Read & Shout @ Nettleford Hall, London

Here’s a tip, readers! Should you find yourself getting your hair cut the afternoon before going to a music festival/anti-cuts protest in a public library in south London, and the person cutting your hair asks what you’re doing tonight, don’t bother trying to explain. Make it easy for yourself. Pretend you’re going dogging in the South Downs or something instead.

Read and Shout sprang from the brain of Matt Stead, librarian and frontman for London indie-pop band A Fine Day For Sailing, as a protest against government-enforced cuts to council library budgets in general and in the great borough of Lambeth in particular.

Libraries and indie are, as we know, inextricably linked, and nobody exemplifies this better than Mr Darren Hayman. Haymo seizes the opportunity to air all his songs which reference libraries and librarians (quite a lot, as it turns out), wear a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, and lead a mass singalong to the timely ‘We’re Tired Of Being Dicked Around’, written as part of his recent January Songs project. The audience is sitting cross-legged on the floor at this point. The girl next to us is knitting. It’s that indie.

As, indeed, are Pocketbooks, who have the air of having been assembled from a kit. They have jangly guitars, keyboards and girl/boy vocals; they wear cardigans; they have a record out on How Does It Feel. But who cares, cos we love their rollicking tunes and occasional Springsteen-y flourishes. At one point, to establish his protest rock credentials, the singer produces a harmonica.

All this, however, is very much a prelude to the unchallenged star of the Read and Shout bill, Jens Lekman, whose arrival on stage is preceded by the kind of feverish anticipation more commonly associated with Justin Bieber.

Lekman rarely plays in the UK, and his presence alone on the line-up ensured it sold out in mere nanoseconds. He plays an hour-long solo acoustic set of “hits” and a couple of new songs, including ‘Waiting for Kirsten’, which he explains is about stalking America’s sweetheart Ms Dunst in his home town of Gothenberg. He encores with euphoric renditions of ‘Sipping On The Sweet Nectar’ and ‘The Opposite of Hallelujah’, banging a tambourine jubilantly over a backing track.

In short, Read and Shout was a triumph. Here’s to another four years of lunatic spending cuts and amazing pop music!