Saturday's bill at this most corporate of festivals seems designed to bestow spurious rock'n'roll cool on acts no one needs to see playing in a field - particularly Pink and Dido, who, in particularly muddled scheduling, plays before headliners Muse. Muse have a light show Jean Michel Jarre would think over-elaborate. The sound is similarly overblown: Rush refracted through parts of the Pixies, Radiohead and Jeff Buckley. Occasionally a riff would surface briefly before being pulled under by a merciless riptide of virtuosity-for-its-own-sake. Muse's trump card, however, is their absolute lack of cool, lassoing both a young audience unbothered by the anxiety of influence and an older crowd perhaps alienated by the dazzle of British music's fleeting trends.

Sunday, thankfully, brings Scissor Sisters, continuing their festival-trouncing summer run, playing to a crush that extends as far as the eye can see. Getting the best part of a vast festival crowd singing along to a song about coming out to your mother is no mean feat. If only Faithless had been similarly subversive on the previous day. Immensely well-meaning, their politics is drowned out by the stadium techno and entry-level jazz-funk of their songs. Strange, too, how much parts of their set sound like Level 42. Seeing Scissor Sisters and N.E.R.D. underlines how characterless Faithless are. N.E.R.D. are a riot of miscegenated funk, both weirdly dislocated and utterly instinctive.

The band of the weekend, though, is surely the Pixies. Playing second to last on the main stage on Sunday, their blistering, euphoric set would be hard for any band to follow, and the Strokes have more to prove than most. Their wired, sometimes tinny sound has become muscular, and Julian Casablancas's hoarse croon can be a lovely thing. Songs from their debut album have the most punch, but it is still too soon to write them off. Of course they can't match the Pixies. But who could?