As might be expected, Wonderwall, Champagne Supernova and Cast No Shadow were highlights of last night’s V Festival, Chelmsford branch.

Alas, they weren’t delivered by Oasis. Despite spending Saturday afternoon watching Manchester City and Saturday evening grappling with the hits at V Festival, Stafford branch, the headliners cancelled at the last minute.

Apparently Liam Gallagher was feeling a little bit poorly, but where once brother Noel (who had also watched City, but from a different executive box) might have taken the vocal reins, he too took the day off.

As a result, poor Athlete were almost booed off when they tried to dedicate Black Swan Song to Oasis, as was Gary Lightbody, whose Snow Patrol were upgraded to headliners, when he referred to “the mighty Oasis”.

Gallery: V Festival Highlights

Ideal second fiddles, Snow Patrol battled manfully and turned Chasing Cars into mass karaoke, but, tellingly, even that wasn’t as well-received as their Wonderwall and Champagne Supernova covers, while the ever-earnest Keane had tackled Cast No Shadow with similar results.

With or without the Gallaghers, the V Festival is a peculiar beast. Now in its 14th year, unlike competitors from Glastonbury and Creamfields to Latitude and Bestival, it makes no effort to engender a special atmosphere and its booking policy is so conservative I half expected David Cameron to MC. Even so, it remains a useful weather vane for the state of British pop. Its organisation was patchy, however. The site was sign-free, leaving countless hordes wandering like a lost tribe of Israel in search of noodles and lager; even discussing the lavatories would break hygiene laws; functioning waste bins and litter collectors would have stopped the site resembling a filthy municipal dump; and chips (even so-called “curly fries”) should not cost £4.

The crush to see Lady GaGa (unfathomably marooned as a support act on a minor stage) was not for the faint of heart, but her set was a triumph, despite her breaking a heel during Love Game.
There were other successes. Elbow offered lovely summery music for a lovely summery evening. The Human League — with Phil Oakey in a suit, shirt and tie — rattled out glorious hits suitably gloriously, while the highly regarded Swedes Miike Snow offered further symphonic synthesised delights and Biffy Clyro’s topless (they must have given themselves terrible sunburn, poor lambs) punk was a testosterone-fuelled burst of energy.

Elsewhere, Paolo Nutini offered something you might hurry past at an Underground station and while Katy Perry’s energetic attempts to escape the one-hit wonderdom of I Kissed A Girl are admirable, her version of Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now will live long in the memory: I’ll be having nightmares about it for decades.