Put on partly to raise awareness of the dangers of racist political parties in the run-up to London's elections this week and partly to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original Rock Against Racism festival, the Love Music Hate Racism Carnival has got a lot to live up to. So it wouldn't be pessimistic to expect a bit of a shambles – a badly organised excuse for people to pick a fight under overcast skies. As it turns out you would have been right about only one of those predictions, although the sun did burst through as The Good The Bad And The Queen took to the stage just before six o'clock. The atmosphere amongst the crowds was heart-warming, to say the least. Any pronouncement from the stage about combating the BNP was met with unanimous applause and cheers from the thousands of people at the main stage, and Tony Benn was, not undeservedly, greeted like a rock star and saviour rolled into one. That the turnout was a pretty equal cross-section of whites, blacks and Asians, surely the point of Love Music Hate Racism, says a lot for the event's success. Even more comforting was to see the crowd react as wildly to grime crew Roll Deep as they did to Jimmy Pursey's performance of The Clash's 'White Riot', backed up by Babyshambles' Drew McConnell and his Helsinki project. At normal festivals the press and artist areas are pretty well separated, but luckily the relatively small backstage zone was home to both the musicians and journalists at Victoria Park. Among the stars we saw hide underneath trees as the heavens opened or squeeze into the photo pit to see the bands playing were Don Letts, Ken Livingstone, The Reverend Jon McClure, Sham 69's Jimmy Pursey, Damon Albarn, Paul Simonon, Tony Benn, Andy Nicholson, Carl Barat, Wiley and Edward Larrikin. The Good The Bad And The Queen were worthy headliners, and not just because Paul Simonon headlined the original 1978 Rock Against Racism gig in the very same park with The Clash. Kicking off with Kinks-ian single 'Kingdom Of Doom' – which Albarn stopped and restarted a few minutes in after it was plagued by ear-splitting feedback – the group sounded much meatier than on their self-titled album, with Simonon's dubby bass punching out over Simon Tong's clanging, clattering guitar. As always though, the star was Albarn, who sent the crowd whooping as he left his piano and came to the front of the stage to sing 'Three Changes', one of the labyrinthine highlights of their set. 'The Good The Bad And The Queen' and its noisy free-form outro would have been a perfect ending to the set – however, The Specials' Jerry Dammers' bizarre ten-minute version of 'Ghost Town' followed. In anyone's book, a strange end to the festival, but no matter; from where we were, today seemed like a resounding success. An uplifting display of human solidarity and some good music – what could be better?

OK, so now it’s 101 degrees and the crowd is crawling from patch of shade to tented shelter, the mass influx of Hollywood types and music biz bigwigs (them that’s left!) arriving in limos when the sun goes down. The cops are on horseback, there are drug amnesty bins on the way in (300 tabs of acid, 46 grammes of coke collected so far) and, if you’re well enough festooned with passes, golf buggies to get us from stage to stage. Hop aboard. Here’s how it all went down for Uncut on Day Two: BEST SHOW MGMT Could be Band Of The Weekend already. Sidestage is packed with celebs, the Mohave Tent is heaving, it’s four o’clock in the afternoon, we’re wearing sunglasses and on a mission from God. Or something. Whatever it takes, these young dudes have got it and are sweating it like ice water from their every cool pore. The set’s just about all of Album Of The Year So Far ‘Ocacular Spectacular’, ‘Time To Pretend’ is the shout-along song of the day and when Andrew Vanwyngarden and Ben Goldwasser disappear into the adoring crowd during the closing ‘Kids’, we have what is commonly described as a “moment”. COVER VERSION FROM HEAVEN PRINCE doing ‘Creep’. We think the sun has boiled our brains. We can’t believe our ears. But, yeah, that is definitely Prince, headlining the Main Stage as a late addition to the bill, and he is definitely playing a funked-up version of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’! Let’s go crazy, indeed. The rumour is His Dandyness had been drafted in late to help ticket sales at the cost of $4m but, dapper in a crisp white suit, He sure makes certain to give us our money’s worth. We get ‘Little Red Corvette’, ‘1999’ a memory for life in ‘Purple Rain’ and another cover, The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’. He busts the curfew by an hour, still up there noodling at 1am but heck, we’ll never see Prince in such a magical setting again. HOTTEST HOTPANTS JENNY LEWIS of RILO KILEY Doing the dusk spot at the Outdoor Theatre, local(ish… Silverlake’s three hours off) heroes Rilo Kiley turn in a sultry set for all the laydees. Jenny Lewis, foxy as always, sports the nautical look with sailor blue hotpants, leads mass singalongs through the ‘Under The Blacklight’ album and we finish with popular oldie ‘Portions For Foxes’, the band wigging out over the frets. They do nicely. Next year, the real Fleetwood Mac? COMEBACK…er…KIDS PORTISHEAD Grumbling to all and sundry that Prince’s