Dear Landlord is a singer-songwriter named after a criminally obscure Bob Dylan song and he opens proceedings (as far as I’m concerned) with a folked-down version of Willie Dixon’s ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’. As an opening gambit, it’s a good idea, as nothing can be worse than the Foghat version. This segues into the highlight of the set (perhaps the whole evening), a gorgeous ensemble of acoustic guitars, mandolin, harp and alto sax. I’ve never heard the last two trade riffs before, and I think I’d like to hear more. The middle of the set is DL solo and it’s not very memorable. His voice is cracked, emotional but nothing out of the ordinary, and his lyrics, replete with quotations from Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are clever but unexceptional. Sometimes there is a literally fatal disconnect between the despondency of the lyrics and the perkiness of his band. For example, the line “all the others are dying, but I’m clinging on somehow” sounds daft amid all the joshing and badinage onstage. In summary, when he’s with his band, DL’s songs come to life; on his tod he’s a mite predictable.

The theme of the early part of the evening is Nervous Studenty Folkies and no-one can be more nervous than The Mountain Parade, a troupe of violin, ukulele, cello, trumpet, clarinet, and acoustic guitar. The latter is played by a giggling girl who can’t tune her instrument, but sings like Leslie Feist. Overall, they look like a motley bunch of work-shy English undergrads, and there is an undercurrent of laziness about their music, mixed with a certain amateurish charm. The songs are very undeveloped, usually based on just two or three guitar chords and the performances are wonky and out of tune. I seriously wonder if they are actually interested in making children’s music, as the level of whimsy in ditties about friendly dragons living in the shower is pretty scarifying for an adult.

Even more petrified were the two girls fronting The Middle Ones, the tour-mates of Mountain Parade. The bands are quite similar, with terrible tuning, embarrassed giggling (even during the songs) and a backing of various folk instruments, mostly accordions in this case. I especially liked their percussionist, who looked like Steve Buscemi a few minutes before the sawmill in ‘Fargo’, and who thumped anything he could get his hands on, at one point using the ceiling of the Jericho as a convenient floor tom. Also like MP, their songs are pretty but rudimentary.

You couldn’t level that charge at Cogwheel Dogs, an angular (ouch, again!) duo of cello and acoustic guitar, fronted by the exceptionally glamorous Rebecca Mosley. Tonight she wasn’t in the best of moods, growling that their occasional drummer had ‘enemies in the house’. Without going that far, I honestly don’t think that he contributed much, burying Mosley’s vocals in oafish fills on the first song. As a friend in the audience put it, Tom Parnell’s cello is highly percussive on many of the songs anyway, so an extra layer of rhythm is usually superfluous. Perhaps it was the near-empty room but the set as a whole was cold, with Mosley distant and distracted. But they have some good songs: the highlight on this occasion was the delicate ‘Breathe’ with Parnell’s cello unusually rapt and hushed.

A more extrovert bunch now too over, big, beardy bards from Basingstoke. The Wookies are a strange outfit, sometimes harking back to the seventies by purveying chops-heavy seven-minute prog epics, before lurching into yob-culture singalongs à la The Fratellis’ ‘Chelsea Dagger’. A prime example of this is the chorus of ‘In the Forest’. It takes five minutes of ADD noodling to get there, but the ride is worth it-it’s bloody good. I particularly enjoyed the swirling, bleeping keyboards which stopped it all getting too pub-rock on us. The playing was uniformly classy and precise and made some of the earlier acts look distinctly iffy.

As seems to happen by a law of nature, punk succeeded prog. Secret Rivals are a youngish four-piece who gave us thirty minutes of danceable, tune-laden punk that could have been made any time between 1977 and now, but was none the worse for that. The instrumental work was of the no-frills variety with bass, drums and guitar augmented with some minimal keyboards. Vocals were shared between the female keys player and the yelpy male guitarist (so far, so Gullivers) and their undisciplined yet committed style brought back memories of the Pixies’ ‘Bone Machine’ with Black Francis and Kim Deal stumbling boozily over each other’s lines. All good then. The best thing about the band is that the energy levels remained high throughout the set, and while far from sophisticated, they are more than just noise merchants- there are some simple but effective melodies in amongst the racket.

Which brings us to dark-indie rockers Vixens who closed the festival (Mary’s Garden, who seem to be cursed with health problems this year, sadly had to withdraw). Some months ago, a demo review of theirs on this website brought the entire student population of Brookes University (and who knows, a few of the dons) posting on the site, often in hilariously mangled English. The result was a comedy classic and I urge you all to find it in the archive. Among the posters was the feisty Charlotte Sands, the band’s drummer, who urged me to get my head out of my arse and catch them live. Happy to oblige.

With one vital exception, the band have clearly progressed from when I heard them on record. The drumming is much more solid (Good, Charlotte!), the two guitars dovetail well (lots of tremolo and delay but not oppressively so) and the style is clear enough, a compound of Joy Division dark-pop filtered through Interpol’s modern soundworld. What is still killing the band is the singer, who simply can’t find the space in the textures for his painfully-limited Ian Curtis impersonation. He’s either ranting tunelessly or murmuring inaudibly and seems to have a range of about three notes. Sadly, the verdict is that the instrumentalists are growing as musicians; the vocalist is as bad as ever he was.