Last year I wrote that the O2 festival was more a marketing gimmick than a place to see music. It looks like promoter Vince Power picked up on that undercurrent of resentment at using Queens of The Stone Age to promote credit cards and sunglasses. Market research (sic) indicated that I was not alone in this zeitgeist and the Hop Farm festival was the antidote. What the market research seemed to miss was that a lot of festival goers need to visit a toilet from time to time and I missed most of Supergrass’ entertaining sit while lining up for an hour. It was worse for the women.

Neil Young headlined a bill which interested me not just because of him but included Primal Scream, who when they are on form are one of the finest most deafening bands you can wish to hear and My Morning Jacket, more of whom later in the month. The woman behind kept referring to them as “My Dinner Jacket”. Close enough.

Primal Scream kicked off with their new single and tried out a handful of tracks from the forthcoming album, one of which seems to have its eye on the Christmas market with a pioneering use of those tubular bell things you get when someone from a TV soap opera releases a festive charity single. Primal Scream have a favoured place in my heart ever since they abused a Glastonbury audience which started to heckle them because the wanted some tripe like Coldplay. Bobby Gillespie rightly said “f~~k off. You’re a bunch of f##ing hippies. We are a punk rock band.” I always thought he was too soft on the Coldplay fans.

No need for that type of thing last night. The band gave a great show with pretty much everything you wanted to hear with this reviewer’s highlight being a menacing version of their Thatcher tribute Swastika Eyes. The Scream were the only exception to the anti-corporate aspect of the festival. On his amplifier one of them had done a bit of ambush marketing and stuck a big sign saying “Coke please”. Why would a band want to advertise a fizzy drink? Tsk!

Planning for a festival in early July probably includes working out what to do for the victims of heatstroke. That work was redundant yesterday. Preparation for hypothermia would have been more apt. You would not have believed it was possible to get that cold in July. That made the wait until Neil Young took the stage at 9pm a pretty unfun business – mitigated only by the excellent £5.99 folding chair from Woolworths, the must-have accessory at these events.

Neil Young was worth the wait.Two things are needed for a musician to succeed at a festival. One is to have the crowd behind him or her. This needs a repertoire that the audience knows and loves – Young had this last night. I heard one man arguing with the ambulance crew that he wouldn’t go to hospital for treatment his frostbite until Young had quit the stage. The other thing is an ability to fill the space. Something Young does effortlessly.

Among the backing band was Mrs Pegi Young. She has either never tried or given up on that conversation with her husband that goes “I’m not leaving the house with you while you are wearing that shirt / jacket / hat.” Mr Young was sporting a jacket which he seemed to have been wearing when someone threw a few small pots of paint at him. Jacket removed his shirt revealed the same idiosyncratic dress sense.

The set featured a lot of Harvest  material and included a long version of Words would was a finale in its own right. There may, or may not, have been a bit of a dig at the choice of venue. Not much of a one for onstage banter Young thanked the crowd for coming before starting Everybody knows this is nowhere. Driving through the centre of Tunbridge Wells after midnight due to a navigation error I was inclined to agree.The misjudgement on Young’s part was a version of No hidden part that seemed to last for about twenty minutes. Even the man’s duff albums have one or two tracks superior to this and no obvious point was served by elongating it. The main business was divided into harder numbers, mellow acoustic material, including a performance of Mother Earth, that was much better than the drippy album version.  An advantage of the big screens at these events is that you get good close ups of performers’ faces. Young often seems angry when he plays – the Bush regime has certainly peeved him and you saw he was saying something about himself during Fuckin’ Up– but this was not an aging rocker putting money in his pension. Last night was a musical great who still has a fire inside him.