“So, who was good?” I was asked on coming back into the office after reviewing the Isle of Wight Festival for the Telegraph.

Iggy Pop, I answered immediately. I own one Stooges album, Raw Power, which hasn’t had a lot of play and probably won’t get much more. In terms of sheer spectacle, though, I thought Iggy and the Stooges were the highlight of the festival.

At 61, the original American rock’n’roll outlaw is still a man against whose attentions any father would lock up his daughters. He didn’t slash his bare chest with razor or bottle as he used to in his most drug-addled days in the ‘80s. He didn’t need to: shoulder-length hair sopping from constant dousings, he still looked like an Apache who at any moment might draw a knife and take a scalp.

Lunging into the crowd, he set up a call-and-response with the front row: “My idea of fun…/…Is killing everyone.” The security guards took him at his word. When he leaned briefly on the shoulder of one of them, she looked absolutely terrified.

The Isle of Wight was a place of mixed messages. The Police, the Sex Pistols, the Stranglers and Iggy were desperate to convince us that it was 1978 again. But at Smallfleet petrol station, any of the 55,000 festival-goers unwise enough to have brought a car were having to stump up £1.45 a litre. It was only 20p (79p a gallon) the last time these guys were strutting their supremacy over one another.

KT Tunstall – whom I didn’t have room to mention in my review – was a babe in those days, but she’s now man enough to hold her own with any of the punks. Halfway through her set, she dismissed her band for Black Horse and the Cherry Tree, the song with which she got her break, and stood alone, one woman with just her guitar, commanding a stadium.

Who else? The young Coventry foursome The Enemy showed a punkish anger that was less contrived than Johnny Rotten’s; and both the Kaiser Chiefs and N*E*R*D were much more impressive live than on record – though the batteries of lights they employed must have outweighed all the good done by the issuing of biodegradable tent pegs.