Dominated this year by heavyweight American acts, the Reading Festival remains the bastion of loud, aggressive, masculine, guitar-band rock. Subtlety is never at a premium here, a fact clearly recognised by those bands who made the biggest impression.

“We are Rage Against the Machine from Los Angeles, California,” proclaimed Zack de la Rocha, the vocalist. Even this bland statement was delivered as a ringing battle cry of barely contained fury. Wearing orange jumpsuits with black bags on their heads – a reference to the detainees of Guantanamo Bay – the Friday night headliners began with Bombtrack. With Tom Morello coaxing strange, jazz-rock squawks from his guitar while de la Rocha mounted a succession of increasingly splenetic raps, they gave a sustained, hyperbolically charged performance that spoke to the hardcore heart of Reading.

Queens of the Stone Age, who preceded them, weighed in with a more harmonically sophisticated but still heavily jackbooted set. However, owing to a technical hitch, it was only about halfway through their set that the PA speaker towers set in the middle of the field came fully to life.

Indeed, one of the recurring complaints of the festival was that the sound from the main stage was not loud enough. This may have been something to do with the steady breeze that swept across the front of the stage for most of Friday and Saturday and which fuelled another besetting problem: flag inflation. There are always a few flags raised among the crowd at such events, but this year there was such a dense forest of them that for long stretches the view of the stage was comprehensively obscured. The sound was better in the huge tents that housed the various alternative stages, although that still wasn’t enough to rescue a lacklustre performance by Babyshambles.

Saturday night showcased a more mainstream lineup, with solid performances from Bloc Party and the Killers on the main stage and a surprisingly celebratory set by Manic Street Preachers in one of the big tents. The Oxford band Foals nearly started a riot with their high-energy indie art-rock, and the Raconteurs underlined their credentials as now much more than Jack White’s “other” band, with a razor-sharp display of alternative blues-rock showmanship.

However, it was Seasick Steve who truly got to the heart of the matter with a set of beguiling originality. The grizzled, itinerant bluesman sang his songs of a life spent on the wrong side of the tracks and played a selection of unbelievably beaten-up guitars, accompanied by his son on washboard and a wildly flailing drummer. Towards the end, Steve unveiled a homemade, one-string guitar. “This ain’t going to sound nice,” he warned the crowd. But Reading is rarely about sounding nice. Bursting with raucous energy and a raw, restless vitality, it remains a festival in the rudest of health.

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