Performing at V Festival 2011

V Festival is structured around a cunning "switcheroo": the same line-up plays two different venues — one in Essex, the other in Staffordshire — on consecutive nights, allowing fans the length and breadth of the UK to rock out al fresco with the minimum of travel hassle. It's a nifty ruse, and for 2011 the V headliners have spectacular written all over them. Jetting in the from the States, on the back on 2010's GRAMMY®-winning Recovery, is Eminem who opens up our selection with "Love the Way You Lie" (featuring Rihanna, also performing at V), while Arctic Monkeys balance the Brit side of the equation with "Don't Sit Down 'Cause I've Moved Your Chair".

Young guns and old renegades await you at V, in Next Steps.

Here, we snack hard on the juicy and perfectly seasoned filling of V Festival's sonic sandwich, extracting especial pleasure from tunes by a couple of veterans — Big Audio Dynamite's brilliant "E=MC²", a track that took sampling into the mainstream when it first charted back in 1986, and Squeeze's "Cool for Cats" (1979), notable as much for its lyrical cleverness as for Jools Holland's nifty keyboard work. Representing the youngbloods are Olly Murs, with his sunburst of summer pop "Busy", and Eliza Doolittle, who gives the soul revival a sweet pop twist on "Pack Up", the second single from he debut album (featuring vocal support from Lloyd Wade).

Groove with Chromeo, and chill with I Am Kloot, in Deep Cuts.

The quality at V 2011 runs deep, as this eclectic selection from undercard confirms, ranging from the dancefloor synth-bombs of Chromeo ("Fancy Footwork") and Fenech-Soler ("Demons") to Goldie Looking Chain's mirthsome hip-hop-satire ("Guns Don't Kill People, Rappers Do") and Stornoway's dreamy folk-pop ("Zorbing"). Big Country takes us back to 1983, the year they dropped their debut album The Crossing, with "In a Big Country", I Am Kloot mellow us out with the cultured opening track from 2010's Guy Garvey-produced Sky at Night, "Northern Skies", and the Airborne Toxic Event leads us to a crescendo with 2009's "Sometime Around Midnight".

The seeds of V Festival can be traced back to the mid-'90s, when Pulp's Jarvis Cocker mooted the idea of playing two outdoor gigs back-to-back, one up north, the other down south . . . and come the millennium, that commendable acorn-sized idea had sprouted into a mighty rock and pop oak on the summer festival landscape, split between Hylands Park in Chelmsford and West Park in Staffs. For 2011, the array of A-listers on the roster confirms and bolsters the event's gargantuan reputation, with Eminem and Arctic Monkeys dominating the main stage, backed by the likes of Primal Scream, Dizzee Rascal, and the two Bs — Plan and Katy. And there's a ton more good stuff besides, so dive in and take your pick of V 2011 artists, from Aloe Blacc to Ziggy Marley.