Here's some random lists of things we've seen while out and about on site, assembled by the UNCUT Latitude work team. That's us. FIVE THINGS YOU CAN BUY ON SITE 1. A spiritual doorbell = £10 2. A copy of the Saturday Guardian from the supermarket tent in the camp site = £1.80 3. Dirk Bogarde's "Snakes & Ladders" from the bookshop = £3.50 4. Yellow Magic Orchestra's "You're Gonna Miss Me" (slight surface scratches) from the second hand record shop = £1 5. A comedy hat = £10 OUR ON SITE FOOD RECOMMENDATIONS Allan -- sausage baguette (£4) Michael -- chicken fajitas (£5) Farah -- chicken Thai curry (£6) Terry -- chicken fajitas (£5) Louis -- vegetarian Thai red curry (£6) FIVE BEST T SHIRT SLOGANS "Men Lie" (worn by a man) "I Don't Like Labour" (worn by a child) "Westerburg High Class Of '88" (for all you Heathers fans reading this) "Tom Baker For Prime Minister" "My Dad's In Prison" (worn by a baby!) More gubbins soon...

Just back from the Uncut Stage, which has hosted some pretty remarkable performances so far today. Opening the stage at midday was Wildbirds And Peacedrums, a Scandinavian boy-girl duo peddling an unusual, experimental take on the blues. Vocalist Mariam Wallentinis is blessed with the sort of gospel-tinged voice you wouldn’t feel terribly silly comparing to Amy Winehouse, say. It’s what the twosome do with it, though, that’s truly surprising. Sat behind the drums, Andreas Werliin whips up pounding, tribal rhythms which Wallentin uses as a bed for all manner of primal exhortations. “You see, I’m lost without your rhythm,” she pleads, kicking off her shoes and bounding, trance-like across the stage. It’s relatively short on tunes - although Wallentinis sometimes beats out simple melodies on steel drums – but really, though, it’s all about the raw, primal rhythms, building towards crescendos and staying there, right at the brink. Following is Marnie Stern, and the continuing lack of commercial success granted to this New York singer/guitarist is baffling in the extreme. I mean, what’s not to like? Pretty blonde in a dangerously short dress, playing the sort of most excellent electric guitar that would have Bill And Ted tossing the mane and throwing the horns. Today, Marnie seems to have turned down some of the super-complex, finger-tapping excesses of her albums in favour of straighter hard-rockin’ tracks like "Transformer", although it’s still a tricksy, often dissonant tangle that’s certainly ambitious in its musical and lyrical approach. Stern’s guileless charisma keeps this performance firmly on the map, though: whether chatting about vaginas, glugging beer and vodka, or trading flamboyant licks with her bassist, her performance is a joy to watch. A great show from St Vincent, too. “My name’s St Vincent and I’m from Dallas, Texas and I’m very happy to be here,” she says, by way of introduction. “This song’s called “Laughing With A Mouth Of Blood”. Which says a lot about Annie Clark’s peculiar mix of choral pop and unusually dark subject matter. Here, the pop miniatures of Clark’s recent album Actor are worked up with eddying clarinets and blasts of saxophone – and they sound pretty comfortable in their new skin. Right, that’s all for now – if you’re reading this from the site, I can recommend forthcoming sets from The XX on the Sunrise Stage at 6.45pm, Camera Obscura at 7.20pm, and of course, tonight’s Obelisk Stage headliner, Grace Jones. Catch you in a bit. LOUIS PATTISON

