Although it has yet to have a branch of Waitrose on site, the Latitude festival, held last weekend, is as middle-class as these summer music gatherings get. Set among wooded hills and valleys dotted with lakes, the event was akin to transporting shoppers at a north London farmers’ market to East Anglia for three days of organic food, child-friendly facilities and activities and some often brilliant and transforming live music. Add in theatre, ballet, comedy, poetry and pretty much every other art form you can think of, and it is no wonder Latitude is such a draw: 25,000 attended this year, twice as many as at the first festival, in 2006.

Forest pathways snarled up with buggy jams; the air filled with parent-child exchanges as treasurable as “No, Jocasta, that’s Daddy’s Yakult”; a passing security man’s walkie-talkie received the urgent message “Child support to the poetry tent”. At times, it was tempting to view the whole shebang as a celebration of white-liberal self-regard and fecundity, with some nice music attached.

That it was possible to resist this temptation was down to some extraordinary live sets from among the 120 music acts on offer. Sigur Ros drew the weekend’s biggest crowd on Saturday night with a boisterous and beautiful show on the main stage. A brass section in white tails and bowler hats paraded around the stage, a string quartet sawed and, on new songs such as Festival and Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur, the Icelanders demonstrated that their ethereal, falsetto-rich atmospherics had what it took to stroke the audience into submission. Earlier, Elbow had woven similar spells, Guy Garvey and co proving again that they are not only this country’s most underrated band, but one of its best. The sight of adults dancing along to songs such as Station Approach while children did cartwheels or sat on rugs, playing card games, banished cynicism and replaced it with a glow as strong as the sun’s, setting behind the stage.

Among the disappointments were Franz Ferdinand (despite a cover of Hall and Oates’s Maneater) and Blondie, who attracted a vast section of final-night festival-goers to the Uncut tent and somehow went down a storm despite performing their hits at a funereal pace. The heavens, which had, amid the blowy sunshine, been sending down warning shots all weekend, finally opened, soaking those stuck outside the venue.

More fortunate was Joanna Newsom, at midday on Sunday, beguiling a sun-soaked but sleep-deprived audience with old songs such as Sadie and Emily, and three new tracks debuted at the piano. Lucky with the weather, too, were Nick Cave’s magnificent Grinderman sideline, later the same day. Looking like a demonic pimp, and, on the title track of the band’s first album, screaming, with real menace, “Yes, I am; yes, I am” at the crowd, Cave came across like a demented shaman, dredging the swamps for his thrillingly twisted and lascivious songs. Of the less familiar acts, the young band Beggars, the new London electro-pop singer Anita Blay (aka thecockandbullkid), Toronto’s Crystal Castles, the Leeds act Wild Beasts and Atlanta’s Black Lips were each memorable.

Doubts are being expressed about the festival’s growth, with crime reportedly on the rise this year, and rumours doing the rounds that the organisers are questioning whether the event can even be held in 2009. It would be a real shame if not, because Latitude is too good a festival to fall victim to, say, the thieves who this year targeted the family camping area, or the type of “beer boy” I spotted weaving his way towards trees marked with neon slogans such as Tranquillity and Harmony, then urinating against the one labelled Respect.

Yes, it’s a bit of a smug-fest — I heard one of the more cynical souls present saying: “Joanna Newsom just reeks of Radio 4” — but it’s a musically rich smug-fest, and the organic burgers with rocket, not to mention the risotto stall, are to die for. And the fairy-lit midnight woodland rave, with hundreds of people cutting loose to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now, was life-changing — or, at least, seemed so at the time.

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