late addition to the bill means they have to cut four songs from their set, nevertheless, Portishead do the comeback thing consummately. This is the money spot, after all. Past years have seen Rage Against The Machine, Pixies and Jesus And Mary Chain rise from the ashes here to take their bow for posterity and Beth Gibbons ensures a palpable sense of occasion, characteristically torturing herself through oldies like ‘Glory Box’ and newies from ‘Third’. A chill in the heat of the night. BIG COACHELLA MOMENT KRAFTWERK doing ‘RADIACTIVITY’ Main Stage big screens reel out images of autobahns and robots and suchlike while, off in the distance, those little men who could be hired stand-ins for all we know, do… something… while the tracks majestically unfold. ‘Radioactivity’ is a blast and even the coolest of the cool involuntarily gyrate and get their rave heads on. PARTAYYYY! M.I.A. Never one to come quietly, M.I.A’s Sahara Tent session develops into a showdown with security as the lady calls the ravenous crowd up onstage for ‘Bird Flu’. The house (tent?) lights are turned on, she won’t budge and eventually, under her burning stare, the powers cave in and the show rocks on with a brilliant ‘Boys’ and even a sarcastic dig at The Verve with an off-key ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’. Uncut crowns her Queen of Coachella. PARTAYYY TOO! MARK RONSON Nattily laundered after collapsing onstage during the NME’s US Awards, the master socialite gets all his mates up with him for his evening slot in the Outdoor Theatre. Kaiser Chief Ricky Wilson does his ‘Oh My God’, Charlatan Tim Burgess does his ‘Only One I Know’, Klaxon Jamie Reynolds shares vocal duties on The Smiths’ ‘Stop Me’ with newbie Sam Sparro, and Kelly Osbourne, appropriately enough wearing some sort of toga affair, leads a mass celeb choir through The Supremes’ ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’. Fun. Fun. Fun. Uncut crowns him the Fresh Prince of SoCal. CELEB SPOT Crazier than yesterday, we’ve got… DAVID HASSELHOFF (Yup, the Hoff!), KELLY OSBOURNE, AGYNESS DEYN (loves MGMT, mad for ANIMAL COLLECTIVE), SEAN PENN whizzing about in a golf cart, JARED LETO, MELANIE GRIFFITHS (big Prince fan), JAMIE-LYNN SIEGLER (Meadow Soprano to you) and SIENNA MILLER, who’s mates with MICK JONES and gave him the Inspiration Award at the NME Awards on Tuesday. COOL IN THE HEAT KATE NASH Sweltering in the Mojave Tent, it’s late afternoon when Kate takes the stage looking hot and flustered. Her band attack ‘Pumpkin Pie’ with such venom, the drums get dislodged! Rawk mayhem? Kate Nash! God’s own truth! Anyhoo, things settle down with a lovely ‘Birds’ and Kate’s got us eating out of the palm of her hand. Her main hug Ryan from The Cribs is side-stage lending moral support. All together now: aaaaahhh! Check back tomorrow for Day 3 inclusding Roger Waters doing ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’. STEVE SUTHERLAND

COACHELLA FESTIVAL – DAY ONE - The Verve, Les Savy Fav, The Raconteurs! It’s 97 degrees, 50,000 music tattooed fans are surrounded by palm trees and padding cowboy-hatted and barefoot across the lush polo fields of Indio, California while trucks spray water ON the site to keep the swirling dust down. Read it and weep Mr Eavis! It can only be COACHELLA. This is the ninth COACHELLA VALLEY MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL and this is how Uncut saw Friday 25 April, day one: BEST SHOW THE VERVE (Main Stage) Their first US show for 10 years and they climax with a song they’ve never played before! Richard Ashcroft – newly mod shorn but assuredly still the space commander – leads the amassed faithful through the psychedelic dusk with a majestic ‘Lucky Man’ and ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ which he dedicates to Hunter S Thompson because the band stop off at Vegas next. Then he takes us higher with this new cosmic thing that even the band don’t have a name for yet! The band slope off triumphant and the crowd disperse leaving headliner JACK JOHNSON to pick up the pieces. BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY LES SAVY FAV Weird beard Tom Harrington stripped down to his undies, (ugh!) microwaving lobster pink (double ugh!) on the sizzling open-topped, mid-afternoon Outdoor Theatre decides to proposition the crowd, kiss a guy then ascend 30 feet to the top of the lighting rig where he hovers precariously, leading us cheerleader style through set closer ‘We Rock The Party’. CELEBRITY SPOTS: We’re a mere three hours from Hollywood so the stars all rock up: ALICIA SILVERSTONE, ROSANNA ARQUETTE, AGYNESS DEYN, who dances on stage with Black Kids, STEVEN TYLER and PINK all show. Pink digs The Breeders. Tyler digs Raconteurs. ROCK GODS IN WAITING THE RACONTEURS Jack does his best Jimmy Page impersonation, hair fresh cut and cool sideys, soloing like his life depends on it as the band hunker down to some heavy blues work-outs. Some of this stuff is on the recently out and already bypassed ‘Consolers Of The Lonely’. ‘Steady As She Goes’ is the day’s big Fest anthem. WIN SOME, LOSE SOME… VAMPIRE WEEKEND Big, big crowd for the latest East Coast nonchalants and much screaming along to party anthem ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’ but the sartorials are a Benneton nightmare, singer