Predictably, perhaps, the afternoon’s biggest draw – so far, at least – is for Simon Armitage. At 2pm, the Poetry Tent is rammed, with the crowd extending about 20 people deep around the perimeter. One curious passer-by asks my neighbour who’s on. “Simon Armitage,” says the guy standing next to me. “Sorry,” says the passer-by, “I don’t know who he is.” “He’s only the most important poet since Andrew Motion.” “You’ve lost me. Who’s Andrew Motion?” “Obviously,” comes the withering reply, “you never studied GSCE English at the start of the Noughties…” It is certainly worth flagging up that the crowd here is, by and large, conspicuously young. It says much, I think, about the way Armitage’s work has impacted on a twentysomething generation of former CGSE students that he can inspire such affection, after the school texts have been shut. A lot of this is arguably as much down to Armitage’s persona as the body of work itself. He’s tremendously personable, filling in the background to each poem or reading with anecdotes and stories that are wry, warm and mostly self-deprecating. Here he is, for instance, talking about his native Huddersfield: “Huddersfield is a punk town. Punk came along, and it’s never really gone away. You tell everyone you meet that you saw the Sex Pistols last ever gig at Ivanhoe’s nightclub in Huddersfield. But we didn’t. We were too scared.” He has a brilliant, deliberately windy story about how, he and his wife, went on holiday to Cornwall. They discovered the Radio 1 Roadshow was in town and, for reasons they still are unable to fathom, decided to go along. “Just as we stepped into the venue, it finished,” he deadpans. The poem itself, “Roadshow”, is typical of Armitage’s brilliant writing, and transforms the Radio 1 Roadshow into a surprising thing rich with an impossibly exotic promise: “We were drawn uphill by the noise and light; a silver, extraterrestrial glow beyond the hill’s head; a deep, cardiovascular bass in the hill’s hollow chest” He reads, too, from Gig, his exceptional memoir of his failed attempts to make it in an indie band in the Eighties and how that set-back impacted on his decision to become a poet. It’s great stuff, and key certainly to Armitage’s appeal to a younger audience. Poetry, for him, is an elegant craft, and he understands that you can apply that craft just as readily to anything, whether it be Middle English poetry (his translation of Gawain And The Green Knight) or awkward fumblings with a guitar in the North of England circa 1984. Everything is there to be used, everything is accessible; this is not about ring-fencing poetry for lofty subjects and dusty volumes, but making it as broad church as possible. Fantastic.

It’s an early start for everyone today, so not long after what seems like daybreak I am making my way down the leafy trail to the Uncut Arena to see Wildbirds And Peacedrums, about whom a I know as much as I do the internal working of the combustion engine. On my unsteady way, I notice a sign someone’s pinned to a tree that say I LOVE YOU MORE THAN MY RECORD COLLECTION, a declaration of affection so passionate it must be an exaggeration. My determined march towards the Uncut Arena is further delayed when I call in at the Poetry Tent, where a blonde woman at a Perspex lectern, whose name it turns out is Molly Naylor, is reciting a poem, part of which is about her discovery of her “inner Marxist”. This makes a change from yesterday when at whatever point I dropped by people in cardigans were reading poems which consisted mainly of descriptions of urban blight as metaphor for the urban condition or else waxing nostalgically about the bands whose music they loved in their youth, which unanimously seems to have been The Smiths. There is serial mention, too, in their verse, of Ikea, apparently the very essence of evil in the modern world, unless I have got hold of the wrong end of their poetic schtick. Wildbirds And Peacedrums, meanwhile, turn out to be a young woman in a black lace top, satin mini-skirt and lime green tights banging a cowbell and shrieking loud enough to wake the dead (successfully so in my case) while her partner, a bluff young cove with a beard, smacks seven colours of hell out of a customised drum kit. It’s bracing stuff so soon after breakfast, but enthusiastically-received by a surprisingly large crowd, not all of whom can be sheltering from the drizzle that’s just started to fall outside. Their next number, which is something, I think, called “I Am Lost Without Your Rhythm”, is noticeably quieter – not exactly hymnal, but at least not quite so much like the sound of the brick-by-brick demolition of a factory chimney. They end quite strikingly with a testifying blues, a chain-gang holler, something that may originally have been recorded at Parchman Farm in the crackly 20s, a hint also here of a plantation gospel, the ghosts of slavery calling. It ends, deafeningly. At which point, it strikes me that 20 years ago these people would have ended up on the cover of Melody Maker after one single and a limited edition cassette, raved over by The Stud Brothers, David Stubbs and other champions of the noisily eccentric. On my way back to the Uncut HQ at the Latitude press tent to write this, I drop by the Literary tent where there’s a very serious debate taking place on the subject of TABLOID CULTURE: IS OUR NEWS MEDIA WALKING A NEW STREET OF SHAME? According to a solemn-looking man in a cardigan who I’m sure I once gave a guinea for a copy of The Big Issue, it is. Allan Jones

