Yorkshire played host to this summer's top rock festival, over a sunny Bank Holiday weekend, as thousands of fans flocked to Temple Newsam estate, in Leeds, to catch some of music's biggest names.

Carling Leeds Festival - Saturday

IT may famously tend to chuck it down whenever Travis tempt the festival gods by playing Why Does It Always Rain On Me, but the Bank Holiday sunshine blazed down on the Leeds faithful.

And who better to headline a sunny day in the park than Travis, rock's most ridiculously nice blokes, who delivered the arms-aloft mass singalong you'd expect, from opener Sing to the closing strut through Happy from their first album, via a version of Bowie's All The Young Dudes.

On the main stage, all that sun must have got to some of the bands.

Not only did Tarzan-like grandfather of punk Iggy Pop invite half the audience on stage to dance with him during The Passenger, but the massively-popular Green Day - not content with drawing the biggest crowd of the day - dragged some of said crowd up to form a DIY band on the spot, before putting them out of their misery by belting out their anthem Basket Case.

After Green Day, a hefty tract of the audience deserted Travis to pack into the Evening Session tent for Irish rockers Ash.

Singer Tim Wheeler had to stop the band's storming show on several occasions to urge the crowd to move back as the crush became too great.

Ash, boasting better tunes than Travis and, in the rock'n'roll thrills department, able to eat Green Day for breakfast with a vodka chaser, would have been better candidates for an upgrade to the main stage than the much-hyped Strokes.

However, despite the problem that they've barely released a record yet, the painfully cool Strokes, led by the Lou Reed drawl of one Julian Casablancas, did offer an impressive revival of the arty, spiky New York sound of their musical ancestors Television and the Velvet Underground.

PJ Harvey, the only woman to appear on the main stage (other than one of her own guitarists) was in fantastic voice, looking and sounding like a bona fide British rock star, her music uncompromisingly personal yet more accessible than ever.

American giants Eels, having reinvented themselves as a straightforward rock band for festival purposes, sadly lacked the quirky brilliance of their York gig last year.

Updated: 11:20 Monday, August 27, 2001