It’s like I know by now that there will be a frill of cymbal-shimmer and a ripple at the edges of everything and that I will leap up and down and laugh because I’m so excited. I know what Boredoms are going to do, pretty much, at least to start with. I know the way in which they’ll unfurl their sound with the upward seeping and sweeping of queasy intergalactic fairground chords and an outward spiral of drum-rolls and percussion mutterings, upwards and outwards until the music spreads to touch every sonic nerve ending in your body and light appears from your fingertips and your toe-tips and your nose and the clouds open and swallow you into the space between them and then they get going, after that. I know because I’ve seen Boredoms play pretty much the same set four times in four years - with some differences, sure, like tonight’s acid house disco bit in the middle - and I wonder about this and then I stop wondering and start leaping and laughing again because it’s OK, it’s not the same it’s totally different, it’s like weather is always different and like how the seasons are always a surprise when they change, and it’s OK too, using all this hippy talk, because it is Boredoms, and they are what most out-there music only promises to be. They are body music for the mind to do iridescent aerobics to.

Last night they retained the high of their last few performances and were also more lyrical and unashamedly pretty than usual, sounding more like Yoshimi’s OOIOO in places. They aimed for triumphant, anthemic prog peaks, too, and (duh, obviously) reached them easily, finishing off with a stately march, a national anthem for a planet run by giant cats and carnivorous plants. And there was the aforementioned disco-acid-house breakdown bit, expertly dropped on us after a galloping, thundering motorik. When things got too sweet, Eye cut loose with a swoop of noise that whistled past the head like a circus knife-thrower’s blade and travelled thence downwards much further than it ought. He leapt and yelled and pointed and conjured with glowing orbs in the encore, hinting at the chaos that surrounds the drumming and could always overtake and swamp it. Of course we know that won’t happen, but the intimation that it will is part of the tension and the fun and the sacredness of Boredoms: that they - at their best, which is like most of the time - sound like they’re holding everything together, holding the whole of music in their hands for an instant, passing it round, passing it on, passing it over the heads of the audience, and then throwing it out into the world and letting someone else have it.