Photographs by Lili Forberg

Saturday morning

Standing in the sunshine waiting for an interview with the Hold Steady. It's not going to happen.

It's taken too long to get onsite.

We have just been taken by the authorities on a re-education tour of the site. The Hold Steady will have to hold steady. Angry clouds hover overhead. First on our list is the Bravery who were a band du jour when they played Oxegen two years ago but whose sophomore album has yet to get a release here.

Sam Endicott sits down and the first thing to notice is the funny haircut has gone and he's taken to wearing a plaid shirt buttoned all the way up. And he's extremely nice. Fickle as we are, we like the Bravery again.

Sam tells us about the new record. "The main difference is that the first record we tried to make the whole thing a dance party but with this we didn't want to limit ourselves. So there's fast songs and there's also slow songs. It's kind of all over the map."

He is dying to see Queens of the Stone Age later on. "They are so heavy but lyrically they are also really funny. There's a song on the new album called 'Make It Wit Chu' and that song is just genius. But it's weird how they can be so heavy and spooky and also funny at the same time."

With first interview done it's time to head outside. Oh there's Avril Lavigne and surprisingly she's really good. Pink flags, pink costumes, hell she's even got a pink mic. And she's hot. We both nod. But we have to go, taking in a few minutes of a scorching Delorentos set before heading off to meet Editors frontman Tom Smith.

1pm

As Smith approaches, a weak-at-the-knees fan asks for his autograph and he duly obliges. He'll have to get used to the fame when his band's massively anthemic An End Has A Start album goes global. "Recently some 15-year-old kids came up to me on the Tube and said: 'Hey Mr Editors, where are you getting off? Munich?' It's hilarious."

In the background a giant screen shows the Live Earth festival. What does he think of that?

"It's a tricky one. Of course the issue needs awareness raised, of course it does. There are obviously compromises made with bands doing it and getting on planes to do their own shows.

There's a conflict or contradiction there. We weren't asked to do it and I don't know what we would have done. I'm not really anti or very pro the issue. I find it hard to decide what is the right thing to do and yet it is good the issue is being talked about."

So who is he going to check out at the festival? "The Macabees. I like his voice. It's very endearing. There seems to be a lot of bands from that ilk . . . NME generation bands . . . and what separates them for me is his voice. Muse as well. They're always good for a bit of full on stuff. Snow Patrol as well; they are good friends. The Kings of Leon are a really great band. I've seen them three times recently.

"On days off when you're touring I always check to see who is playing in whatever town we're in or when we are at home and just go. The way you like music changes a bit when you are in a band. You become more cynical.

When I was first discovering bands I would love everything.

When I was a lot younger whoever played Gloucester . . . which was no one . . . I loved. Now even Arcade Fire, who are obviously a phenomenal band, I was sitting there watching them and thinking, 'Yeah, they're really good but the gig's probably an eight.' The greatest bands on earth and your like. . . it's terrible. The National are amazing. I've listened to their current record a million times. The same thing happened with Elbow."

Interview over, it's time to check out some more music.

First up The Gossip. It's amazing the alchemy between the guitarist, the drummer and Beth Ditto's voice. Honesty and integrity go a long way towards helping us forget the vertical rain that lasts their entire set, with Ditto's declaration that "queer love is the best love" and a cover of 'Careless Whisper' sending us happily over to Kings of Leon on the main stage. The crowd is enormous and although we're far back the musicality of the boys shines through. Plus the sun has come out.

There's no such worries about the next act, Interpol on the second stage. The evening is drawing in suitably while the New Yorkers play a set that is best described by Kieran from the Delorentos (see panel). For headline act Muse it's time to head for the pit. By the time we get there it's past midnight, their scheduled start time, but there's a problem with one of the screens so it's almost 12.45am before they start. But it's well worth the wait. The set is awesome, the volume of the PA is so loud we stand there in the mud and feel like we are about to be lifted up above the crowd like Dorothy and dropped in Kansas or Naas. We'll go after the next song. But each song is so jawdroppingly amazing we just stand there transfixed.

It makes the bus journey home and the scenes of Oxegen-like drunkenness on O'Connell Bridge an irrelevance.