We've been ear-wigging on your behalf again, to bring you sagest, most insightful snippets of overheard conversations. Behold, the latest musings from Latitude's fields of philosophers. 1. "There should be an emancipation tent here, where cool kids can go and divorce their ridiculously-dressed parents." 2. "He's coming back. Change the subject and hide the brie." 3. Man walking past the comedy tent: "I've seen him on that telly panel show. He sits next to the funny one." 4. "Ding-chicky, ding-chicky, ding ding chick. That's exactly how the chorus goes. I can't believe you don't know it!" 5. "The only thing more ludicrous than a poet talking about typos in the American Declaration of Independence is the fact that 30-odd people are listening to him and nodding." 6. Girl shouting into mobile: "I'm at a festival...! Not sure, Altitude I think...! Let me check with Stacy and ring you back!" 7. "I remember nothing about Bat For Lashes apart from holding on to some rope. It was brilliant." 8. "I'm not entirely against jewellery on men, but that bracelet crosses the line into utter faggotry." 9. "I've got jam. Shit, I've got jam." A punter falls foul of the glass container ban at the festival entrance. 10. "Wait for me while I go to the loo. You can't dance to the Pet Shop Boys with a full colon."

An early Saturday highlight, for me at any rate, is Band Of Skulls, playing in the Sunrise Arena down in the woods. Such a bucolic setting might seem entirely incongruous for a band who specialize in sinewy, blues rock. And at such an early hour, too, when most people are still digesting their breakfasts. Yet, amazingly, it works. I suppose it might be something to do with the incredible earthiness of their sound, and it’s primal swagger, that they themselves seem perfectly at home among the trees and soil. What does, in fact, strike me as most incongruous about Band Of Skulls is how deeply their music references a specific kind of American blues – as practised by the White Stripes – that it comes as a shock when singer/guitarist Russell Marsden thanks the crowd in a conspicuously English accent. I was expecting an American drawl. Still, it’s fantastic stuff – bearded, blonde haired Marsden and his musical partner, singer/bassist Emma Richardson (looking like a young Chrissie Hynde) swapping lines, blasting riffs off each other, thundering their way impressively through their debut album, Baby Darling Doll Face Honey. Anyway, off to Simon Armitage. This looks to me like another highlight in the making... Back later.

Friday’s highlights, then. ** Fever Ray in the UNCUT Arena seems, by common consent, to have been an early Latitude peak. On stage lighting by way of standard lamps, a striking laser show and a backing band dressed partly as bird people. Oh, and the songs were pretty good, too. ** Pet Shop Boys covering Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” as high-energy disco. Chris Martin has never sounded so good. ** The Pretenders covering Dylan’s “Forever Young” on the Main Stage. ** Jeremy Warmsley covering Tom Waits. In French. In the Music And Film Arena. C’est bon, n’est ce pas..? Mais, oui. ** Jeremy Hardy’s brilliant, hilarious musings in the UNCUT Arena. ** The bloke in the woods last night dressed as a robot doing dancing to early 80s electro. ** Jesus for a day! There were people walking on the surface of the lake. We don’t know how it’s done, but we honestly saw festival-goers striding across water. ** Wheelbarrows for hire. This year’s festival innovation. The best and quickest way to transport tired and grumpy children across the site to beddie-bies. Aw. ** And our heartiest congratulations to festival-goers Julian and Dora, who got engaged during Regina Spektor’s set. We don’t know ‘em, they don’t know us, but we couldn’t help but wade in with warm handshakes when he got proposed. On one knee. Ring, everything. Heart-warming stuff. And an apology to anyone who tried to log on to the site yesterday evening, but found they couldn't. We had a few minor technical glitches – hey, it’s a festival, what do you expect? – but everything should be running smoothly now. Thanks for your patience. Anyway, off to Band Of Skulls, Simon Armitage and then cheer on UNCUT's own David Quantick, who'll be interviewing Rotters' Club author Jonathan Coe in the Literary Arena.

