The watercooler moments of the Reading Festival. If there was a watercooler, and not just a lot of beer HIGHS Jack White's hair You can look like this, too. Just go into your salon and say: "Hey, stylist. Make me look like a work colleague of my mother's" Shoe shop assistant, town centre, Saturday Observed placing pair of mud caked econo-wellies into bin bag. Her expression: "Has it really come to this?" Pint pot collectors Don't just throw it at someone during Avenged Sevenfold! Your empty pint pots can be collected by someone and exchanged for a very small amount of money. Feeder cover They channel the spirit of Readings past and do Nirvana's "Breed". Yes, really. "The Anti Christ" The lead guitarist from Tenacious D. Looks like Tony Iommi. Plays like Buck Dharma. We're in! LOWS The hopeful (Shouting into mobile during Bloc Party) "I'm holding my pint up! Can you see me?" Oh, dude, there you are! Thank god for your failsafe meet-up plan. The sound Bit of a non-negotiable one, this. As the kids say: "Turn it up!" Various "atmospheric issues" are blamed. The sign: "Crowd surfing is dangerous". Yes, but hey, at least we'll only be hurting our backs, not our ears, right? Self-graffiti We're still doing this, are we? Low point: a girl with "Will fuck for ket" written on her shoulder. Still, at least drugs didn't affect her penmanship. Enormous teenage congas Sure, you don't want to get separated from Megan and Seth. But don't walk on my fucking noodles, all right? JOHN ROBINSON

There's not too much that's ironic about Metallica, but the band's terrific Reading Festival performance on Sunday night illustrates that such ironies do still exist. The main one is essentially this: here is a huge band that will go to extraordinarily complex lengths to give the appearance of keeping things simple, just like a small band would. It's the band's continued battle, and as they enter the closing stages of new single "The Day That Should Not Come", halfway through their set tonight, you'd have to decide that they'd won it. Having begun like Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper", the song ends with the bloodthirsty high-speed kind of thrash that Metallica patented when they debuted in 1983, and that's surely the desired effect. The crowd roars. Undoubtedly, it's been a success. Throughout their show, Metallica do what they can to create such small band intimacy and intensity, and in this, they are ably assisted by a great repertoire of tricks. There are huge video screens to give you every detail close-up. There's a "drumcam" to give you a view of Lars Ulrich's sweating face. There's some terrific pyro during "Ride The Lightning", which perceptibly warms the night. Even James Hetfield's language is back to basics. "Metallica," he grunts, indicating the band. "Reading," he says, pointing at the crowd. It's as if he's just discovered us in the jungle, and he's trying to make contact. So fronted by the monosyllabic Hetfield, Metallica do a magnificent job of redefining their own age of thrash metal innocence, by homaging their past. While in the recording studio they continue to battle to find a way forward, to climb down from megastardom and reconnect with their younger selves – most recently for the Rick Rubin produced new album "Death Magnetic" – in the field, they do it effortlessly. The band may be getting older – there are a couple of brief "Intermissions" – but their setlist is forever young. Tonight – apart from the new single and new song "Cyanide" - you won't find much from the band's recordings post 1991's "The Black Album". Instead, from "No Remorse" through "And Justice For All", and "Master Of Puppets", the band revisit their past with a setlist of greatest hits. All round, it's a perfectly understandable policy. For one thing, we find today's Metallica attempting to win one of the biggest propaganda battles since World War II: with the band polling low in opinion public opinion post Napstergate, they are eager to please, and happy to jump through hoops to retain their loyal heartland. For another, more rocking reason, this is simply great stuff. In Britpop terms, Metallica didn't just make one "Definitely Maybe", they made three. And from these three triumphant albums, the band drink heavily, and often. James Hetfield, however, is keen to remind us of one of the reasons we're here. There is, after all, a new album to promote. "Yes," says Hetfield triumphantly, as he announces the fact. "Newtallica!" So far it doesn't sound so different from Oldtallica – but that may be a reason to celebrate just the same. JOHN ROBINSON

The Last Shadow Puppets played the NME/Radio 1 stage at Reading Festival this evening (August 24), bringing with them a 16-piece orchestra. The two frontmen, Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner and Miles Kane from The Rascals, greeted each other warmly on stage as Turner joked 'Alright, Miles?' before opening with 'Calm Like You'. But the band suffered from sound problems and restarted the song after a few minutes realising that that Alex Turner's guitar, as well as the 16-piece orchestra, couldn’t be heard for much of the song. At its end, Turner said to the crowd: "Shall we do it again? Ever so sorry about that. You deserve better, you've been around all weekend and you're tired, you want the full thing." The band played 11 out of 12 songs from their UK Number One album 'The Age Of The Understatement' to a packed crowd as girlfriend Alexa Chung and her friend Kate Moss looked on from the side of the stage. Turner then caused another false start in the intro to their current single 'Standing Next To Me', admitting: "That was my fault this time, let's go again." They played: 'The Age Of The Understatement' 'Black Plant' 'Only The Truth' 'The Chamber' 'Gas Dance' 'My Mistakes Were Made For You' 'Cyst' 'Separate And Ever Deadly' 'I Don't Like You Anymore' 'The Meeting Place' 'Standing Next To Me' 'In My Room' Nat Davies

