Friday starts perfectly with a welcome splash of sunshine and spot of solo guitar bliss courtesy of crack Texan fingerpicker Hayden Pedigo. He ably transports us to the flat, wide plains around Amarillo, where, as he informs us, “you can see your dog running away for three days”.

Ellie O’Neill’s technique is just as dazzling, but her songs have a darker tint, littered with broken bones and emergencies both physical and emotional; she reappears on the Piano Stage later, performing a breathtaking version of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”.

Cornwall’s Daisy Rickman casts a spell over the Garden Stage with her dreamy, deep-voiced folk-jazz mantras, driven by a novel combination of banjo and saxophone. When she covers “All’s Tomorrow’s Parties”, it could be Nico herself up there holding court.

Rosali hasn’t been able to bring her full band over from the States, but instead we do get to witness her first ever duo show with her North Carolina homegirl HC McEntire. It means a song like “Rewind” shifts tone slightly, from rousing defiance to bittersweet hymn of regret.

Ben Chasny’s solo set as Six Organs Of Admittance Occasionally veers closer to one-man heavy metal than it does to freak-folk. “This is an old English ballad,” he deadpans, before playing a doom-laden version of “Fascination Street” by The Cure.

Jackie-O Motherfucker’s slowly undulating oddness is diverting enough, but over on the main stage, Goat use roughly the same source materials to ignite a wild psychedelic dance party. More than a decade in, their refusal to show their faces feels less like a gimmick and more an attempt to focus on the stuff that really matters, at least at a festival: fuzz guitar freakouts allied to irresistible Afrobeat rhythms and raucous vocal incantations. Masked and behatted, the blokes in the band resemble the inept terrorists of a tiny mountainous enclave, while the twin female vocalists / percussionists / dancers / flautists are more like ancient Aztec deities running riot at an electroclash revival night.

There is no lyrical subtext to unpick, no authorial hinterland to interfere with the purity of their mission. It’s just groove, noise and shaking it all loose – which the audience do eagerly, even indulging in a spot of excitable crowd-surfing. And while it’s nice to see headliners Caribou basking in their moment of glory after paying their dues with years of festival sundown sets, it’s hard to engage with their increasingly on-rails indie-rave in quite the same way.

These New Puritans don’t make a great start by missing their own on-stage countdown. They are currently touring with a relatively conventional four-piece band, which makes it harder for them to conjure the grandiosity and mystique their songs require. Jack Barnett remains a somewhat reluctant frontman, though behind him, his brother George compensates with a display of compelling powerhouse drumming. Their confidence builds as the set progresses, with the wonderfully stirring new songs “Bells” and “Wild Fields” finally proving worthy of holding their big themes.

But the last word on life and death goes to podcast king Adam Buxton, kicking the first of the weekend’s late-night secret sets in the Folly with a cheery song about ageing: “When you stop getting older and start getting colder…” Backed by three members of Metronomy, his songs are as musically literate as they are gently amusing, including one about unabsorbant tea-towels in the style of Joao Gilberto, and a strangely moving cover of “Satellite Of Love”, interrupted by a British Rail platform announcement. If Lou Reed was still with us, he surely would have seen it, said it and sorted it.