The rain held off, and so did the vultures. After all the negative publicity, the sense of relief no doubt felt by the organisers on Sunday was mirrored in the mellow cheerfulness of the crowds. Sundays at Glastonbury have a hazy, meandering feel, anyway. This year, you could take in Ladyhawke's 1980s pop in the Queen's Head, or go to Dance East for some Day-Glo face paint and Rex the Dog electro-house. If the sunshine had made you exceptionally generous, you could even watch trustafarian troubadour Newton Faulkner cover Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like a Record).
Later, Billy Bragg joined Carl Barât for some Libertines songs, and Manu Chao was the Reduced Shakespeare Company of world music: all the most popular bits performed very, very fast. Meanwhile, Mark Ronson demonstrated his ability to make any song sound like Saturday night ITV and hosted the most uncomfortable guest appearance of the weekend: a Lily Allen so devastated by a bereavement the day before (her grandmother) that she cried and forgot the lyrics.
When Goldfrapp played here five years ago, Alison Goldfrapp's look was S&M Weimar disco. This time, it was hippy folk priestess: there was even a maypole on stage. A run of delicate new material made a suitably bucolic soundtrack to the dipping sun, but it was the glitterball pulse of Ooh La La that ignited the set. One minute the dancers were wearing white robes and flowers, the next they were in black bikinis and wolf masks.
In the past, the Sunday afternoon Pyramid stage slot has hosted the likes of Al Green, Brian Wilson and Shirley Bassey. Neil Diamond - whose face shows how good you can look at 67 if you are the only man in pop who didn't do drugs in the 1960s - lies towards the Bassey end of the spectrum. He may have had a critical resurgence with two autumnal Rick Rubin-produced albums, but he remains resolutely uncool. Beautiful Noise was pure corn, and Medicine Man could be no more redolent of 1973 if he performed it wearing a Nixon mask. It took Sweet Caroline to prompt the mass singalong this slot demands.
Leonard Cohen also required, and received, the crowd's patience. Clearly, few people knew his later material, but curiosity kept them hanging around for an extraordinary troika of Tower of Song, Suzanne and Hallelujah. The latter song has been performed here before, but never by the man who wrote it, never with such wracked intensity, and never to such a glorious response.
The boos that greeted Richard Ashcroft's shout-out to Jay-Z suggested the Verve were who the Gallagherites had been waiting for. This is Glastonbury's comfort zone: big, mate-hugging indie anthems. They do it with aplomb; during Bitter Sweet Symphony, Ashcroft even raised his sunglasses, for once, to survey the sea of arms. But what saved Glastonbury this year was the willingness of festival-goers to give something different a chance.
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