Queens of the Stone Age rally against the authorities and Nine Inch Nails get down and dirty on the final day of Mad Cool Festival

Bringing the third and final day of Madrid weekender Mad Cool to a close, there’s a curiously bipolar bill on offer. In one corner, you’ve got the various overlords of music’s swaggering, sexy underbelly – Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age, with their slightly more electronic pals Depeche Mode thrown in for good measure. On the other, you’ve the Radio One mainstream contingent – Dua Lipa (great), Jack Johnson (meh) and Rag’n’Bone Man (lord, make it stop). It’ll probably be the first and only time you’ll hear Trent Reznor’s searing ‘Hurt’ seconds before a sparkly bikini-clad Dua kicks into ‘Blow Your Mind’ mere metres away, but hey – we’re all for variety in these parts.

The day begins with an early set from Wolf Alice, who seem almost too much of a live force to be contending with slightly bleary-eyed afternoon crowds these days. Fresh from playing a series of enormodome gigs with Foo Fighters, Liam Gallagher and QOTSA themselves, the Londoners are an absolute juggernaut. Front-loading the set with some of their biggest thrashers (‘Yuk Foo’, ‘You’re A Germ’), there’s no gentle easing-in here; the unlikely anthem of ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’ is air-punchingly joyful and tear-jerking all at once, while Ellie Rowsell stomps around the stage during ‘Moaning Lisa Smile’ with the entire crowd in the palm of her hand.

If the noise of Rag’n’Bone Man huffing his way through an extended (the joy!) version of ‘Human’ complete with an additional rap aren’t necessarily the sweet sounds we’d ideally wish for in the balmy early-evening sun, then fear not – for Josh Homme and his mighty horseman of the apocalypse are here to toss any signs of mediocrity to the kerb.

If there’s been an elephant in the room throughout the festival, it’s been in the event’s decision to corner off an area at the front of the two main stages reserved for VIP ticket holders; often meaning that there’s huge empty areas directly in front of the stage, with shitloads of fans heaving against the barrier behind them, it’s one that you sense they might not be repeating next time round. Josh Homme, however, isn’t up for waiting. “Security, you’d better let those people in,” he begins – interrupting ‘No-One Knows’ mid-way through. “I’m not playing until you let them in; you’d better let them in because you work for me tonight.” After a strained few moments, and some en-masse chanting from stage and crowd, they relent and a thousand exultant fans charge through to form a celebratory circle pit. It’s the kind of ‘fuck you to The Man’ move that Queens of the Stone Age have always revelled in (“at a QOTSA gig, you can do whatever the fuck you want,” the singer smirks later), and it charges the second half of the set with a renewed electricity. From the faux-slow intro to a feral ‘Go With The Flow’, to a final ground-wobbling ‘A Song For The Dead’, Homme and his pals tumble around the stage, smashing the wobbling light poles interspersed around and generally being absolute fucking bad-asses. As he mounts the speaker stack for a final meaty guitar solo, tonight, Josh is the people’s Queen and king of the festival.