUT Arena. Jason's an UNCUT hero. Spiritualized set list: Amazing Grace/You Lie You Cheat Shine A Light Cheapster Soul On Fire Walking With Jesus Think I'm In Love Lay Back Take Your Time Come Together Take Me To The Other Side

It's 20 minutes past the scheduled start-time for the main arena headliner, and our Saturday night diva has yet to emerge from behind the black curtain covering the front of the stage. Grace Jones, a woman whose concept of punctuality has traditionally been a little on the abstract side, may not yet have reached the level of fashionably late, but she's certainly crossed a line towards trendily tardy. But here she is now, majestically eyeing rain-soaked festival-goers from her vantage point of a raised platform that may well have been borrowed from the chaps who wash the outside windows of tall buildings, her deep drawl wrapping itself around the words of "Nightclubbing". It's pretty much a greatest hits set, with "My Jamaican Guy", "Demolition Man" and "Slave To The Rhythm" despatched with clinical efficiency, hardly veering (if at all) from their familiar recorded versions. Her recent Hurricane album features, but not excessively, and arguably the most entertaining aspects of the evening come when Grace decides to communicate directly with her fans between songs: "Wow! Wow! Wow! Wow! Wooooowwwww!!!! Am I on the moon?" (Quite possibly, love) "Give me something to suck on, please. I'm a little thirsty." "Oh, darling, a good conscience will kiss you as it bites you, you Portaloo sunset." "I don't know if you know this about me, but I like to dress up a bit." That last remark may well turn out to be the most phenomenal understatement in Latitude history. Never has a 61-year-old donned a pair of hot pants with such style and confidence, but it's the increasingly bizarre headgear that takes the breath away. Imagine Salvador Dali decreeing that everyone attending Ladies' Day at Royal Ascot has to buy their bonnets from the "especially bonkers" shelf of his haberdashers' store. Jones clearly isn't to everyone's taste musically, so it may not have been just the rain that had some of the crowd heading for the exits long before the end of her set. Those who stayed, though, witnessed a true one-off of a performer having a blast under a deep purple sky, pulling up to the bumper with outlandish glee. TERRY STAUNTON Pic credit: Richard Johnson

Reports on an indie-pop institution and the hottest band in blogland, fresh from Suffolk's dusty fields... Camera Obscura are not exactly what springs to mind when you brainstorm out your list of classic festival bands, but this slow-burning Glaswegian indie-pop outfit smoulder with style at the Uncut Arena. Done out smart in suits and ballgowns, they are clearly not trying to be anything that they’re not – “Thank you for letting us play a quiet one,” says Tracyanne Campbell, at one point – but songs like “Let’s Get Out Of This Country” and their nod to Lloyd Cole And The Commotions, “Lloyd I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken” unfurl beautifully, all whirling mellotron and warm brass. Arguably, they’re a band that’s had more success in maturing the Scottish indie-pop sound than any of their contemporaries – certainly, no late period Belle & Sebastian never sounded so well-wrought and effortless – and the sea of colourful balloons punted from fist to fist above the crowd confirm this is a band to get fanatical about, albeit in a slightly twee way. Passion Pit, meanwhile, probably can’t believe their luck. The brainchild of Michael Angelakos, who wrote the first Passion Pit songs as a Valentine’s Day present to his then girlfriend, they’ve since exploded across the blogosphere, and their set this evening at the Sunrise Arena confirms this is a band with a buzz about them. Essentially the authors of emotive electronic-pop songs of an intimate sort of nature, add one tent with a low roof and a thousand-odd bodies and we’ve got what looks like a real festival event, songs like “The Reeling” sending shivers of excitement through the crowd and, if my eyes don’t deceive me – seriously, it’s heaving here - a whole lot of crowd-surfing. Sure, they’ve got a sweet edge, but that doesn’t mean Passion Pit aren’t out to make you dance, too. Right now, her majesty Grace Jones is about to his the stage, so I'm off to stumble downhill again, doing my level best not to end up upside down in a ditch along the way. Also on the schedule tonight is a midnight performance from Jeffrey Lewis and, for the real festival hardcore, a 2am set from Chas And Dave. Will I make it that long? I'll let you know tomorrow. LOUIS PATTISON

