Sunday at Reading has a smell you wouldn't want to bottle. A funky concoction of rising dust, stale urine, mustard crushed into cardboard, burnt plastic and emo goth armpits that've been dousing the same Bullet for My Valentine T-shirt all weekend. It's the smell of moshpit and impending riot that you get in milder form at many rock fests, but Reading's strain has a certain pungency and insidiousness. No amount of scrubbing will get it out of your skin before September.
This particular Reading Sunday also has a defining sound – a blues rock riff, played like blues rock still matters. And in the hands of Band of Skulls and Alberta Cross it does. Southampton's BOS, around midday on the Main Stage, want to be mid-west rockers so bad they model their look on JT LeRoy's The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, pummel out riffs as heavy as 18-wheelers and drop in poker slang like the most hardened hold-'em hustler ("Got 25 grand on the bubble"; yes, but what are the blinds?). Yet their romantic idealism of the canyon rock genre gives Death by Diamonds and Pearls and I Know What I Am fresh British bite. New York's Alberta Cross meld prehistoric blues with helium Band of Horses melodies, much to the delight of a man who's been forced to wear an "I Heart Michael Buble" T-shirt to their Festival Republic stage set because it's his birthday.
As the Gaslight Anthem shift the main stage into fifth gear and drive it straight through the truck-stop pumps singing Springsteenishly about girls, bars, "American skies" and the impressive speaker systems they've got fitted in their pick-ups, we decide to take a break from the blustery Americana rock and head over to the NME/Radio One stage for respite. Ironically, when we get there, we find Tribes managing to out-bluster Gaslight with their rousing We Were Children, sung by Johnny Lloyd as he tries to stop the front row tearing from his back the sort of sparkly black blouse last seen on Beverley Knight in 1996. Or possibly Robert Smith on Friday.
Remember the shock of Friday's blog declaring the unexpected popularity of Hadouken!? Well you'll never guess who else is far less finished than everyone's telling you they are: Kaiser Chiefs. Really. Their main stage crowd is gigantic, the forward-rushes for I Predict a Riot as enthusiastic as any of the weekend and their set – solid hits drawn from their forthcoming singles compilation Souvenir, plus their Olympics cover of the Who's Pinball Wizard – is headliner-worthy, with singer Ricky Wilson displaying all the crowd-pumping nous of a stadium stalwart. It's tantamount to discovering that Placebo remain a global success (which, as it happens, they do), and if Reading's credibility feels tarnished from this much shameless indie fun, it can always cleanse itself with an icy blast of SBTRKT in the NME/Radio One tent afterwards, where Aaron Jerome's glacial rave from a stage festooned with tribal masks inspires a whole new form of dance move we shall name The Shiver.
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Then, back to the blues. The Black Keys have built a hefty fanbase and draw a huge crowd to the Main Stage with their Light Stripes chutzpah, even though their voodoo pop take on the blues smacks more of Jack White's Raconteurs partner Brendan Benson than their reputation as the heirs of Jack and Meg suggests. They pull out a charming hour tinged with T Rex glam, deep south stomp and producer Danger Mouse's trademark antique synth crackle, as well as a muso's playbox of brilliant guitars – a double-necked beast for the Gold on the Ceiling romp and a golden resonator guitar for Dan Auerbach's ballad intro to Little Black Submarines. You know it's Sunday at Reading when you start wondering what sort of rack the guy's rocking.
As the sun goes down, the perversity of some of Sunday's scheduling starts to become clear. Who thought it a funny idea to tempt hordes to the noisenik dreariness of the Horrors at the same time King Charles is having a calypso limbo knees-up in the Festival Republic tent, his piled-high dreadlocks and grotty overalls resembling 1983 Boy George taking up motor mechanics and his musical interpretation of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol exposing a vibrant new branch of intellectual party pop? Who decided to have the Futureheads doing their – fantastic – a capella and acoustic set of traditional folk drinking songs within bawling distance of Foo Fighters?
For those of us witness to Dave Grohl dragging out Monkey Wrench to 20 minutes with cliched hair rock drop-downs and extended solos at Milton Keynes Bowl last year, a scheduled three hours of Foo Fighters at Reading is a daunting prospect. Luckily tonight's a special occasion for Grohl – the last night of the tour and a virtual homecoming to what's "more than just a festival to me" and, although you slyly suspect he says that to all the festivals, he certainly makes Reading feel precious. He avails us with his entire history of Readings from the first time he heard about the place from Mudhoney's drummer at a Nirvana barbeque to the legendary tent crush of the Foos' debut appearance in 1995, and dedicates a moving These Days to Krist Novoselic and Kurt Cobain. To mark the occasion he's brought his entire family along for the ride; his daughter sits on a packing case for a riveting, passionate Walk (a song Grohl wrote while teaching her to toddle) and the crowd sings happy birthday to his mum, just like they did during Nirvana's set here in 1992.
Best of all though, with regular cries of "here's one we haven't done in fucking years!" he trims the set to two and a half hours and allows little in the way of fripperies and padding, ramming in as many major hits and speedy rarities as he can manage. It's always boggling to hear the Foos rattle out the likes of My Hero, All My Life, Rope and Learn to Fly in the first hour and still keep so many crowd-pleasers in reserve (Best of You, Everlong, Times Like These, This Is a Call; their canon is frankly dazzling), but when they're also dotted with first album treats like Alone + Easy Target or drummer Taylor Hawkins singing a faithful and powerful rendition of Pink Floyd's In the Flesh, the sense of occasion bulges to bursting. It's a fitting end to one of the most exuberant and good-natured Readings in recent memory, and the clean-up operation is already underway. Well, there are people forming two-storey shoulder towers in order to place empty beer cups into an enormous teetering stack to the cheers of a large mob over there, anyway.