Following on from user-friendly sets by The Pretenders and Squeeze earlier in the evening, headliners Pet Shop Boys brought up the rear in Friday night’s poptastic triptych. In front of an ever-changing stage set resembling something between Pink Floyd’s famed wall and a giant’s Rubik cube, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe presented a savvy adaptation of their usual indoor theatrics that perfectly caught the festival spirit. It was as much about hats as it was hits. The duo take their headgear as seriously as their songs, but with a healthy dose of self-mockery. Tennant’s first costume combined a stiff-brimmed bowler with a spangly blazer that made him look like the Elizabethan Blackadder’s foppish chauffer, the ideal threads for the arch words and melodies of “Can You Forgive Her?” or “Heart”. “Go West” is the expected crowd-pleaser, fleshed out by a balletic troup of dancers, and there’s further visual splendour when Neil Tennant changes into Sinatra bow-tie and tux for the regretful ballad “Jealous” – all that’s missing is three fingers of bourbon and a battered matchbook. A crown and cape come into play for King Neil’s deliriously funny high-octane disco version of Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”, the duo revisiting the ironic twists they brought to U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name” 20 years earlier. Their glorious wit hasn’t diminished in the ensuing years, and neither has their knack for fashioning attractively packaged and engaging pocket pop symphonies. TERRY STAUNTON

Check your watches, it’s Squeeze o’clock. That means it’s the goodtime singalong hour, with South London’s finest kitchen-sink troubadours offering a master class is catchy pop brilliance. Glenn Tilbrook is nominally in charge, but he’s accompanied with gusto by several thousand members of the Deptford Fun City Under Canvas Choir (Suffolk branch), who appear to be as familiar with the lyrics of “Up The Junction”, “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Take Me I’m Yours” as the songs’ author, Chris Difford. It’s an endlessly pleasing jukebox of a set, but special mention should go to the vintage soulful slow-burner “Tempted”, which sounds crunchier and more finger-clickingly vital than at any time in its past, a testament to the fact that Squeeze’s reunion of two years and counting is not just a lazy take-the-money-and-run exercise. Amid all the pristine singles, they throw us a couple of curveballs, with a punky charge through “It’s So Dirty”, their early years ironic anthem to laddish misogyny (“It’s so dirty when it’s in the right mood/Give it some brandy and some Chinese food”), and the knees-up rockabilly of “Melody Motel”, which Glenn describes as “a jovial little ditty about betrayal and murder”. Perfect festival fare, of course. TERRY STAUNTON

