Music review: Kasabian, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh

When your band has always been larger than life to the point of near self-parody, why not push it one step further and put your swaggering, dashingly bearded guitarist in a canary-yellow high-vis raincoat with the words 'Shadow conceals, light reveals' emblazoned across the back? Meanwhile, your lead singer '“ looking like a middle-aged dad on his first night out with his mates in six months and moves like Mick Jagger in Performance '“ fades somewhat into the background, aside from a sassy, angry vocal that sounds as though he's constantly on the verge of asking for a fight outside a kebab shop.

Serge Pizzorno of Kasabian in Princes Street Gardens PIC: Calum Buchan

Music review: Kasabian, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh ****

It’s fair to say that Leicester’s Kasabian are so quasi-knowingly ridiculous as to be a guilty pleasure for many; they have swagger that would give Liam Gallagher pause, lyrics which pointedly make next-to no sense and a live show that rocks, in the most primal sense. Here, they burst through the ferocious Shoot the Runner and the tetchy, paranoid Eez-Eh (owner of the famed lyric “Everyone’s on bugle / being watched by Google”, a rail against the twin vices of hard drugs and social media) and rolled out one of the least romantic slices of pure disco ever written in You’re in Love with a Psycho.

Serge Pizzorno (the high-vis guitarist) was left to strut the stage and pit bellowing the vocals to Treat fused with those of Colonel Bagshot’s Six Day War (aka DJ Shadow’s 6 Days), while singer Tom Meighan dedicated Bless This Acid House to the late Aretha Franklin. Throughout, their set was primed with itchy-footed tension and loud as hell; and it’s difficult to see who could have been left unmoved having borne witness to it.

DAVID POLLOCK