Light glares off the forty storey glass monolith, blinding me. I can smell something frying in the distance. Still suffering from this morning's hangover my stomach twists and turns as it tries to escape but I press on following the crowd of baggy shorts, big wallet chains and Blink 182 t-shirts towards the giant glittering tortoise menacingly crouched just ahead of me.

Summer Sonic is not like other festivals. Where Fuji Rock had rain, green fields, hippy pretentions and an eclectic line-up spanning five decades and a quintillion musical genres, Summer Sonic has blazing sun, hyper-modern soulless re-claimed faux-urban desolation, more corporate sponsors than an American military invasion and approximately two different kinds of music.

Any lingering memory of Fuji Rock's slightly disconcerting British affectation is banished by the realisation that the main stage is inside a baseball stadium. I down two beers and dive in to find some kind of pro-wrestling superhero artist who, with the use of visual aids, appears to be gently mocking the absurdities of Japanese animation. Despite the nagging feeling that this is a bit like making fun of the sun for being hot, everyone else is laughing so I do as well.

Razorlight (Outdoor Stage) are currently being tagged as The New Libertines but lack the swaggering confidence and on-stage chemistry of the tragically combusting London four-piece. Their inexperience also shows in the songs which are just a little too obviously indebted to Television and Patti Smith but it's early days yet and they have the seed of something great. The highlight of the set is the near epic "In The City" which starts out with a kind of menacing Patti Smith babelogue before exploding into life with a blazing finale which at last sees them falling together as a band with an identity of their own.

The comedy-garage of The Datsuns (Outdoor Stage) holds no particular allure so it's off to the giant glittering tortoise where The Star Spangles (Sonic Stage) are prancing around in the kind of entertaining manner we expect from The New Strokes. They look good, sound right and have great hair but there's nothing in here that anyone in the audience can remember fifteen seconds after it's finished.

With The Greenhornes (Indoor Stage) promising more of the same I try to take a nap which is rudely interrupted by that annoying Brian/Bryan guy from Space Shower TV introducing a Japanese band called Orange Range (Sonic/Factory Stage) who make the kind of ugly lumbering sideways-baseball-cap posturing sports metal that says nothing whatsoever about life in Japan and everything about the lack of ideas currently plaguing Japanese "alternative" music.

Since the last couple of bands have at best left me cold and at worst chilled me to the bone, it is with a tidal surge of relief that I greet The Canadian Strokes, Hot Hot Heat (Sonic Stage). On record their XTCesque new wave epilepsy-pop grows on you with each listen but live they only have one shot so they attack each song with intensity, energy and dynamism, the singer, like the songs, exploding all over the stage but constantly yanked back to the centrally placed keyboards. The rapport with the audience is instant and they exit the stage with a thousand new friends.

The interior proper of the Makuhari Messe provides the opportunity to watch miniature Kabuki and a techno ninja display team courtesy of something possibly called "Edo-A-Go-Go". Also the opportunity is available to queue for an hour for the same food that made me vomit my guts out at Fuji Rock last week. Thanks but no thanks.

The Kings Of Leon (Indoor Stage), The Hillbilly Strokes, deliver their set efficiently and with sexy hairiness but could learn something from Hot Hot Heat about creating a rapport. Inexperience and a baffling experience on Japanese TV the previous night partially excuse their lack of immediacy but despite rave reviews in the music press the songs have to take some of the flak. As music to put on in your car stereo it's great but musically and lyrically they're still a couple of hooks short.

Next up are The Kills (Indoor Stage), The New White Stripes, the closest thing to live on-stage sex we're going to get as long as Pete Doherty's lover's tiff with Carl Barat keeps the Libertines incomplete. They create a world of their own from the word go and smoke, thrust and smoulder at each other like they're the only two people in the world from then on. As music it's hard to remember beyond "Fried My Little Brains" and "Cat Claw" but as an audio/visual experience it lights a fire that it'll take more than Blink 182 (Outdoor Stage) to put out.

"Thank you very much, it's a real pleasure to be here tonight, we're the Blooooozzzee Explosion and we're going to play some Rock and Roll for you!"

Keeping the fire alight is The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (Outdoor Stage), a band whose tech crew would upstage most of today's bands. The Old White Stripes they may have become but they don't let that bother them. Their last album, "Plastic Fang" pushed them in an even more theatrical, cartoonish direction and attracted a certain degree of criticism which perhaps overlooked the fact that it's actually one of their most tuneful and dare I say it melodic records to date. Tonight the cartoonishness goes down a storm with the Japanese audience and the addition of a few more legitimate tunes to the set actually makes Jon Spencer seem like the megastar he's always felt.

The only question is can Blur (Outdoor Stage) follow that? Accused of being wilfully difficult over the last few albums and forced to scrape together the recent "Think Tank" without guitarist Graham Coxon they stand on shaky ground with a lot of people. Fortunately "Think Tank" is an excellent album and Damon Albarn is a born star, bundling onto stage in the same mod suit he wore circa 1992 (albeit taken out a bit round the waist) with a pair of aviator shades and an electric guitar slung around him he rips through the first few songs demolishing strings, monitors and mic stands with childlike glee, trying at every moment to fill the gap left by Coxon with the force of his personality alone. It's left to the audience to sing Graham's part in "Tender" but since Blur's choruses tend to run along the lines of "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah", "Come on come on come on", "la la la la la" and "Whoo hoo", he has a pretty much constant accompaniment anyway. That's not to say he needs it of course, somewhere along the way Damon seems to have become a really good singer, most evidently on new song "Battery In Your Leg" and perennial closing number "This Is A Low", a song which builds and builds and builds until you don't think it can go any higher then just at that moment the skies explode into a thousand fireworks. A success then. -Ian Martin, Sep.30.03