Ezra Koenig jittering around in pressed pink shorts for Chrissakes! HEIGHT OF FASHION: A draw between DATAROCK, who manfully sweat through the entire day in their matching blood red track suits, and SANTI WHITE of SANTOGOLD who performs a stunning set from her debut album in the Gobi tent dressed in a crazy-ass jumpsuit and red fishnet tights. KEEPING IT OLD SCHOOL THE BREEDERS Still can’t keep it together, the Deal sisters bitch about their mother’s Alzeimers, tune and detune, false start a lot and eventually bludgeon their way through a ragged collection of newies from their ‘Moutain Battles’ album (‘Walk It Off’ achieves some kind of stand-out) plus main stage set savers ‘One Divine Hammer’ and ‘Cannonball’. SONG OF THE DAY BLACK KIDS’ ‘I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You’. Not just a brilliant title, the Jacksonville outfit tore up the Mojave tent, singer Reggie Young in fine rabble-rousing form. STEVE SUTHERLAND

I am the proud owner of my late grandmother's radio. It's a Ferranti, bought, so my mother tells me, around 1950/1, from an electrical shop in Tattenham Corner in Surrey, where my grandparents lived at the time. Radio enthusiasts note, it's a 215 model, with a walnut-finish cabinet and, according to a quick Google, would have cost £27 back in the day, very expensive in a post war world of rationing. It carries Long, Medium and Short Wave and, sometimes, there's a rather eerie whistle running underneath the programme when it's on, like the ghost of electricity moping around in the ether. I have other radios in the house -- from a swish, cream-coloured digital replica Roberts in the bedroom to a battered old plasterer's transistor in the kitchen -- but my grandmother's old radio, which sits in my living room, is the one that I love listening to the most. The ghosting aside, the sound has an incredible warmth to it, particularly noticeable on speech radio, that comes, I guess, from the plucky valves and transistors who've manfully converted electrical signals into sound for 60 years now, and have never, to the best of either mine or my mother's knowledge, needed to be serviced. Magnificent craftsmanship, I'm sure you'll agree. but the real reason it means so much to me, of course, is that it once belonged to my grandmother, who's long since departed this life. My grandmother used to have the radio in the dining room of her flat in Epsom, which is where I remember it from originally. It would have been, I like to think, on that radio that my mother first heard Radio 4, and developed a lifelong relationship with the station that I have since inherited, along with the radio. It’s entirely possible, too, that it was on that Ferranti set my grandmother first heard I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Radio 4’s cheery “antidote to panel games” that began life on April 11, 1972, presented by the avuncular Humphrey Lyttelton who gave the teams “silly things to do” for the duration of its 50 series. Lyttelton died last night. I must admit, I don’t really know much about his career as a jazz trumpeter, only that when marshalling the two ISIHAC teams – invariably consisting of Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor alongside guest panelists like Jeremy Hardy or Jack Dee – he was very, very funny. He had a dry wit, and a likable way with put downs. His references to the sexual exploits of non-existent scorer Samantha, for instance, were usually hysterical, despite being singularly out of step in our more politically correct era: "In her spare time, Samantha likes nothing more than to peruse old record shops. She particularly enjoys a rewarding poke in the country section.” It was all harmless, seaside postcard sauce. I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, of course, gave us Mornington Crescent, a game with no clear rules that’s somehow based on the London Underground map and where the winner is the first person to mention that station (following the death of one of the show’s original players, Willie Rushton, London Transport erected a blue plaque at Mornington Crescent in his honour). There are strange and arcane rules Lyttelton used to introduce before the round began – “the Trumpington’s Variations” or “Tudor Court rules” that, frankly, only made the whole thing even more surreal. There are, perhaps unsurprisingly, plently of Internet sites devoted to Mornington Crescent, where fans and such like attempt to try and fathom the game's eldritchian rules (one online poster to a site pleads: “Please can you explain the Hammersmith jink, especially when played after Broad Green?”) I guess Lyttelton himself was one of those figures like Nicholas Parsons, the host of Just A Minute, another wonderful Radio 4 panel show, who belonged to a different generation, his voice coming through my grandmother’s radio on Sunday lunchtimes like it was being beamed from back in time, when men read the news on the radio while wearing suits and smoking a pipe. But unlike Parsons, who remains the epitome of the straight man as, you might argue, any good chairperson on a comedy panel show should, Lyttelton wasn't afraid to impose his wry, artful wit onto the show, frequently at the expense of anyone within earshot. And he made three generations of my family laugh, and for that – thanks, Humph.

