Rufus Wainwright came on stage and started to sing. I had to listen to him for almost a minute. The remote control had fallen behind the back of the sofa. Boom boom!

BBC 3 and 4 more than meet my music festival needs and the Saturday night of this year’s Glastonbury found me and several hundred other people pitifully grateful for the huge rainstorm that broke over London at about 8.15.

In the main auditorium at the Royal Festival Hall an outfit called The Valerie Project were performing their score to a 1970s Czech gothic film. “How very London artsy-fartsy” the provincial mind might think. The provincial mind is spot on. You never want to seem philistine in these circumstances and a lot of work had gone into the film and the music so I felt I should watch it. Fifteen minutes of the incomprehensible pretentious gibberish was all I could inflict on myself. The torrential rain and thunder breaking over the city were more inspiring than the human creation.

It was Jarvis Cocker we had all come to see performing at the final night of this year’s Meltdown Festival. The set was drawn from his solo album with not a single Pulp song played. A DVD of the night should be compulsory viewing for migrants arriving in England and anyone obliged to endure those citizenship ceremonies. This was the apogee of English pop culture. The New York Dolls played while the roadies set up and Jarvis threw in references to the Wheeltappers and Shunters during his inter-song banter. The only singer I’ve ever seen generate the same affection in his audience was Johnny Cash. Everyone there thought he was their friend. Several of the songs had been given rather different arrangements to the album versions and were greatly improved as a result. The performance of Baby’s Coming Back brought a lump to this reviewer’s throat and as you can see from the video Running the World is the best political protest song our species has come up with in this millennium. Just to make the point he referred to the proximity of the Houses of Parliament.

The only quibble you could have about the evening was choosing Survivor’s criminal The Eye of the Tiger as the closer but even this had a happy ending. A few people jumped on stage and the bouncers tried to get rid of them. Jarvis protested and a man, neither in the first flush of youth and lacking both hair and rhythm danced his way through it on stage. He did it for all of us.

A big thanks to Stroppyblog for the tickets.