Sunday 2.30pm

Hosed down and scrubbed up we return to the site in pretty good time. It's lashing rain and Kele Okereke and Matt Tong are refusing to leave their dressing room to come to the press area for interviews. Their recordlabel management is kind of freaking out. The word 'divas' is mentioned a couple of times by various people. Eventually, they emerge, hands in pockets. Kele, we are informed, will not be doing any interviews, so Matt steps up to the plate.

"Everywhere we've played it's been raining. It doesn't appear to be anything new, " he begins.

Their second record, A Weekend In The City, Kele's tribute to London living in all of its cokedup, lonely and sexually ambiguous glory, is being toured heavily following a positive reaction from the press and the buying public. "I think the more we return to various territories, the more the fans have heard the record, the better the reaction has been. So it's been great."

They've had a few massive gigs recently, have Bloc Party: Glastonbury was one of the "pinnacles of this year" and the day before Oxegen they played Live Earth. "It was one of the weirdest days of my life and hugely enjoyable at the same time.

Nervewracking. The charity gig has polarised certain opinions.

Obviously you're trying to draw people's attention to global warming and at the same time you're contributing to it. We kind of saw it as a means to an end really."

3pm

We're in need of a bit of healing after that so who better to talk to than Sinead O'Connor. She's just arrived in from Glasgow and can't wait to play. "I absolutely adore these kinds of shows, " she says, "it's much more rock 'n' roll . . . there's no soundcheck, I love that. We all think too much in this business to make things perfect."

She's not going to play much from her excellent new album Theology because it's a festival and people just want to hear stuff they know. But she is going to see as much as she can.

"In Glasgow I saw the Arctic Monkeys. I had heard about them but never heard their music . . . they were incredible.

And I saw The Coral . . . they were great. And I saw this band called Bloc Party and I couldn't decide whether I loved them or hated them. Even just watching these shows makes me fall in love with music again. You make sense of yourself when you are around other musicians."

Sinead, who will be touring for real in the autumn, was hoping to check out Amy Winehouse but she pulled out. "But I did see Lilly Allen recently. I haven't seen Arcade Fire but I hate the name . . . it's really ridiculous of me, I know. I also saw The Skids from the side of the stage but it was really stressful."

5.45pm

Matt Berninger, the singer from The National, stands with his hands in his pockets near the onsite TV studios, almost achingly shy. His soft and quiet accent is a million miles from the brooding baritone in which he sings. The National offered some of their first tracks free on their website, making it easier for bloggers to share their tracks.

It's a method Matt thinks makes a lot of sense: "I think if you're making songs, you want people to hear them. That's the first thing you should care about if people are downloading your songs. If anyone complains about that, it's kind of silly. For smaller bands, it's nothing but a good thing because more people find out about us."

Referring to The National as "a smaller band" is a bit of a stretch at this stage. Their third record, Alligator, topped best album lists almost everywhere in 2005 and their fourth, Boxer, released this year, looks set to do the same. Their fan base has grown from "just New York" to "New York and Paris" to "evening out this past year.

We're still a kind of underground band. Everywhere we go now, there's some kind of fan base, which is pretty exciting."

Matt wants to see Sinead O'Connor. "Did I miss it already?

Aw, man. That sucks. I think we're gonna see Arcade Fire . . . it would be nice to meet up with them again."

Meanwhile Jamie Reynolds from nu ravers Klaxons shows up. He lost his band earlier but has just been reunited so it's all good. We try to get Jamie to interview Matt and vice versa but it's not going to happen.

Klaxons and the National don't make an obvious venn diagram so we'd best leave it. Jamie tells me it's amusing that he managed to change the music business from his flat in south London.

"I will never fail to find it amusing that I managed to get the world's media talking about a non-existent music scene. I will never not find that funny."

Jamie (27) loves that young people love his band and admits that, despite writing a song called 'Gravity's Rainbow', he's never read a Thomas Pynchon book.

"Simon [the guitarist] claims he read it while working in a call centre." And here comes Simon. He doesn't look like he wants to be asked.

6.15pm

Dizzee Rascal has discarded his plastic 'Mace' bag and is joking around with fans, posing with one guy's girlfriend who says "don't kiss her" as he takes a picture with his phone. "I better get my rapper poses on, " Dizzee says, when our photographer starts snapping away, and he begins to throw various shapes. "I used to just stand like this, " he says and makes like a statue.

He's pretty hilarious. "I was in T In The Park yesterday, Roskilde before that and Amsterdam before that. And useless baggage claim, " he says, throwing his arms up in the air.

