The natural destination for the hungover contingent on Sunday morning was the comedy tent, where the prostrate could let someone else try to coax them back into life with a battering of humour. Holly Walsh failed to do this with a slightly flimsy set, but Andrew Lawrence more than compensated: a strange South Park scene incarnate. Spieling off huge rants, each over several minutes long, his impish croak flip flopped between various character impressions as he blasted everything from his indifferent Irish mother and the elephant behind the glass at the zoo to the Starbucks servers who offer an additional raspberry muffin without warrant.

At the Word Arena, The Antlers were busy soothing the afternoon crowd with cathartic songs from their heartbreaking concept album Hospice. It wasn’t all doom and gloom though; it was nice to see the drummer shake the shackles of the down tempo material late in the set, grinning while he let a rare drum  solo loose on the skins.

Mumford & Sons were riding high off The Guardian’s gushing praise of their Glastonbury set, and had a mammoth crowd out in the sunshine at the Obelisk stage to reflect that. It was all quite rousing with the three Sons flanking Mumford and playing fast and shouting loudly and there were many happy bunnies just contented to pump their fists in the air a lot. Who doesn’t enjoy that? Shit, I’d be doing it right now if I wasn’t typing. But in truth, the band’s songs tend to pile into a homogeneous mess, and the most elating moment of the set actually came when Mumford broke ranks from the line of banjo pluckers to do a Phil Collins from the drum stool for a new song, ‘Lover In The Light’ (which you can see played elsewhere here), switching from beaters to sticks half way through with all the boys shouting themselves hoarse.

The Dirty Projectors picked up a good chunk of Mumford’s crowd remnants, but they didn’t keep them long. As brilliant as the arty New York hipsters can be- see ‘Knotty Pine’ or ‘No Intention’- it’s hard to expect newcomers to be gripped by their experimental jamming and all the vocal harmonies whirling about. In the words of a friend who drily summed up their set: “they’re just fucking noodling”. It’s a shame that they aren’t always captivating for laymen, considering the fact that they’ve written the best song by anyone at this year’s festival.

Yeasayer

Another stage and another avant-garde Brooklyn band then, as Yeasayer peddled their odd wares on the Word Arena: occasionally marching with psychedelic swing (e.g. ‘Rome’) and at other times, sounding as dystopian and distinctly tribal as a gang from Mad Max (see ‘Sunrise’). So knowing what the crowd made of them is an issue, but it’s unquestionable that there was an awful lot of freakiness to admire.

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Charlotte Gainsbourg succeeded the oddities and grounded things with her trans-Channel pop. The chanteuse and actress was on her first ever tour, supporting the album (which we like) she recently collaborated on with Beck . She had something of a light stage presence, and the lyrics she sang in French benefitted from an air of exoticism which covered for her relatively weak voice that left a few songs sounding flat without Beck’s crisp production on record. But ‘IRM’ and ‘Heaven Can Wait’ are too strong not to command attention, and being the last night of their tour, the band were in a gratifyingly joyous mood when closing with ‘Couleur Café’, a tune pinched from ol’ Serge Gainsbourg himself.

So ultimately it was left to Vampire Weekend to see out the festival on the Obelisk stage. The band cheekily emerged to an old school rap track 20 minutes late, with frontman Ezra Koenig quickly greeting the crowd with “Hi Ladidood” in his pointed New Yorker English before launching into a one-two of ‘Holiday’ and ‘White Sky’. They apologised for their tardiness- their instruments had only just arrived from Portugal apparently- before reeling off almost every song from their small catalogue over their hour and a half set. In some ways, they are the perfect band for Latitude: they have the chart hits for the young pups; they remind the older generation of Graceland; they are literate enough for the hipsters, preppy enough for the public school kids, and mild-mannered enough for the take-home-to-meet-your-mother distinction the Guardian readers look for. And with ‘Walcott’ being their flight song and our call to exit, from behind streams of sheet-white confetti they left us all to head back across the lake for the last time that weekend.

Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig