In 2006, the inaugural Hyde Park Calling - a two-day festival without the camping or the nutcases - starred the Who and Roger Waters. This year is ripe with veterans, too, with Crowded House, back after their 1996 split, joint-headlining on the Saturday. Singer Neil Finn sips whisky from a tumbler, eschewing the normal call-and-response routine to ask the audience to sing E-minor. Yet for all his relaxed charm, their performance hardly feels like a joyous comeback. When the rain sheets down and the umbrellas come up during Four Seasons in One Day, the group plug on gamely but ineffectively.

At 57, Peter Gabriel no longer dresses up as a flower or flings himself into the audience - smart combat jackets and cute, dad-at-a-wedding-style dance routines are more his style. His voice brims with drama on I Don't Remember, but it isn't until the set concludes with Solsbury Hill's merry psychodrama and Sledgehammer's buoyant stadium soul that the night really soars.

This message - that a damp audience want hits they can move to - is lost on former Soundgarden man Chris Cornell, whose melancholic solo material hardly lifts things on Sunday. By contrast, Aerosmith start with Love in an Elevator and close with a hollering Walk This Way, with Run DMC's DMC on rapping duties. The band have always sounded like they are soundtracking either a bar-room brawl or its emotional aftermath, and tonight, leaning more heavily on bluesy rock than epic balladry, they provide the energy the festival has been crying out for. It is a feast of bare-chested, pre-rehearsed abandon, Steven Tyler swinging his mic stand like a battleaxe and hanging off his bandmates like a bony constrictor. It may not be Glastonbury, but at least the walk to the tube gets the mud off your shoes.