Perhaps because it arrives near the close of the festival season, there's always a frazzled, uneasy, end-of-tether feeling to Reading.

Come Sunday, people are virtually feral, huddled around paper-cup bonfires like plane-crash survivors. The sight of one man clad in a torn skeleton suit with furry tiger feet, red in the face and openly weeping, suggested that just two days of relentless rock might be more than enough.

This year was even more intense than usual thanks to an increase in capacity but no increase in space around the stages. The addition of big screens outside the marquees was an admission that seeing certain bands in the flesh was going to be an impossibility.

Among the acts who were booked into an inappropriately small space were Brighton's Kooks, currently selling more albums than anyone else on the bill. Thousands were prepared to watch them perform their breezy anthems from so far back that the noise from other stages was louder - true dedication.

Also filling their tent to bursting point were the Fratellis, three Scots who looked like imminent stars, but this year's biggest buzz was reserved for Klaxons. Their punky take on oldschool rave music prompted their fans to daub themselves in fluorescent paint and go completely spare. They'll definitely play the main stage in 2007.

Arctic Monkeys had a similar response when they played a small marquee here last year. Now they have rocketed up the bill to second on the main stage, though they could easily have headlined. With a set that was typically low on spectacle but high on musical fire, they confidently made the festival their own.

Also succeeding were Kaiser Chiefs, who had to contend with Friday night's heavy rain and a crowd unfamiliar with their new songs.

Singer Ricky Wilson treated the main stage as his personal adventure playground, scampering everywhere and trying in vain to start a Mexican wave (they don't work when everyone's already standing up). But new tracks such as Heat Dies Down and We are the Unremarkable, while somewhat less silly then their old material, were still instantly catchy and boded well for their comeback.

Friday's and Saturday's headliners, Franz Ferdinand and Muse, have already come back successfully with new albums.

Franz sometimes seemed too serious to fully engage with a crowd of this scale, although the addition of 11 extra drummers for The Outsiders provided one of the moments of the festival. Muse filled every inch of the site with sound, rising to yet another big occasion with bombastic style.

It was all too much for some, but they'll surely all be back again next year, hopefully to a field with a bit more room.