It’s easy to criticise giants, and T in the Park is definitely a giant - the first batch of 40,000 ‘early-bird’ tickets in 2008 selling out in just over an hour; definitely not, as one of my previous English employers described it: “some crappy hut in a field to keep the Scots happy.”

It seems like a year doesn’t go by where there are choruses heard of “the lineup for T’s Shiite this year” – Usually from people who haven’t managed to get any of the sought-after tickets, and who use the lineup as an excuse to avoid paying the inflated tout prices after the fact.

The truth is that T in the Park gets a bit of a bum rap for their headline acts. It’s not difficult to see why, when the majority of this year’s main-stage Acts – the Killers, Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon have all filled major slots on the very same stage in previous years. It’s an easy target, and one which is repeated so frequently that it’s worth giving a bit of a defence to. Those that complain about the larger acts consider themselves to be ‘good’ music fans – enough to reject the mainstream, yet who lack the insight or knowledge to see the other side of what T has to offer on its smaller stages, or during the day. There’s plenty for an Artrocker to see at the fest, provided that they’re willing to get up a bit earlier or seek it out a bit harder.