Something that happened last night seems to have brought out the sun and with it a growing sense of self-consciousness about the smell of my trainers. Since my tent has suddenly become an oven we head down to the river and frolic gaily until my toes are ready to drop off in the icy mountain water and I get down to the more serious business of soaking my shoes. The five Japanese university students having swimming races a few yards downstream later died of cholera. Probably.

Anyway, pangs of guilt are beginning to set in after abandoning Bjork last night so, ignoring the lure of the enticingly named Sugardonuts (Red Marquee), I set out in search of difficult music.

I find OOIOO (White Stage), the mutant offspring of Bow Wow Wow and a dying cat with a stylophone. My conscience is satisfied.

The Board Walk is great because it is probably the only place in the entire festival which is both flat and quiet. It emerges by the Lark Freedom Village, a kind of Robinson Crusoe shanty-bar serving the same 500yen beer as everywhere else but this time with toilet queues of less than 30 minutes. Raincoat girl rejoices whereas I make a move for an exciting looking curry-with-banana-ice-shake combo which I devour to the mysterious and wonderful Latino-Japanese-jazz-with-dancing-girl carnival music of Hashiken (Orange Court).

The spirit of exploration is still strong so we advance to the Field Of Heaven which both sounds and smells like hippies. The mud thickens still further as the ominous sounding Avalon Field approaches. Sure enough on the Solar Power Stage Gypsy Avalon there are girls with acoustic guitars and flowers in their hair. What's happening? I clearly heard Primal Scream instruct us to Kill All Hippies last night. A brief battle between my fight and flight instincts and I settle on flight.
Safely back among the noise and carbon dioxide of honestly produced electricity Yo La Tengo (White Stage) flirt with tediousness but come right in time for a brutal psychedelic deconstruction of The Beach Boys' "Little Honda" which, with the assistance of Sun Ra Arkestra, dumps the sun drenched Californian good vibes of the original in a ditch somewhere and comes out more like Spiritualized.

Getting better and better with every album are Quruli (White Stage) whose late afternoon set can't do justice to the awesome eclecticism of their recent output. In fact they nearly ruin it with a long, chorus-free slow song in the middle which slouches through the mud where something like "Suichi Motor" would have soared west into the setting sun. Nevertheless, carrying us through both the highs and the lows of this patchy set is Kishida Shigeru, surely the coolest rock frontman in Japan today.

If today's line-up has been a bit short on love then it's probably because Elvis Costello (Green Stage) has been keeping it all to himself. Tonight, however, he spreads it around like a miniature Liverpudlian Jesus feeding the love-starved twenty-thousand. After twenty-five years in the business he's got songs to spare but it's still telling that such powerful anti-war songs as "Oliver's Army" and "Shipbuilding" are shelved but then that's not what tonight's about. After a magnificent thousand-voice rendition of Smokey Robinson's "You've Really Got A Hold On Me", and with the cold mountain night beginning to make itself felt, bodies are beginning to move closer, arms enfolding arms, hearts beating faster, war isn't just a million miles away, it's in another galaxy.

The galaxy, it would appear, currently occupied by Massive Attack (Green Stage) who, along with Blur's Damon Albarn, have been the British music scene's most active opposition to the Blair regime. 3D and his revolving cast of vocalists have nothing to say on the subject, they leave all the talking to the brutal, relentless parade of statistics, displayed in Japanese on the back projection detailing everything from the cost of a Patriot missile to a running counter of world tyre production, and the increasingly psychedelic metal noise barrage of their music, the perfect soundtrack to the dystopian industrial nightmare our world has become. If the bodies continue to huddle closer then its from cold and fear. Midnight draws near, Monday morning awaits and the ear-splitting guitar-quake you hear is the sound of three days of peace and love turning back into a clockwork pumpkin. -Ian Martin, Sep.26.03