This sounds familiar. It’s a blast of Aaron Copeland’s “Hoedown”, a loud orchestral stirring the faithful many here tonight recognise immediately as the taped introduction to his shows he’s been using now for at least the last 10 years that still never fails to thrill and make you also laugh out loud. The voice of his long-time tour manager, Al Santos, follows, mock-serious. “Ladies and gentleman, please welcome the poet laureate of rock 'n' roll, the voice of the promise of the '60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the '70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to 'find Jesus,' who was written off as a has-been by the end of the '80s, and who suddenly shifted gears and released some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late '90s. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan." The cheer from the crowd that greets his name virtually drowns out what happens next, which is the sound of Dylan and his band kicking into “Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35”, almost before the introductory tape has finished, in a hurry clearly to get this show underway. It’s rambunctious, loose, full of funky mischief and rollicking good humour. Dylan’s stage right for the moment, impeccably cool in white Cordobes hat and natty black gambler’s suit, a riverboat charmer. And even though what’s being shown on the video screens flanking the stage is a static wide-angle shot of the stage and the people on it, with no close-ups, from what you can see, but perhaps more importantly hear, you’re inclined to believe Dylan tonight is in notably good humour. And no wonder. The band is already playing up a storm, a wholly jubilant racket. “Everybody must get stoned,” the audience sings along in ragged harmony and there’s a feeling already that this could be one of those special shows, the kind that for those of us who are inclined to think that The Never Ending Tour – which we have latterly been discouraged to call it, but do anyway - is the most compelling of all rock narratives makes our attendance almost mandatory whenever Dylan plays somewhere we can get to without having to sell the house and everything in it, a field in Kent, for instance. Much of this anticipation and early rapture is in great part due to the return to the ranks of Dylan’s formidable touring band of guitarist Charlie Sexton as a replacement for the departed Denny Freeman. Sexton’s more emphatic personality as much as his singularly exciting playing turns out as the evening unfolds to have had a galvanising effect on everyone we’re listening to, including Dylan. Whatever staleness Dylan might have felt a need to address by Sexton’s welcome re-enlistment is nowhere in evidence, a sense of reinvigoration and freshness of purpose coursing like an electric current through everything that now follows, starting with a version of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” cast in the bluesy light of Together Through Life and a bruisingly good “Stick Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” – with Dylan on guitar, standing shoulder to shoulder with Sexton, grinning beneath the wide brim of his hat. There’s a lot going on around him at this point, most of it exclamatory, the peerless rhythm section of George Recile and stalwart bassist Tony Garnier giving the thing a demonstrably funky foundation for Sexton’s guitar excursions and Dylan’s own trebly guitar flourishes. What seems to be at first a long coda to what would therefore be an abbreviated version of the song now turns out to be an unusually long instrumental break, a build up to a storming finale, Dylan coming back into the mix with an emphatic vocal, his voice tonight especially strong, despite the obvious degradations of age and a fair amount of hard living. Bob’s back at the keyboards for one of the best versions in years of “Just Like A Woman”, which in parts sounds like a Tex-Mex waltz, Dylan acknowledging the crowd’s full-throated participation with a little pause before every chorus. Evidently, he can’t keep away from the guitar tonight, and is next back alongside Sexton for a particularly raucous “Honest With Me”, from Love And Theft. “I’m not sorry for nothin’ I done,” he sings. “I’m glad I fought, I just wish we’d won.” The song’s momentum is such that at one point things, hilariously, seem to get out of hand, excitably shapeless, a rare loss of recognisable form. But Sexton and Donnie Herron on pedal steel bring it back into ferocious focus. Dylan’s on guitar again for a sublimely done “Simple Twist Of Fate”, pretty faithful to its Blood On The Tracks incarnation, his voice curling like smoke above the measured beauty of the band’s accompaniment. It’s a hugely poignant preface to the thundering thing that follows, which is the most powerful reading many of us have yet heard of “High Water (For Charley Patton)”, dramatically punctuated by Recile’s concussive drum fills and Herron’s hammering banjo lines. Dylan delivers the song standing in front of the drum-riser, shoulders hunched, singing into a hand held microphone, adding harmonica blasts that further add to the song’s anticipation of calamities to come. “See them big plantations burning, hear the cracking of the whips/Smell that sweet magnolia blooming, see the ghosts of slavery’s ships,” Dylan’s now singing and while you may have recognised the words, it’s unlikely you would have heard a version of “Blind Willie McTell” quite like this sulphurous overhaul of one of his greatest songs, the band’s smouldering heat something you can feel as keenly as you could this afternoon’s sun. “Highway 61” is just wild, a venerable warhorse, which by now you might think had been ridden to death, suddenly revitalised, played with a raw abandon that contrasts beautifully with the sombre elegance of “Workingman’s Blues # 2”, which follows. It cues up in turn a feverish “Thunder On The Mountain” and an awesome “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, the urgency of Dylan’s vocal matched by Sexton’s guitar, Dylan moving from piano to centre stage again, where he blows mean and savage harmonica breaks. Thanks to Ray Davies’ earlier stubborn petulance, and the over-running of his set, Dylan’s own performance is now consequently abbreviated, with time for only two encores: “Like A Rolling Stone” and “Forever Young”, both glorious. The band then line up with Dylan at the front of the stage, take their bows and are off then to wherever it is they are appearing next, where they will doubtless again illuminate the lives of whoever comes to see them play.

