The Hold Steady, the band of the moment from Brooklyn, New York, struck a suitably optimistic note as they set about their task in the early afternoon sunshine on the opening day of the V Festival. “We gotta stay positive,” sang Craig Finn, a chap with sensible glasses, a middle-aged haircut and more rock'n'roll passion in his little finger than most of the acts that followed him on to the Channel 4 stage combined.

Although run with dependable precision and corporate know-how, the V Festival continues to lack something of the spirit and spontaneity of other big rock festivals. Now in its thirteenth year, it has a bit of history but no firm roots or mythology. With its Chelmsford site slightly reconfigured this year to accommodate an audience of 75,000, it was big outdoor business as usual, as a succession of crowd-pleasing acts with million-selling debut albums trooped on and off.

Amy Macdonald sang her folk-tinged, acoustic pop songs with a cheerful flourish, while Duffy delivered her manicured retro-soul tunes with a similarly light and breezy touch. Meanwhile, Estelle, the current Mercury Music Prize nominee, gave a much more earthy exhibition of street-smart soul in the JJB Arena, a tent in an adjacent field that was almost like a parallel festival in its own right. Will Young unleashed a frightening falsetto as he tackled Joni Mitchell's Help Me. He was parked in yet another tent, which was crammed to bursting with the pop idol's admirers. The crowd rather melted away, however, when the same stage was then taken over by the sleek, Amazonian figure of Siouxsie, who gave a masterclass in the ancient arts of punk yodelling and throwing kick-boxing moves.

Over on the main stage the Kooks gave a curiously ineffectual account of themselves, such that even a cameo guest appearance by Ray Davies, singing the Kinks' song Victoria, failed to lift their performance. After a similarly workmanlike effort by Stereophonics, the arrival of Muse was doubly stunning. In a scene redolent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, six huge satellite dishes erected on and at the sides of the stage swivelled menacingly as a crescendo of sound, light and lasers built up. The performance that followed was a rock odyssey combining Wagnerian melodrama with the visual effects of a Star Wars movie. It was a superb and almost embarrassingly dominant display.

Meanwhile, back on the C4 stage, the Prodigy were winding up a set of turbo- powered, techno-punk manoeuvres. The Essex band's occasional vocalist, Keith Flint, charged around like a madman but did little else, while the rapper/MC Maxim Reality adopted an increasingly hectoring tone as he demanded ever more bountiful displays of respect from his home crowd. They finished early.

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