The latter’s quite unnecessary, but never unwelcome, four-drummer onslaught has the capacity to be more than a little rhythmically intriguing, but instead it’s with a primal, guttural thwack that each drum is struck at exactly the same time. No messing with the time-signatures. It’s just loud. And quite brilliant, too – the songs are short, punky, swaggering rough diamonds, grunted out by a bunch of guys who all look like your dad (and more specifically, my Dad). Whether more than half an hour of it would get a little grating is something still open for discussion, but before the delicacies of our headliners could waft through the atmosphere, the air did need clearing. And it was done so with possibly the most John Peel sound ever.

Kid Dakota are a wonderful discovery, playing for most of the set as a two-piece (until Low’s bassist Zak Sally guests for a final few songs), it’s the antithesis of everything their predecessors made virtue of. The closest you could get would be to have Todd Trainer take up the sticks behind Elliot Smith, the melodies at times hauntingly delicate, then worryingly intense, for the duration of the short set the duo have such a grip on your emotions that it’s as if they’re holding your heart in the palms of their hands, squeezing and relaxing, dictating when it’s appropriate for you to feel pain or excitement. Everyone falls silent in reverence for the arrival of a new personal obsession.

Few things could prepare for the bizarrely enriching trauma of a Low set, but the supporting cast has probably been the best possible. Even their respective talents however did nothing to hint at the beauty of the following two hours. Yeah, two hours. And every minute was splendid. There are, however, some empty seats. It’s criminal, in the proper sense of the word – people outside should have been rounded up, arrested, tied into their plush Festival Hall chairs and forced to witness this. One word in, and they’d have understood. Bring on such a police state.

Indeed, one word in, you’re hooked. The harmonies are what get you first, then it’s the fragility of the playing that draws you in. Mimi Parker (Drums, standing at all times) and Alan Sparhawk (Guitar) sing as if they were only ever intended to utter sentences at the same time, the harmonies so perfect and smooth that there’s not a single vulgar hiss to any ‘S’, no harsh kick to any consonant, just an exquisite flow of words. And these are weird words – prayers offering yourself up as an angel of death if God’s ever too busy to carry out his own dirty work, stumbling across corpses with X’s on the eyes, and, heck, even hearing this couple say ‘Tonight, you will be mine’ isn’t in the least bit romantic; more uncomfortable, given the ‘dead monkeys’ context it’s uttered in.

Low are dark, but they’re also uplifting. New LP ‘The Great Destroyer’ is hailed as their ‘rock’ record, but its essence is more of a stirring one than anything aggressive. Recent single ‘California’ is perhaps the finest song all night, the sound of a band enjoying a new world of possibilities, where a light breeziness brings in smiles and nodding heads rather than the forlorn, often crushing weariness of some of their most masterful melancholic moments. But instances of the latter are, of course, quite something – how many people here can claim to be certain what ‘Laserbeam’ is about is probably not a large number, but it has the same arresting effect on every last one of us.

They stick around as long as the curfew permits. They seem a little too polite to try to break it. They could have played on indefinitely, but somehow, this reached a level where it wasn’t needed. Memories of its peculiar elegance are so vivid that with every blink of the eyes, days later, we’re transported back into that very seat, going through it all over again. With defiance towards the now-common funny looks and sniggers, for that reason, we’ve tended not to keep our eyes open for very long this past week. It’s as if to say to the world, ‘leave me alone, I’m very happy here’. The mocking ones would understand too, if they’d have had that empty seat in front of us.

~Tom Hannan