It’s a riff-heavy weekend for north London. Yet where Biffy Clyro and Wolf Alice are bookending N4’s celebrations with their biggest ever London headlines, Kasabian’s Saturday night billing seems like a walk in Finsbury Park for the Leicester band. Established festival headliners for more than a decade, they’ve weathered changing cultural trends, industry 180s, an interpersonal controversy with former frontman Tom Meighan and a line-up shift. Kasabian’s brand of raucous bangers might be a Marmite proposition, but tonight is the only show of the three to sell out in advance - proof that the appetite for Serge Pizzorno and his band isn’t going anywhere.
On a balmy summer’s evening, there’s no messing about when it comes to the setlist. Entering the stage, they’re straight in with the en masse “oosh” of Club Foot, its lairy swagger somehow now more than 20 years old. There’s no meandering deep cuts and only a two song concession to forthcoming LP ‘Act III’ in the wonky slope of Superpowers and Hippie Sunshine - a propulsive, mosh-ready cut that keeps the energy at a premium. Pizzorno is never going to be the type of frontman who prioritises anything other than maximum crowd reaction. Kasabian, essentially, always understand the assignment.
Sporting a denim jacket adorned with painted female faces that could potentially be The Slits, it’s increasingly easy to forget that there was ever a time when Pizzorno wasn’t front and centre on the mic. A boundless fountain of energy still at 45, he spends half the set bouncing down the runway into the crowd, leading the pogo on Shoot The Runner and turning the glitchy electronics of Treat into a 30,000-strong rave.
If a couple of their more recent cuts - the slightly lumpy “woah-oh-oh-ohs” of Italian Horror or Coming Back To Me Good with its package holiday ad sheen - are on the weaker side of their arsenal, then there are plenty enough turbo-charged hits to immediately bring them back up to full blast. Days Are Forgotten sounds huge, its epic chorus ringing out to the edge of the park where, in previous years, so many other artists have struggled with volume. “Is it people on shoulders time?” Pizzorno questions, as You’re In Love With A Psycho segues into a section of Justice vs Simian’s ‘00s classic We Are Your Friends. A brief cover of Faithless’ Insomnia drops into Vlad The Impaler’s call to “get loose”, while ‘L.S.F. (Lost Souls Forever)’ rounds out the main set with the crowd still singing back its earworm riff long after it’s finished.
Returning with a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Fins-bur-eh’, Bless This Acid House is just the right side of a football montage anthem while a final, suitably incendiary Fire comes preceded by a challenge: “We’ve been playing this song for 15 years, but I feel like this will be a seismic shift,” the frontman suggests. Perhaps tonight is less about a shift and more about maintaining the hefty level Kasabian have been at for a long while, but for a band in their third decade, that’s not to be sniffed at.
