Review: Typical. You wait all year to see a neo-psychedelic dress-up band, a wised-up pop trio and a corrosive dance militia, and then they all turn up at once, writes Peter Crowley, at Punchestown.
Torn between five stages, surrounded by 45,000 people and wondering which way to pivot, you realise once again that there isn't one single reason to come to Witnness - there are hundreds.
Moving from Fairyhouse to Punchestown this year, the Witnness relocation programme has introduced a more tactile element to the event. Billed as "the greatest festival on grass" (if you get the entendre), this year actually throws up an array of substances: Echo and the Bunnymen sympathetically supported by the lawn, the unfairly talented Relish spreading honey and grit on the pocked tarmacadam, the appropriately named Upstage and the smooth concrete of the dance warehouse.
If it feels like a festival for the soul, Witnness stays effortlessly in step with the times. Although never generically pure, popular music is now uninhibitedly promiscuous. At Witnness, stylistic interaction feels like a musical orgy.
Dave Couse's Endless Art rings through the Rising tent, quoting Beethoven and juxtaposing a roll-call of cultural celebs.
The quieter folk of green-card carrying, Irish songwriter Mark Geary (America, Gingerman and It Beats Me) is buttressed by fleshy chord progressions, a full backing band and, for the latter, The Frames leader Glen Hansard (every band should have one).
Later, college-dorm eclecticism from precocious scousers The Coral (dressed as undertakers and, naturally, waving electric steam irons) makes them the blissfully obscure mavericks of the festival. Dizzy with odd musical metres, jerky guitar figures and bizarre lyrics, Skelly presses on with new single Pass it On, which is worryingly accessible.
Speaking of which, despite their assured pop and on-the-money Gary Numan appropriation, The Sugababes are adrift on the Main Stage. Obviously nobody has explained out-door protocol to the poor poppets. When the crowd beach ball lands in their midst, the 'babes consider it a gift and duly send it backstage. To the audience, it looks as though the ball has been confiscated.
"Just to let you know," proclaims the ever-modest MC Black Thought, "we are the legendary Roots from Philadelphia." A must-see act, this old-school, hip-hop outfit brings musical promiscuity to new heights: a Beatles bass riff here, a TV western reference there - a chorus co-opted from Motown? I don't see why not.
Even The Seed (2.0) morphs into a straight-ahead rock cover of The White Stripes' Seven Nation Army - a fitting shout out to the cancelled Detroit duo.
If last year's festival was a mud bath, this year's is a dust bowl. Under continuous sunshine, everything acquires a bleached-out hue, like a faded but beautiful photograph.
In short, this is a day for the The Thrills. Even with hype, acclaim and that fate-tempting name to live up to, nothing prepares you for how astounding Dublin's five-piece are live.
A dangerously crammed Rising tent leaps to One Horse Town as singer Conor Deasy maintains his rigid pose: nuzzling the microphone like someone sucking a water fountain dry. More elastic, their music not only meets inflated expectations, but exceeds them. Don't Steal Our Sun and Santa Cruz brim with lush harmonies that swell into glorious anthems. The world is theirs for the taking.
Just as urban dance wizard Mike Skinner (aka The Streets), urges us to "push things forward", dance duo Lemon Jelly stretch the envelope of eccentric electronics with Nice Weather for Ducks.
Move fast enough and you can see the domino effect of experimentation and miscegenation from stage to stage. Mogwai's appealing vamps yielding to nasty fixtures, while Damien Rice's version of Jeff Buckley's version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah is sweet, but pointless.
As the sun sinks into the horizon, a brilliant moon announces headliners Coldplay.
With great ideas, gracefully and insistently pronounced, Coldplay are as searingly direct as the laser beams that adorn their stage. Somehow, Chris Martin's boundless enthusiasm never threatens the poignancy of opener Politik, the lamenting Trouble - ("one of the best ballads of all time," states Martin, as tongue meets cheek. "Better than Flying Without Wings.") - or the heart-wrenching luminescence of The Scientist.
"We've only got two hits," he half-jokes with the crowd, while Gwyneth Paltrow watches from the wings. Maybe. But if the first day of Witnness has been an orgy of sound, Coldplay's cathartic set could be a mass, post-coital smoke.