16.45, Main Stage

My first visit to the Main Stage, having carefully avoided the punk-pop shite that’s clogged it up earlier in the day, and PRIMAL SCREAM find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, or, if I might be allowed to be so graphic, between a steaming turd (Sum 41) and a slightly larger and steamier turd (Good Charlotte). Those in the audience of a baggy-shorted persuasion hold no truck with beat-heavy songs like ‘Pills’, while the perenially snake-hipped Bobby Gillespie provokes further ire by labelling Metallica “American pricks”. But they really don’t do themselves any favours whatsoever by playing a version of ‘Kill All Hippies’, the one track that might have united them with the crowd, that is feeble and lacking all menace, and by slipping ‘Shoot Speed Kill Light’ (great song on record, not so hot live) into the middle of an already-sagging set. Mani looks like a craggy-faced fifty-year-old baboon, and Kevin Shields strums away listlessly as if he’d rather be gazing at his shoes in peace. No punch, no bite, just a bunch of middle-aged men making Exterminator and Evil Heat seem like collections of toothless dirges. It’s a sad sight, and a far cry from their glorious showing three years ago.