Kasabian @ The Wedgewood Rooms, Portsmouth

Words: Chris Waugh
Photos: Nicola Comley

"I love this! I can see the whites of your eyes!"

Pre-festival warm up gigs are generally referred to as 'intimate', inferring a certain jolly cosiness, gently cuddling up to your musical icons in a small comfortable setting.

But there's nothing cuddly about this gig. Nor Kasabian for that matter.

Tonight's show has all the impact of a head-on car crash. From the get-go, tunes slam into the face, in the nearest approximation of Spector's wall-of-sound or early Oasis (when they sounded like the Sex Pistols rather than the Beatles).

Kasabian isn't a complicated beast, but it's a beast nonetheless. This isn't music to pontificate over, to debate or intellectualise. This is music for the masses. Music to go apesh*t to. And the 400 lucky punters crammed into the Wedgewood Rooms tonight do exactly that.

In fact, it's a miracle Kasabian's blaring glam rock dance racket doesn't blow the doors off the tiny venue as the foundations and roof strain to contain tunes of such planet sized massiveness.
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