I got an email from someone the other day about a new band helmed by Richard Fearless, the sometime leader of Death In Vegas. Of Black Acid, they said, “Half of it sounds like a Japanese sixth form band doing Mary Chain covers. Half of it sounds like Bobby Gillespie telling you about records he likes while trying to play them. The first song is ten minutes of backwards noise.” Incredibly, these all turn out to be good things. I can’t pretend I was ever much of a fan of Death In Vegas, finding Fearless’ theoretically rock’n’roll take on techno to be excruciatingly self-conscious (apart from their enjoyably motorik-heavy last album, “Satan’s Circus”, that is) and nowhere near as dangerous as he made out in interviews. There seemed to be a general pursuit of sleaze – or at least the vague signifiers of sleaze – over substance, and the substance – even when it featured Iggy Pop – still managed to sound oddly bland. Black Acid, it’s fair to say, does not represent a brave escape from those tawdry preoccupations. Fearless now resides in New York (rather than just round the corner from me in Dalston), and has recruited a bunch of musicians from bands I’ve never heard of (NYMPH, Place To Bury Strangers, Dirty On Purpose) to help him live out a bunch of absurd gutter fantasies. The titles are hilarious: “I Hate You”, “Donna Distortion”, “Glitter In The Gutter”, “Flatlining” and so on. At times, the band sound like they have spent four hours practising their sneers in the bathroom mirror, then managed to put their leather trousers on their heads. And yet, and yet, there’s something quite exhilarating about it all – though unless I’m doing Fearless a disservice, I suspect I’m not taking it quite as seriously as he’d hoped. “Black Acid” begins, fantastically, with "Lucifer's Disguise", a great skree of noise that lasts somewhere over ten minutes, and is maybe the first time Fearless has sounded as radical and uncompromising as he’s always claimed. I’m reminded vaguely of something like Popul Vuh, though there’s a faint echo of Suicide’s panto menace there, too and, subliminally, a sense of the ritual doom of The Stooges’ “We Will Fall”. Then track two barrels in, “I Hate You”, there’s some mention of Jesus, huge levels of distortion, rudimentary garage band dynamics, assiduously studied Mary Chain and Primal Scream records (especially the second album) littering the studio floor. And, against all the odds, a tremendously rousing bit of Rolling-Stones-in-a-dishwasher rock’n’roll. Occasionally, some synths will drift through the mix, and there’s a suspicion that Fearless is just roughing up his old Death In Vegas schtick with a raw, dumb, street gang band. “F.U.R.” amps up the electronics and reverts to the Krautrock pulse, reminding me of something from, well, the Scream’s “Evil Heat”. But the thing is, it all works. The balance between machines and scuzzy lo-fi is extremely clever, as if those DIV records were mere preparation for Black Acid. I’m reminded of how he was originally slated to produce an Oasis record, and how funny it would’ve been if he’d made Oasis sound like this. “Here She Comes”, for instance, is a spectacularly crude take on the Velvet Underground’s protean chug. God it’s preposterous. And also, fun. The crowning glory is “Don't Stop”, another ten minutes of sucked-in-cheek, satan-worshipping Popul Vuh ritual organ doodle, point-of-death muttering, dissolute strum-and-tambourine-jangle, supremely fried ghosts of the Scream’s “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have” and “Higher Than The Sun”, “Loveless”-era My Bloody Valentine. And so on. Yesterday, I whinged on about my disappointments of 2008, My Morning Jacket and Spiritualized. Here, though, is one of the year’s most unexpected triumphs. Visit the dungeon of amusing iniquity that is “Official Black Acid”’s myspace, and find out for yourself. . .