Bo Ningen @ Royal Festival Hall

I'd been looking forward to this for weeks, and I was still blown away.

Bo Ningen played the Royal Festival Hall as part of Yoko Ono's curation of this year's Meltdown festival. Iggy and The Stooges played a sold-out gig elsewhere in the building earlier on in the evening for some lucky buggers, but actually we were all (potentially) lucky buggers today because Bo Ningen played for free for an unrestricted crowd in the Clore Ballroom.

And boy were they good value.

It was an absolute belter of a set. I'd sort of seen the band twice before - once at the Windmill Brixton, but with an unusual lineup, and once supporting I forget who, on which occasion I arrived just late enough to regret not arriving earlier. So this was my first proper time, and as I said, even though I'd seen enough before to expect good things, this was all that and then a whole lot more.

Bo Ningen play noise rock, but in exactly the right proportions. Just the right amount of noise to keep things teetering, and just the right amount of rock to keep things grooving. They're satisfying as fuck.

They played to a large crowd this evening, and seemed to enjoy the hell out of it, which set up some kind of positive feedback loop between crowd and band that kept reinforcing and reinforcing until I felt like the tendons in my neck were gonna twang loose like an overplucked guitar string.

I only just hung onto my head.

Bo Ningen are going right to the top of my 'see em whenever you can' list. This was the best gig of my year so far by quite some margin. In fact, right now I can't remember the last time I saw anything as good.