Partytime at V
Faithless drew the biggest crowd of the day, with the possible exception of Radiohead the whole weekend as they played for an hour on the Main Stage on Sunday evening.
This was a set which mixed and matched the high tempo, rave style classics with their hip-hop based tracks perfectly. They opened with 'Insomnia' which sent the massive audience onto another planet, and never looked back!
'God Is A DJ', 'Mass Destruction' 'Muhammad Ali' and 'Miss U Less, See U More' all featured, with the band looking out from the stage over a field full of a sea of raised hands and jumping bodies. The gig was brought to a close by 'We Come One', with the traditional crowd participation being called for, bellowing 'One' as loud as humanly possible.
This is a great example of how festival scheduling can be extremely confusing. Faithless left the Main Stage with a crowd absolutely flying and fully in the mood for a party, ready for miserable Morrissey to take to the stage to grumble about world politics and do his usual party trick of moaning about how Radio 1 and Virgin won't play his records: good one guys!
For me it would have been better to pair Faithless and the Charlatans together on the Channel 4 Stage, rather than competing with each other, with Razorlight warming up for Morrissey on the Main Stage. The Prodigy were a brilliant headliner for the second stage in 2005, Faithless would have been perfect for 2006.