When I get to Hop Farm on Saturday still blessed-out on memories of Van Morrison’s set the night before, I find it a very different place. There are as many as 20,000 more people here today than there were yesterday, possibly an even greater number than that according to some estimates. Whatever, the field that last night had comfortably hosted a significantly smaller crowd is now unbelievably packed. There are queues everywhere. You get the feeling that you’d have to in fact queue just to actually join a queue and the queue itself you’ve just joined isn’t going to take you anywhere in a rush. To get from, say, here to there or a bit further involves the complicated negotiation of many bodies, clumps of people who seem simply to have collapsed in the heat. There are vast snaking lines of thirsty folk at the bars, others desperate to get to what seems to be the only water tap that’s running. It’s all a bit of a nightmare. To make matters worse, Laura Marling is on stage, doing something that involves communal whistling. I want to flee, but there’s nowhere to run. She does a version of Jackson C Frank’s “Blues Run The Game”, so she’s obviously not deaf to a good song, although listening to her own twee whimsies makes me wish for a temporary loss of my own hearing. Whatever connections to a noble folk tradition are claimed by admirers on her behalf, what I’m listening to sounds not much more than fey, a bit too precious. The audience largely loves her, though. And given their palpable affection for the demure songstress, you wonder how they’ll take to a celebrated reprobate like Pete Doherty. In the event, they find him irresistible, his bleary charm winning them over from the opening strum of “Arcady”. He’s nattily dressed in a black suit and white short, his usual uniform, if you like, both of which are soaked through in about 10 minutes. He’s also sporting a very large plaster on his neck, just under his left ear, which slowly begins to peel off in the heat, nothing apparently under it that I can see. Two ballerinas in tutus appear as he starts “For Lovers”, twirling attractively, if somewhat bizarrely, behind him as he plays. “I’ve been dusting off me Chas and Dave records,” he announces, introducing the first of several hilarious versions of “Hopping Down In Kent”, which turns things into a regular knees-up. “Can’t Stand Me Now”, “Music When The Lights Go Out”, “Down In Albion”, “What A Waster”, “Last Of The English Roses” and a rapturously received “Fuck Forever” follow and then he’s gone. Backstage about now, there’s quite a crisis. They’ve run out of beer and just about everything else. This makes someone called Keith Hatch, who according to a sign on a tent pole is in charge of things here, almost as popular in my personal lexicon of prejudice as Seasick Steve, who unbelievably is hauling his sorry self around the festival circuit for another summer and is on stage at the moment giving the blues a bad name. Mumford & Sons, on next, sound like a firm of undertakers in a Keith Waterhouse novel involving comic tribulations Oop North, whose services it strikes me now I could probably do with, so fast is what they’re playing making me lose the will to live. What is the point of these people? They get everybody going, though, including me. After about 20 minutes, I’m gone, man, I’m out of there. Ray Davies, a while later, starts promisingly with a defiantly raspy “I’m Not Like Everybody Else”, one of many Kinks classics he revisits this afternoon with an increasingly heavy hand. “All Day And All Of The Night” and “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” – great, great songs – are somewhat boorishly dispatched by a leaden band. How much better he might have been playing them on his own, not bellowing hoarsely over their stodgy hard rock. “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” is ruined entirely when for reasons I couldn’t begin to explain he decides to play the second half of it in the style, as he puts it, of Waylon Jennings. “Many years ago I was in a band called The Kinks,” he reminds us, perhaps unnecessarily, but to huge cheers anyway, introducing an ugly version of “You Really Got Me”. “They were a pain in the arse,” he adds and doesn’t seem to be joking, instead hinting at levels of residual bitterness, an oddly off-hand attitude to a past he is nevertheless not beyond exploiting even as he may resent the crowd’s preference for these old hits (he plays “Sunny Afternoon” next) over newer material like “The Tourist”, which recounts his shooting by a mugger in New Orleans and is delivered in an excruciating American accent. “Apeman” is even worse and when he starts up with the bits of “The Banana Boat Song” that used to mar Kinks’ concerts in days of yore you simply cringe. Around the time he does “Come Dancing”, he seems to be told that he needs to cut his set short because things are overrunning. This sends him into a right strop. “Fuck you,” he yaps at someone in the wings. “I’ll play all night if I want to.” His stand would be a lot more admirable if what he was playing was more worth listening to, but by now he’s ruining the immaculate “Days”, which screams out for a more delicate treatment than it’s currently afforded. We get, eventually, “Lola”, which the crowd love, and sing along to with much gusto. But who among us doesn’t feel deflated when he leaves the stage without playing “Waterloo Sunset”? Still, we have Bob Dylan still to look forward to. He’ll be on in about 20 minutes. See you back here then.