As the Reading Festival moves into its second day, you wouldn't be wrong to expect a hint of nostalgia in the air. Yesterday, after all, there was heavy rock, and the return of old favourites Rage Against The Machine. On Sunday, there will be the return of the reassuringly sturdy Metallica, and with them, yet more heavy rock. Today, however, it's all change. A day characterized in the main by a rather more pop mood – a calm, if you like, before Metallica's storm – there are moments of fairly unequivocal modern fun to be had. These could be said to start with a pretty decent showing in NME/Radio 1 tent from The Ting Tings (who prove to be not just a band with one good song, but three), and end with The Killers, fighting against extremely poor sound to deliver the likes of "Somebody Told Me". Still, the seeker after interesting, but rather more traditional fare would not have been disappointed either. In the tent, in the afternoon, we find plenty of interest. Not least a man wearing an empty wine box as a hat, and another on whose arm is written, in capital letters, simply: "KNOB". There is also a terrific performance from Seasick Steve. A festival favourite anyway, thanks to his winning blend of blues hokum and rambling storytelling, Steve responds to the highly timetabled environment of this festival perfectly, sacrificing some of his more lengthy digressions, but still retaining an element of surprise. "I need a girl," he says, at one point. And sure enough, a young woman (named Alice, in fact) pretty much instantly responds to the grizzled ex-hobo's demands, coming to the stage to be serenaded with a song called "Walking Man". Elsewhere Steve is joined by his youngest son on inaudible washboard, and leaves with an overflowing cup of goodwill. If Seasick Steve's blues sets the old time scene, an early evening set from The Raconteurs fleshes out the sepia picture – here, after all, is a band whose performance appears on the video screens in black and white. From that promising touch, this, though proves to be a rather mixed bag. In principle the joint project of White Stripes man Jack White and his chum Brendan Benson, in practice it's clear that The Raconteurs are only a joint effort in the same sort of way Jimi Hendrix Experience was. It's particularly apparent when, as today, the band appear to be having a bad time. The songs – particularly "Steady As She Goes" and "Level" – can definitely be impressive. When some of the other material threatens to get lost in the aforementioned terrible sound, however, it is White who pulls out all the stops, trying to keep the show on track with his extravagant theatricality. By turns he's butch, but, perhaps down to his new Sharon Osbourne-style haircut, at times he's also strangely camp. If he can't entirely save the day with his tunes, however, White does a fine job with his words. After introducing the members of the Raconteurs, and thanking the audience, he invites the band to stick around for the next band: "…the politically correct sounds of the Bloc Party." This might be the last place you expect to find it – but it was nice to see that see that in some rarified quarters of the Reading Festival, subtlety never goes out of style. JOHN ROBINSON

Until quite recently, I must admit it hadn’t occurred to me that mixing Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and Bowie’s “Heroes” would be a particularly good idea. But the arrival of TV On The Radio’s fantastic new single has changed all that. “Golden Age” is by some distance the funkiest thing that TVOTR have released thus far, and also possibly the best. Much as I liked their first album, the frowsty density of “Return To Cookie Mountain” made it seem a little samey and impenetrable to me. Listening to David Sitek’s production job on that Scarlett Johansson album earlier this year reminded me, obscurely, of a giant ornate cake made entirely of icing. Impressive, sure, but overwhelmingly sickly. One of the many great things about “Golden Age”, then, is that Sitek has built a fair bit more space into the song. It begins as choppy, airy funk, and the band only really build one of their opulent artifices when the chorus arrives. The contrast, the dynamics of it all, is pretty awesome. There’s a fair bit of Prince here, not least in Tunde Adebimpe’s edgy falsetto (maybe it’s Kyp Malone: apologies, I’m not the world’s biggest expert on the band), but then there’s a glorious shift into the middle eight, when the whole sound transforms into a neat facsimile of Berlin Bowie. I’ve heard “Dear Science”, the third TV On The Radio album, just the once, a good few weeks ago now, and rough acquaintance with it suggested it’s by some distance the best and most varied album the band have made thus far: good timing, I’d say, given that the Williamsburg dynasty in some way sired by Sitek and his comrades are now graduating to serious prominence; and some of their obvious descendants like Yeasayer are threatening to usurp TVOTR themselves. One eminent Uncut contributor who’s been fortunate enough to spend proper time with “Dear Science” has been making claims about it being one of the very best art-rock releases of this decade, which isn’t the sort of empirical hype I like, but which does make me very keen to get my hands on a CD permanently. I’m working on that, and I’ll report back when I’m successful. In the meantime, I think I’ll keep punctuating today’s sequence of New Order and Philip Glass reissues with “Golden Age”. Having checked TV On The Radio’s Myspace, it’s playing there right now. Let me know what you think.