It’s a long time since I’ve been down to the front of the stage for a gig, but at Primal Scream concerts it’s easy to do, since most of the crowd are old, thirty-something indie duffers like myself.

I do regret my actions, though, as my ears are still ringing. I blame Kevin Shields from My Bloody Valentine. A sometime member of The Scream, he made a special guest appearance at this show, lacing ‘Shoot Speed, Kill Light’ with vicious feedback and generally acting like a sonic terrorist throughout the latter part of the set. It wasn’t just Shields who was to blame for my hearing problems. Mani didn’t help matters either, blasting me in the face with a dub-heavy bassline for a trippy, powerful version of ‘Higher Than The Sun’.

Touring to support their occasionally brilliant new release, Beautiful Future, for a bunch of geezers in their forties (apart from young Johnny Marr look-a-like guitarist Little Barry), the Scream were on the money tonight.

New tune ‘Suicide Bomb’ - a non-essential album track - took on a life of its own, becoming a strung-out, garage rock classic.

The dark disco-meets-Philly-soul strut of ‘Uptown’, which Bobby Gillespie dedicated to “all the ladies and the lady-boys”, got the girls grooving, but best of all was a blistering, strobe-heavy ‘Swastika Eyes’ - the nearest thing to being on drugs, without actually doing them, I’d imagine.

Sean Hannam