So, straight to the point: how does he feel about being the great British hip-hop hope? "I didn't know I was." Ah, c'mon Dizzee, we say. You won the Mercury Award! It's not the first time you've heard this question. "I just done it man.

All I want to do is make the biggest album. Anyone that talks to me about conquering America, I mean, I want to conquer the world. America's just part of it."

He's got other problems to think of: "D'ya get me? I still find it hard to get daytime radio play. Even though, like, I've sold a lot more than some of the new artists they put on there. Politics. I'm still seen as a polarised artist." We talk about how most of the artists playing Oxegen, which 80,000 people have come to see, don't get commercial radio play at all. "Yeah, it's a weird one. It's really fickle a lot of times but there's a lot of love out there as well."

Dizzee is a very smart, very young man. "Twenty-two, " he says with a smirk and a nod.

"I'm still growing though." We share a joke about Dizzee Rascal's productivity versus ours.

He guffaws away openly and with a light heart.

To a certain extent, Dizzee has been adopted as much by white indie kids as his black East London peers. "I love it man, " he says. "I want to bring my music to as many people as possible. I understand what genres are but the people who identify through my music take their own different things.

My main objective anyway is to make people jump around and have a good time."

7pm

Speaking of jumping around and having a good time, Arcade Fire take to the main stage and Win Butler reinforces his status as god by stopping the showers and conjuring up a rainbow.

Anyone in the pit is calf deep in mud and rain water. Actor Tim Robbins dances at the side of the stage and takes pictures of the crowd throughout the phenomenal set. And suddenly all the muck, the drunks falling on you, the people emptying plastic cups of piss dangerously near your toes and the flying bottles are very much worth it.

Delorentos singer and guitarist Kieran McGuinness on Interpol (NME stage, Saturday night)

TWO years ago, almost to the day, I watched the best gig I'd ever seen. New York four-piece Interpol had just released their sophomore album, the brilliant Antics, and I was entranced, watching every move and reliving every note with the thousands of other fans.

Halfway through my friend dragged me out to get my lift home and, although I pleaded for another 10 minutes, I had to leave. This year I wasn't going to make the same mistake: I was going to be front row centre. From the first staccato note of new song 'Pioneer To The Falls' (from new album Our Love to Admire) to the last beat of live favourite 'PDA', I planted myself in the muck . . . and I wasn't disappointed. Lead singer Paul Banks doesn't have the onstage charisma of a Johnny Borrell, and sometimes the music is TOO perfect, but the band doesn't mess about, instead playing intricate soulful music with choppy guitars and standout basslines.

Guitarist Daniel Kessler is the most energetic, flicking and twitching with the music in complete command of the audience's attention . . . even if bassist Carlos Dengler is beginning to resemble a Goth Dick Dastardly with his cape and moustache.

The flow of the muscular set is interrupted by new song 'Mammoth' but then the highlight comes with two Antics cuts, 'Evil' and 'Not even Jail', the latter becoming a stunningly climactic epic which brings the house down.

With a tight, tense, set Interpol were my highlight of the weekend.

On 20 July, Delorentos release a new single, 'Stop', taken from their debut album 'In Love With Detail'

David Kitt on the Wu-Tang Clan (Pet Sounds stage, Saturday night)

I FIRST saw the Wu-Tang Clan in 1993. I was working in Paris at the time and they were playing in Cologne in a club with about 200 people in it . . . the type of place you are supposed to hear this music. Oxegen was a big thing because for the first time in a long time all seven of them were there. Maybe some of them were stuck for a few quid.

It was midnight before they came on so I was in a pretty pleasant state of inebriation and I managed to get to see them from the side of the stage . . . giving them high fives before they went out.

The state of me . . . it was like reverting back to your teenage years . . . but to me this band is The Beatles of hip hop.

The most remarkable thing was how up for it they were. It wasn't just another gig and they worked the crowd incredibly, particularly Method Man.

They played mainly stuff from the 199397 period so I knew 80% of it and the thing that stood out most was the razor sharp wit and the gang mentality that they don't seem to have lost. They were trading lines and nursing each other along which is what the best bands do.

The biggest let down was the sound.

I had played the same stage a little earlier and I also stuck around to see Air but it is so hard to hear any detail in the songs. In the end you end up relying on familiarity with the songs.