Port Talbot Margam Park

"Gianluca Vialli/he sleeps with the fishes", hollers Cerys in 'Eye Yamma Mob'. What? Is this an oblique attack on the cokehounds of the London music biz ('Vialli' being Welsh rhyming slang for 'Charlie', obviously). Or is it a snide reference to the failure of the capital's footer teams to win fuck-all in the face of the magnificently omnipotent Man U? Or are we all aurally hallucinating as a result of standing up to our wanking knees in shitting mud in the pissing bastard rain for six dog-tossing fucking hours? Probably the latter.

First up are balls-achingly mediocre MOR plodders Shack. Imagine if Simon & Garfunkel hadn't split up. Imagine that they ate a lot of pies and stopped trying. That's Shack. Anger? Sex? Glamour? What's that, then? But Mick Head is the greatest singer-songwriter of his generation! Stop. Think. Hum us a Shack tune. Go on. We're waiting. Yeah, thought so.

Next up it's Bjorn Again. Suddenly the sun shines. People start smiling. And frolicking. And stripping off and rolling in the mud. We get robotically sexy costumes and robotically delivered killer tunes and robotically witty repartee and robotically idiotic dance routines and we feel ever so guilty for enjoying a frothy flibbertigibbet Abba tribute band so much and so shortly after we've had our socks, cocks, rain-soaked sheep-herders smocks and mud-spattered Man U tops so utterly bored off by the utterly worthy Shack. But only for a bit.

And then it's Ian Brown. Ooh but he's gorgeous. If slightly simIan. Trouble is, though, he sings like a drain. He makes Ugh-Boy from Embrace sound like Dame Nelly Melba. This is a problem. We're in Wales - home of Harry Secombe, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Cerys Matthews. They've got standards here. Would you tolerate anything less, no matter how shaggable? No, of course not! So boo this inadequate fucker - come on! BOO! BOO! There's probably a really ugly male model out there somewhere who's been blessed with the voice of an angel. Him and Ian should do a life swop. They really should.

A backing band consisting of ex-members of The Fall and Simply Red noodlewank away as Ian drones his way through Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'.

The crowd laugh and ask, "Hey! Where's the zombies?" Oh yeah, of course, they're already onstage. We yawn. Ian loses it. He tells us to "fuck off". No, Ian, you fuck off. There's a pretty lamb.

And, now, at last, it's sweet, sweet Catatonia. The bad news is that the first half of their set is dominated by their ho-hum early stuff and extracts from their so-so later stuff and Cerys' raunching foghorn of a sex voice is a tad knackered and thus only operating at 90 per cent of its truly awesome potential. But that's hardly a tragedy. It's a bit like watching Manchester United with Giggs on the wrong wing and Keane and Scholes suspended. It'll do.

Cerys stomps, hoots, hollers, murmurs, bellows, billycoos, smiles, flutters her eyelids and we come - again and again and again. This is class. Sheer, unadulterated, copper-bottomed, brontosaurus-bollocked pop class. A universe away from the sexless schmindie-folkwank aural wallpaper of Shack.

Crustily clobbered middle-aged mums (who dumped their husbands ten seconds after the last kid flew the nest) line dance in the now knee-deep mud and cackle like mad witches when Cerys sings about bustin' some balls. Then they get a bit tearful when she raucously roars her way through one of the sad ones. For Cerys truly is a Sex-Mum for all seasons.

The bespattered and sodden crowd feverishly fall under the spell of Catatonia's ever so slightly sexually ambiguous but utterly irresistible sensuality. They dutifully sing along to the so-so songs but all the time, presumably, they must be patiently aching for the killer stuff off 'International Velvet'.

And then, well into injury time, Sheringham and Solskjaer come off the bench in the shape of 'Mulder And Scully' and Cerys squeezes the last drop of purple sex juice out of her utterly orgasmic pipes and - BOOM SHANKA! - the merely awesome rockets into the Skunk Anansie-ish stratosphere and explodes.

Ian who? Stone what? Jeez, you tossers wouldn't recognise real talent if it burrowed into your scrotal sac and laid eggs. You deaf twats.