Anyway, I arrange to meet a friend down at the Obelisk stage to catch Broken Music, who she’s recently seen playing to about four people in Manchester but thinks will be worth having another look at. So I’m just stepping through this little arch thing they have that you have to go through to get onto the leafy path through the trees and down the hill into the separate county, it feels like, where all the mini Latitude stages are when I’m pulled over for a random security check and asked to give my name to see if it matches the one on the laminate we are all obliged to wear. I larkishly say Lee Harvey Oswald, which I quickly regret, not just because it’s obviously not my name but more seriously takes about 20 minutes to explain that I am actually who it says I am on said laminate and not the Lone Assassin, the Single Gunman, who from a window in the Texas Book Depository shot JFK, in the process ruining Jackie’s dress with blood stain and brain parts. By the time I’ve cleared all this up, Broken Music have been and also gone, so Helen and I find some seats to see who’s next up on the Obelisk stage, which turns out to be The Airborne Toxic Event. They have one thing going for them as far as I’m concerned, which is that they’ve taken their name from the Don DeLillo novel, White Noise, but Helen is keen to see them because the last couple of times they’ve played Manchester, their shows have sold out so quickly she hasn’t been able to get tickets. Helen thinks they sound like a cross between Arcade Fire and The Killers, not a bad description. I spend most of their set struck between the resemblance of their lead singer to Robbie Williams trying to look like Born In The USA-era Bruce Springsteen while trying to sound not too much like Adam Duritz from Counting Crows. The surprisingly small crowd in front of the stage seems to like them well enough, though, so good on them. Patrick Wolf, looking like God knows what, looms into view just as Helen has to go off on some important business and I go with her, stopping off at the Poetry Tent just in time to hear former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion read a poem called The Mower, a moving elegy to his late father that first makes me laugh out loud then get an bit teary. I am then drawn to the Literary Tent, where Vivien Westwood has drawn a huge crowd for something billed as the Active Resistance Performance. Arriving late, I have no idea what this is all about, but she looks great, in a gown she might have worn on a Cunard liner in the 30s, on a cruise to end all cruises, icebergs permitting. She loses me completely, though, when she starts riffing on the intrinsic values of bamboo and so here I am. Doves are on now, with Spiritualized to follow, which means I have to as they say dash. Allan Jones

I remarked yesterday of the rather neat symmetry that took me to Fever Ray and Bat For Lashes. Well, something similar has happened again this evening. This time, it’s White Lies and Doves, who followed each other at the Obelisk Arena and who both, in admittedly different ways, are exponents on a similar style of music. This is what I’d broadly term big music. By which I mean, a particular Eighties rock sound – cascading drum patterns, sweeping synth sounds , chiming guitars, you know the drill. It’s the kind of thing bands like Echo & The Bunnymen did well, and to some degree The Chameleons, too. White Lies’ singer Harry McVeigh appears to position himself in the lineage of earnest young frontmen. You might think of Ian Curtis, the Chameleons’ Mark Burgess, Editors’ Tom Smith, for instance. He stares fixedly out at the audience when he sings, barely moving apart from to stab at his guitar. “”I met a friend I once knew at a funeral,” he sings at the start of “From The Stars”. He, and the rest of the band, dress in black. It’s very sincere. I don’t particularly have a problem with this – just so’s it’s on the record – and it’s pretty apparent that the audience are lapping it up. But, as I leave the stage and pass the Comedy Tent, where Adam Hills is racing 20ft high, pink, plastic poodles across the head of the crowd, I can’t help wishing White Lies lightened their mood somewhat, and relaxed. Doves, too, are part of this big music idea I’m kicking around. But, conspicuously, there’s a lot of difference between them and White Lies. Although they, too, deploy a similarly epic sweep in their songs, there’s something far more interesting bubbling away under the surface. As they race through “Jetstream”, “Winter Hill”, “Kingdom Of Rust” and “Two Of Us”, I’m struck at how broad and impressionistic their songs are. They don’t particularly subscribe to the notion of traditional songwriting. By which I mean, their songs are defined more by textures, than verse-chorus-verse-chorus-break-chorus. It’s perhaps understandable, considering the House music background of Jimi Goodwin and Andy and Jez Williams; a genre which privileges feeling and momentum over conventional pop constructs or dynamics. As it goes, Doves deliver a wildly popular set, Jimi himself a particularly avuncular figure, dressed in a long sleeve grey shirt, who has a good line in between song banter. “It’s nice to see so many kids and babies here,” he deadpans. “It makes us feel like a hip and relevant band.” They finish with a storming ”There Goes The Fear”, by far their best song, just as the final shades of colour leach from the sky. Right, Spiritualized are on in about 10 minutes, so I need to get myself off to the UNCUT Arena for Jason. Allan’s just popped a can of beer open and is raring to go. Space rock, here we come. Back later.

Waves of blinding camera flashes and unbridled shrieks of worship greet the grand dame as she emerges from behind a curtain, in a scene straight from an old time Hollywood movie premiere. But this is not Rita Hayworth or Lauren Bacall, but national treasure Vivienne Westwood, who has come to Latitude's literary tent to read from her "cultural manifesto". This is Active Resistance, a detailed and exhaustive study that aims to contextualise commerce, creativity and media into some semblance of ordered agenda. As Viv herself, resplendant in what looks like a gauze sari, explains in her introduction: "Art gives culture and culture is the antidote to propaganda. We all love art and some of you claim to be artists. Without judges there is no art. She only exists when we know her. Does she exist? The answer to this question is of vital importance because if art is alive the world will change. No art, no progress." Vivienne then expanded on her themes with the help of several readers, including a man dressed, almost inevitably, as a pirate ("I plunder for you! Stick with me and you might get a share of the bounty. My name is Progress!"), and versions of Pinocchio, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll's Alice, each hammily taking different sides of convoluted arguments. Pretentious? Certainly. But Westwood's ideas still bristle with humour and a healthy dose of self-mockery, curiosity and intrigue. It's typical behaviour from a woman who's every move in a long and fascinating career has never been less than interesting, who generates levels of affection normally reserved for pop stars or screen goddesses. On Saturday afternoon she made her fans fall in love with her all over again. TERRY STAUNTON Pic credit: PA Photos

So, day two at Latitude Festival, and a chance to wander around the site ensconced in full on sunshine - there are many little nooks all over the site. Come see...