It’s perhaps a strange moment of symmetry, but earlier I was fortunate enough to catch some of Fever Ray’s set, also in the UNCUT Arena. Clearly, there’s some parity between Karin Dreijer Andersson and Natasha Khan. Both own a significant debut to Kate Bush, and both are convincing exponents of their own, fantastic interior world. It strikes me that it’s Andersson who seems most connected to Bush’s more recent works. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the fact that Andersson referencing “dishwasher tablets” in “Seven” corresponds with Bush’s line about washing machines in “Mrs Bartolozzi”, but there. Anyway, we’re not here to talk about housework. More pertinent, perhaps, you can see further parity between the artifice concocted by both Andersson and Khan. While Andersson wears her face masks; thus it is that Khan wears her requisite head gear. The world Khan evokes, though, seems more beguiling in some ways than Andersson’s. While I dearly love the Fever Ray album, Andersson erects a number of barriers around her songs that Khan doesn’t. She has a certain beguiling, innocent charm. It’s not an insult, I think, to suggest there’s something quite sweet, almost sixth form, about her outfits and her stage persona, and the rather giddy way she brings you into her music. In a similar way, perhaps, to Florence Welch – you either go with it, or you don’t. In much the same way, you’re prepared to engage with the interior world evoked by Robin Pecknold with the Fleet Foxes. Anyway, let’s get the Bush comparisons out of the way. And how can you not have to address it, when Bat For Lashes open with “Trophy”, a percussive heavy number that can’t help but bring to mind “Hounds Of Love”? But – and this is the thing I like most about Bat For Lashes – there’s more going on than, hey, just Natasha Khan’s own dreaming. This is evidenced by the guitar playing of Charlotte Hatherley – a brilliant confection of Celtic swirls that call to mind everyone from Gary Marx in the Sisters Of Mercy to some of the more pensive work of Robert Smith in early Cure, or tense, wired post-punk. The UNCUT Arena, incidentally, is satisfyingly packed. There are, unfortunately, one too many prams being herded around in pitch darkness, which isn’t entirely sensible; although you might think it an entirely appropriate and bewitching end of night for many a small child. That’s it for us tonight. We’ll be back tomorrow with a pile of fun, including our own David Quantick interviewing Rotter’s Club author Jonathan Coe, a friend to UNCUT Shane Meadows, White Lies, Grace Jones and a personal favourite – Spiritualized. We’re off to roam the woods now to see what shenanigans we can stumble across. There might even be a beer. MICHAEL BONNER

“You’re a good-looking audience,” says Chrissie Hynde, before launching into “Back On The Chain Gang”. “Just what I’d expect. This is for your dad.” It is perhaps interesting to note that a lot of Hynde’s between song banter this evening is predicated around mostly wry, self-deprecating references to her past. She dedicates “Kid”, for instance, to late band members Pete Farndon and Jimmy Honeyman-Scott, finishing with “Put the kettle on, we’re not far behind you.” It is, you might think, particularly apt then that The Pretenders choose to cover Dylan’s “Forever Young”. I should apologise if this sounds like a faintly bizarre digression, but at one point, I’m reminded of a comment made by Pam St Clement, who plays Pat Butcher in EastEnders. When asked about Pat’s character’s fondness for oversized hooped earrings and blousy, low-cut dresses, she explained that she located the look for Pat in a time when her character believed herself to be at her peak. There is, certainly, some truth in the notion that people will try and lock themselves, in one way or another, in a specific era; whether it be musically or stylistically. Indeed, Chrissie seems to be wearing pretty much the same clothes she’s worn for the last 20 years. A black and white striped waistcoat, blue jeans and cowboy boots, looking for all the world like Keith Richards younger sister. You might wonder, even, when she delivers lines like “The happiest days of my life” in “Chain Gang”, or “If I come and go like fashion” from “Don’t Get Me Wrong”, quite what’s going through her head. She is certainly conspicuously aware of her band’s legacy, and how that derives from a wealth of immaculate pop songs that, for the most part, are over 20 years old now. “We were going to play a bunch of new songs,” she says, prior to “Stop Your Sobbing”. “But we just thought – fuck it.” It’s rare, arguably, to find a performer like Hynde. By which I mean, an artist who has grown old with her grace and poise, but, crucially, also understands the very intense connection the audience have with specific elements of her impressive back catalogue. And, equally as important, is happy to indulge in it. “You want something a bit cheesy, a bit cheap? Well you must me…” Then it’s into “Brass In Pocket”. Without wishing to sound ghoulish, but I wonder how deeply Hynde is still affected by the deaths that have befallen The Pretenders – certainly, the doff of the cap to Farndon and Honeyman-Scott would suggest that they still figure, to a greater or lesser degree, in her thoughts. You might be tempted to assume that, having lost two friends so early in her career, that there’s something about those songs that have an even greater immediacy for her. Anyway, let’s leave such pontificating for the theorists. Frankly, they were amazing. Even “Stand By Me” is reclaimed from being an 80s power ballad into a thrilling, communal event. Right, off to try and see some of Jeremy Hardy's set, then it's Bat For Lashes. See you back here later. Pic credit: Richard Johnson