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Waking up to the news that Noel Gallagher has apparently quit Oasis for good, pushed to the limit by Liam, makes me further ponder the whole business of being a festival headliner. Some like The Killers go for a bit of glitter, a fistful of hits and very little stage presence. Other like Bruce Springsteen at Glastonbury ladle on the showmanship or deliver pithy lines like Morrissey.

Kings Of Leon, headlining the main stage at Reading on the first day of Reading/Leeds 2009, arguably come from the same school of headliners as Oasis. Their schtick is no frills, straight up rock'n'roll, the kind of gig that has 10,000 raising their pints in the air and screaming along.

But with the anaemic sound of the Reading main stage (a perennial problem thanks to nearby residential areas), their anthems were dampened down. In fact, the errors and issues left the band so frustrated that we were left without an encore.

Despite the fact that the crowd often sounded louder than the band, Kings Of Leon know how to build a festival pleasing set. Chunks from their latest album Only By The Night were interspersed with tracks from the band's very beginning. The polished, punchy performance revealed a band at the top of their game, a truly worthy festival headline act.

They opened with Be Somebody before half-stumbling in to the distorted vocals and bass groove of My Party. Then came a decidedly sludgy version of Molly's Chambers, an enjoyable twist on one of the band's early triumphs. Red Morning Light and Fans followed in quick succession before Revelry led the crowd into a woozy singalong.

After the beauty of Revelry, Closer and Crawl with its twisting, grinding bassline brought our minds down into the gutter with a set of the band's almost trademark dirty sex anthems. Charmer was rawer than a festival goer's blisters and Sex On Fire reaffirmed its status as an instant classic. Sexual dysfunction has never been so sing-along. Fireworks lazily rising in to the air was as close as Reading really gets to a "moment".

Before closing with Use Somebody (no encores from the Followills), Caleb told the crowd: "There's a lot of people who are sick and tired of Kings Of Leon...for all of those people, this is a f**k you." Those people no doubt exist, left unmoved by the band's increasing move to a more polished version of their dirty Southern rock but wherever they are, they weren't in the crowd stood in front of the main stage last night.

Playing across the site in a tent not nearly big enough to enclose Mike Patton's ego, let alone the crowd that streamed to see them, Faith No More were...well...Epic. The band's oddness and brilliance remains undiminished by their time apart. It is no overstatement to say that Patton is one of modern music's true real geniuses, capable of spawning side-projects at an absurdly fast rate, but back with Faith No More he just seems at home.

Earlier, the Kaiser Chiefs were again hampered by the lack of volume on the main stage but a new hirsute Ricky Wilson did his best to augmented the pitiful PA with his own lungs, pushing them to bursting point. During I Predict A Riot, the official anthem of Broken Britain (copyright The Daily Mail), Wilson scaled the lighting rig at the side of the stage obviously aiming for his own ASBO. Once he was up there, he looked unsure of how to get down.

Friendly Fires, with their dancey-indie-racket were sublime and showcased so much terrible dancing you almost felt as if Ricky Wilson had been giving them lessons.

Seeing Placebo on the main stage with Brian Molko's adenoidal vocals still very much in evidence was like jumping in to a time machine piloted by a '90s indie kid. Despite someone in the crowd declaring brightly during Every Me, Every You, "This is the one from Cruel Intentions!", Placebo were...whisper it...pretty good.

In a return match of Glastonbury's battle of the junior divas, Florence & The Ma