In the land of summer sun, Kula Shaker burst through the heatwave in a blaze of light and colour.

It was September 2023, and I’d left my last gig – Blur’s hugely anticipated Wembley Stadium return – feeling like maybe I just wasn’t that into gigs any more. Luckily, this bleak mood was short-lived, and I greeted the news of a Kula Shaker show at the 100 Club with glee. This was the venue where I saw them for the very first time in 1999 and was fully converted to the glory of the boys, and 24½ years later seemed like the perfect time to revisit that experience.

Even more perfectly, the summery buoyancy of so many Kula Shaker tunes – from 1996’s “Hey Dude” imploring you to ‘catch the sun!‘ to their most recent, surftastic single “Waves” – was matched by an end-of-summer heatwave so incomparably delightful that even I, a grumpy sun-shirker, could not be immune to its charms. As I noted in my diary:

‘All I can say is, thank god the Kula Shaker gig happened at the start of the heatwave, and not the end. Because the first few days of Satan’s Furnace were actually really nice – the heat was cut through with a glorious breeze, and Oxford Street was buzzing and vibrant.‘

Emerging from Oxford Circus stations into Argyle Street, I bought a pack of mints at an off-licence which I’m pretty sure occupied the space where Stargreen Box Office used to be. It seemed fitting, given that that was where I bought my ticket to my very first Kula Shaker gigs all those years ago.

Queuing outside the 100 Club, I was approached by a puzzled German couple who asked what the queue was for and seemed even more perplexed when I said it was for a Kula Shaker gig. Once in, with my entrance validated by two treble clef stamps on my wrist which were quickly sweated away, I got myself a JD & coke then found a post in the crowd, dead centre, about half way back. I noted in my diary that the support was a ‘Hendrix-haired dude playing rap classics on an electric guitar, who was pretty cool.’ A helpful commenter on my vlog of the gig later commented that this was Lewis Floyd Henry, definitely an act to keep an eye on.

The boys were on at 8.30 with, of course, “Hey Dude”, and they launched into a gig as stormingly vibrant as you would expect from a Kula Shaker live show. The setlist seemed at first impression to be quite similar to the previous year’s show at Alexandra Palace Theatre, and it was only upon later reflection that I realised something quite odd – there were no songs from their most recent album, “The First Congregational Church of Eternal Love and Free Hugs”. This album may have perplexed some with its church-sermon interludes and conceptual indulgences, but I absolutely loved it, and some of its songs found a place amongst my all time Kula Shaker favourites, like the achingly beautiful “Love in Separation” and the righteous fury of the multi-part monster “After the Fall”. Perhaps it was the return of their original keyboard player, Jay Darlington, that prompted them to embark on something of a reset, but I’ll be sad if “Eternal Love” is never to be represented in their setlists going forward.

What we did get at this gig was quite a future emphasis, with four songs from the next album “Natural Magick”, which had not yet been announced at the time of this gig. We had the blazing “Gaslighting”, the groovy title track and the gleeful “Indian Record Player” on top of the bouncily uplifting “Waves”. Commenting in my diary about my predictions for the new album, I wrote that ‘all evidence suggests it will be completely amazing in an entirely different way to “Eternal Love”, which turned out to be an entirely accurate prediction.

Of course we had a barrage of classics as well, with an utterly transporting “Narayan”, and a glorious “Into The Deep”, being my highlights, though I was still perplexed at the absence of “Great Hosannah”, which they had also neglected to play at Alexandra Palace Theatre the year before. But that didn’t dim the joy of this gig one bit. The band were on electrifying form, and injected a dose of light and joy into my life, in the middle of a year in which I struggled to connect much with music at all.

I’ll comment more on “Natural Magick” when I review their Electric Brixton show of last year, but I will say this: the 2020s are turning out to be truly an exciting time to be Kula Shaker fan. With two storming albums released within 18 months of each other, and now only just over a year since the release of “Natural Magick” they are already teasing its follow up, it’s safe to say their creative energy is currently boundless, and I can’t wait to see what they are going to bring us next.