"He is here, you are going to his apartment.""In Spandau I once teased Hess about his indecisiveness on that occasion," Speer told me. "For a background there I just replaced those huge flags I had invented for 1 May with a huge eagle, about 20m across, nailed to a truss like a butterfly."The organisers didn't dare decide when shown the drawing, and sent the unknown architect to see Rudolf Hess in Munich. The rally organisers were having problems with the stadium decor and somebody remembered the architect who had designed the Templehof platform for the 1 May celebrations [Speer had joined the Nazi Party in 1931]. Speer was flown to Nuremberg and, not unimpressed by this signal honour, rapidly drew some sketches - "not very brilliant", by his own admission. And yet, what I felt neither the Nuremberg trial nor his books had really told us was how a man of such quality could become not immoral, not amoral but, somehow infinitely worse, morally extinguished.IT WAS in 1933, during the preparation for the first party rally in Nuremberg after the Nazis came to power, that Speer had his first encounter with Hitler.

Here was a Sixties rocker backed by Nineties rockers whose destructive behaviour emulated Sixties rockers.This temporal confusion was given another twist by a track from Young's latest album, Mirrorball (Reprise). These youthful high jinks culminated in Mike McCready splintering his guitar, then toppling an amp and a keyboard as an encore. It was an odd piece of time travel, redolent of the film Back to the Future, in which Michael J Fox appears in 1955 and indirectly teaches Chuck Berry how to play a Chuck Berry song. Bjond belief.Neil Young closed the festival on Sunday night and made every other group of the day seem like his warm-up acts. And why shouldn't they be? After all, his backing musicians were Pearl Jam, currently America's best-loved band. Not only were they willing to play second fiddle, or second guitar, to the Grandaddy of grunge, they were so excited by the role that they buzzed around him like flies on speed.

At the end of her set a crane hauled a gigantic postage stamp, fizzing with sparklers, high above the stage To follow, a firework display, as dazzling as the music. But considering that the best British pop groups are choking on beer fumes and stale cigarette smoke, any strangeness at all is such a breath of fresh air that you risk a dose of the bends.Visually, Ms Gudmundsdottir had come prepared. For ears attuned to music drawn from a mere 19 or 20 influences, say, Bjork's polyphonic sonic collages can sometimes be baffling. Which other song apart from "Isobel" could happily marry a solemn Baroque harpsichord and a jungle beat (thumping tribal drums, not a super- fast club rhythm)? Which song but "Hyper-ballad" would juxtapose a squeaking accordion and a jungle beat (the club rhythm, not the tribal drums)? It doesn't always work, of course. Presumably, she had given all those brown woollen jumpers she used to wear back to the jumble sale where she found them. But don't be fooled by the new couture: she still dances and screams like a wild forest toddler who has been driven mad by sudden exposure to Nintendo games.

Rather more interesting, though, is the strangeness of her music, especially as it was arranged tonight. Sounds were thrown into unconventional formations, just as her astonishing voice sparks English vocabulary off an Icelandic accent. Headlining the Reading Festival last Saturday night, she sported a sparkly pink Chinese dress. SHE is so ubiquitous, so assimilated, that we sometimes need to be reminded of how strange Bjork really is So here is a reminder: Bjork is very strange.