Being a pretentious wank, I’m used to attending gigs in tiny rooms with a handful of other conceited punters who spent half their night looking disinterested while composing a smarmy Facebook status update on their smart phones to show the rest of the world how cool they are. So it was a grand experience to see every single punter in Festival Hall loosing their shit as what is arguably one of the best live bands of our generation strutted their stuff onstage and damn near caused a riot, with numerous revellers being bailed up by security as they made their merry way out onto the streets at the end of the show.
Kudos must be given to any souls brave enough to warm the stage for the boys from Leicestershire, and Londoners The Vaccines did well to hold the crowd’s attention. Having seen The Vaccines on their last tour through Melbourne and being incredibly disappointed with their meager live presence, it was a surprise to see how well they played this time around. Their atmos is still below par and for a band who play mindless guitar fuzz they take themselves far too seriously, with the band intently concentrating on honing their sound and occasionally stopping to strike a pose before carrying on with the next track. Their cockney swagger wasn’t quite convincing enough but their set was pleasant and the crowd were happily bopping around by the time they closed with “If You Wanna”. If you want to get fucked up and thrash around then The Vaccines are a good band to do this with. If you like integral sounds that you can connect with while you’re fucked up and thrashing around then give them a wide berth.
My inner cynic spent half of Kasabian’s set looking for a reason to fault them. Sure their music is an obvious homage to their influences that has no deeper artistic meaning, and sure they employ every cliched move in the book so you can easily predict what front man Tom Meighan is going to do next and their show seems so over rehearsed that the band never appears to let go and really lose themselves in the moment. But all snotty complaints aside, Kasabian play the rock star role so Goddamn well it’s like they wrote the book themselves, ate it for breakfast and will shit it out all over anyone who dares to suggest that they aren’t the real thing.
Meighan is everything a front man should be, a dead sexy arrogant cock who wears sunglasses inside and incites his fans into fits of shrieking and fainting with the mere wave of his arms. His reckless swagger had every woman in the room swooning like a 12 year old does for the Biebs and with the combined talents of Sergio Pizzorno and his incredibly tight pants the mosh was alight with declarations of love and lust as the sweat soaked crowd lost the plot jumping around to the intense levels of awesome that occur whenever the band are onstage.
Kasabian know how to entertain and they gave the punters exactly what they wanted – a fuck load of energy while smashing out their more popular singles, with highlights being epic renditions of “Shoot The Runner”, “Take Aim”, “Re-Wired”, “Fast Fuse” and “Empire”. The band encored with “Vlad The Impaler” and ended the night with an extended version of “Fire” where Meighan and Pizzorno got the entire audience to sit down on the floor before forcing them to get loose once last time as they threw their hands in their air and told us all to jump and sing along or else their road crew was going to ‘get us’.
Kasabian are a phenomenally entertaining band who throw one hell of a party whenever they come to town. Love or hate Meighan’s endless posturing and overly dramatic gestures, when he thanked us all for coming, told us we were amazing and walked offstage with a massive grin on his face like he’d just had the best night of his life – I believed him, as did the hundreds of other punters spilling out onto the pavement grinning from ear to ear, dripping in sweat and adrenaline like they too had experienced the best night ever.
