Tim Hughes looks back at another successful festival, held in Steventon at the weekend

It was one of those festival moments that send a tingle down the spine.

Peter Hook, co-founder of Joy Division and New Order, is on stage bashing out an all-killer set of the bands’ greatest tunes. She’s Lost Control, Atmosphere, Bizarre Love Triangle, True Faith, Love Will Tear Us Apart – and an air-punching Blue Monday.

This is stadium-filling stuff, as evidenced by the sea of grins and raised arms. Incredible, then that it should all be taking place in a small marquee at an equally intimate festival. It also highlights how important Truck festival has become since it started life, as a rowdy birthday party for co-founder Robin Bennett back in 1998.

Over the years it has grown in size and stature, attracting some unfeasibly big bands to diminutive Steventon – a village whose only other rock credential is as the home of broadcaster ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris.

A change of management, with the team from Y Not now running the show, has done nothing to change the relaxed vibe and stellar line-up; indeed a determination to grow the festival – this year’s welcomed a record 6,000 people – has meant more money to spend on ever bigger bands.

So, while ‘Hooky’ delights fans in the Market Stage (technically the third stage) on Saturday evening, giants Basement Jaxx are winding up the crowd on the main Truck stage, and Pulled Apart By Horses are finishing off a powerful set in the Barn.

The night before, the site was rocked by a crowd-pleasing set of bass-heavy rave with a retro twist by Clean Bandit, the cool and slick minimal hip-hop artist Ghostpoet, and flavour-of-the-month indie-rockers Augustines. There was more rocking, and eardrum-ringing from Don Broco and Honeyblood and one of our new favourite bands Nothing But Thieves, who sound like they’ve been staying up all night listening to Radiohead, Muse, Zeppelin and Jeff Buckley – and that is obviously no bad thing. But it was Tim Burgess’s Charlatans who owned the first day of Trucking, with a greatest hits set punctuated by gems from their new, 12th, album Modern Nature.

If Friday was an indie-rocker’s dream, Saturday was all about the dance. Well – with lots of rock and indie still thrown in, of course.

Public Service Broadcasting combine the best of both worlds with tight electro and samples from old public information films and news reels fused with scorching rock guitar. Frontman J Willgoose esq augmented his band (usually just him and drummer Wrigglesworth) with more guitar – and a choreographed brass section for new tune Gagarin and the suitably epic climax of Everest. But it was earlier tunes Signal 30 and Spitfire which had the crowd in a frenzy of arms and even crowd-surfing.

There was more of the same for retro-psychedelic rocker Temples, but it was Basement Jaxx who took the roof off (well, they would’ve if there had been one), with a show which veered between ‘old skool’ rave, West Coast soul, sexy burlesque, comedy variety – in the shape of three shapely gorillas – and super-tight dance-rock – from opener Good Luck, through Red Alert, Oh My Gosh and Romeo... before a suitably exuberant finish – the crowd being showered with shiny confetti as they burst into a blockbusting Where’s Your Head At.

That would’ve been a great place to leave it – but this is Truck, and no Truck is complete without a final word from the aforementioned birthday boy, Robin Bennett, his brother Joe and their band The Dreaming Spires – joined for a swaggering finale on the Veterans and Virgins stage by a selection of Truck faces who had been playing (as veterans, obviously) throughout the day.

“You know you got soul,” sang Robin, as the crowd picked up and repeated the mantra and returned it – performers and audience alike singing their lungs out and with arms in the air.

Thank you Truck for another great year – tingles and all.