In its second year, Manchester's Move festival is starting to shape up as the anti-Glastonbury. Glasters is synonymous with country air and green fields; this "urban music festival" sees the hallowed Old Trafford turf covered with polythene. It provides a perfect setting for anyone with phobias about cow dung, camping, mud and people on stilts. The only animals to make it past security are Super Furry ones and the Flaming Lips, who bring their extravaganza of happy death songs and dancers in fluffy gorilla suits.
On Friday the Manic Street Preachers delivered a classic, contrary set, kicking off with a hilariously inappropriate Die in the Summertime. Singer James Dean Bradfield's cheery mood darkened as he dedicated a song to the Daily Star, who recently ran a story about male human remains found in the River Severn, referring to missing guitarist Richey Edwards. Eerily on cue, as the band played Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky, the clouds turned an angry black.
That would have been the perfect moment for Depeche Mode's Dave Gahan to arrive. But it wasn't until Saturday that his electro doom-stomps Bottle Livin' and Personal Jesus whipped up the crowd. The daylight provided a rare opportunity to examine Gahan's marvellous tattoos. And you have to admire the dark preoccupations of someone who can say "Goodnight!" in blazing sunshine.
The heat helped Madchester faithfuls the Charlatans whip up something of a party atmosphere in Saturday's headline slot, with Tim Burgess looking surprisingly like a debauched Donny Osmond. Nevertheless, proceedings lacked Glastonbury's feel of an event.
That changed on Sunday, when an unusually restrained Badly Drawn Boy eschewed drunken shenanigans to mesmerise his home-town crowd with beautiful songs. When REM's Michael Stipe claimed that the fabulous weather was thanks to a conversation with "the man upstairs", things took on an almost religious significance. Midway through a messianic set of old classics and powerful new post-Iraq songs, Stipe claimed to see a man with a beard in the sky. As the hushed crowd gazed heavenward, he explained wickedly: "That cloud up there looks like Badly Drawn Boy."
