No time to draw breath as Oxegen wows fans

The standard warnings to wear sunscreen were largely redundant at this year's Oxegen festival as the rain poured down by the bucketful on 80,000 music fans.

While a carpet of woodchips and plastic bottles and cups provided some soakage, the Punchestown racecourse was a mudbath by Saturday afternoon.

Not that weather dampened the spirits of the crowd at the first day of the festival, as fans poured faster than the rain down to the main stage at 7.30pm for what was possibly Saturday's most popular band, the Arctic Monkeys.

They continued to brave the elements for the rest of the night for the headline acts who were spread over six stages, with the big names including the Strokes, Editors, Primal Scream, Kasabian, the Go Team and rock legends the Who.

Not even rock gods were immune from the havoc caused by the weather as a wind blowing the rain towards the stage left puddles of water and soggy stars.

The bands inside the tents also drew substantial crowds, perhaps more than they would have, had it been sunny, with the Futureheads, Eels and Jose Gonzalez getting an enthusiastic reception.

The weather sometimes got the better of outdoor gigs, with the wind catching most of the sound before it reaches the crowds, and those not brave enough to venture down to the pit near the stage did miss out. But the fans were stalwarts and stoic and battled on.

Apart from fans fighting the weather, however, trouble was kept to a minimum, according to gardaí. "There's a capacity crowd of 80,000 with 70,000 campers and 10,000 daily ticket holders. The number of arrests and the level of activity was what you'd expect for that size of a crowd and I'm very satisfied and pleased with the way policing has gone," Supt Tom Neville said.

There were more than 60 arrests up to Sunday night and almost 400 drugs seizures.

A total of 180 gardaí, including uniformed, plain-clothes and traffic management officers, were on duty for the event.

Sunday was a superior day in terms of the weather and, according to many fans, in terms of the line-up. Bell X1 were an early crowd puller at the main stage and the Divine Comedy took the crowd through a back catalogue of 90s classics and some new album tracks on the Pet Sounds stage.

The NME stage took big crowds for the Kooks and the Zutons and then it was back to the main stage for the big draws of the night, which came one after the other - the Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

But it was the campers who were the real heroes of the Oxegen festival, having spent the weekend wallowing in the mud of Punchestown. Conditions could be fairly described as grim, and many returned from Saturday's concert to find their tents had either become one with the mud or were blown away.