There is little to quicken the pulse about V Festival. Lacking the romance of Glastonbury or the eclectic whimsy of Bestival, this long-running weekend two-header based in Chelmsford and Stafford is a proudly pragmatic affair. Gaze around from any point in the 75,000-strong throng and the eye sets primarily upon a sea of sponsors' logos.
Given this unabashed commerciality, it's surprising that V seems to find it so difficult to get the basics right. The toilet queues are grim, and by mid-afternoon the queues for the beer tokens punters have to buy before they can even begin waiting for drinks are snaking across the main field.
The musical bill is thankfully more competent and a rare blast of summer festival sunshine lifts spirits for the Proclaimers. Craig and Charlie Reid are enjoying success in Scotland with Sunshine on Leith, a politicised musical based on their catalogue, and their fervent acoustic strum is as quixotic as it was 20 years ago.
Away from the main stage, Liverpool trio the Wombats' new single Let's Dance to Joy Division is a curious hybrid of Interpol and Half Man Half Biscuit, while the formidable Beverley Knight remains Britain's most underrated soul diva.
Once an introspective acoustic troubadour, Paolo Nutini has been transformed by commercial success into an arena-friendly slick extrovert. His model looks do him no harm, but he is still more than the James Blunt clone he's been unfairly dismissed as.
Nutini still has some way to go to compete in the showman stakes with Kanye West, who previews sharp-sounding material from his imminent Graduation album in the manner of a Biblical prophet in gold aviator shades. When West orders V to "jump!" for the Curtis Mayfield-sampling Touch the Sky, the ground vibrates as 50,000 white fists punch the air.
Babyshambles set the bar so low nowadays that Pete Doherty gets relieved applause merely for showing up and looking compos mentis and relatively focused.
His band's skeletal, spindly rock appears perennially on the verge of falling apart, but ramshackle new single Delivery implies they may yet show an unexpected resilience.
Back on the main stage, the strident Pink is playing clenched power-pop for the kind of music fans who find Avril Lavigne too intimidatingly cryptic. Her lung-shredding covers of Janis Joplin's Piece of My Heart and 4 Non Blondes' What's Up are so wretched it begins to rain in protest, while the nuance-free Bush-baiting ballad Dear Mr President takes the concept of stating the bleedin' obvious to stratospheric heights.
Snow Patrol's chiming, wide-open rock continues to resemble a 21st century version of U2, or rather U2 as they were before they discovered irony. Gary Lightbody's band's swelling, throbbing music hints at hidden depths, yet nothing of note goes on beneath its glossy surface.
Eyes Open and Spitting Games were written precisely to sound dramatic in vast arenas such as this: Snow Patrol know how to construct a rousing power chord anthem in the way some people know how to build a wall. It's aural chewing gum, which acquires more taste when Martha Wainwright joins them for the Kate Bush-like Set the Fire to the Third Bar.
Foo Fighters played a secret set on a minor stage earlier in the day as 606 to preview their clunkily titled imminent album Echoes, Silence, Patience and Grace, but their main set draws heavily on their 12-year back catalogue. As a festival headliner, Dave Grohl's hard-working band will forever be functional but unexceptional, and this description unfortunately remains equally apposite for V Festival itself.