THE VIEW FROM BBC THREE

Of course, any Placebo is better than no Placebo, and who wouldn't love the reworking of the stuff from the recent album? Set free from the trickery of studio wizardry, Placebo at Reading threw a lot more weight onto Brian's vocals - doubly so, as it seems they were having all kinds of trouble. Frustratingly, the TV coverage seemed to want to keep things tidy and so made every effort to keep the scampering guitar tech out of shot, the way Parliamentary coverage refuses to focus on the noises of off protest and confusion, so it was hard to tell what was actually going on.

Earlier, Brian Molko had popped up alongside Edith and praised the "magnificent Slayer, the quintessential death metal band", who he'd gone to see before they played their set. In a similar aside, Paul Smith had spoken about meeting with Eddie Vedder - Vedder, apparently, couldn't believe that he'd spent the time prior to taking the stage with Maximo Park watching Pearl Jam. We can't, either, to be honest, although probably for different reasons. That anecdote does probably tell you everything you need to know about Vedder and his approach to music, though - so bloody serious, faced with a field full of dozens of bands, it doesn't occur to him to go and see any of them.

People who know about these things assure me Pearl Jam were everything you could hope for from them; certainly, they were exactly as I'd feared.

Larrikin Love invited their mother (well, one of their mothers; unless she was Hutterite I doubt she could have given birth to all of them) to play spoons; oddly, she seemed less out of place onstage in the tent than Mark E Smith did with The Fall earlier. The audience seemed to be united in general bemusement (besides the front two rows, of course) and, frankly, Smith seems to have gone well past the point of wanting to win the curious over to The Fall's cause.

The posh girl who was doing the video diary ended up enjoying herself, as it turned out.

music mark e smith placebo brian molko the fall eddie vedder pearl jam