Stepping away from my brief furrow into the depressing world of politics, I dragged my exhausted body to Trent Uni on Friday night to see the ever-progressive Oxford quintet Foals on the eve of the release of their second record Total Life Forever (do you get the title pun now? I’m so sorry). Having previously seen the band twice; once at Rock City and once at Underage festival - both particularly enjoyable performances - I had fairly high hopes for the gig. I say only ‘fairly’, mainly due to the venue, which tends to be a temperamental venue shall I say; from an almost standstill crowd for Jack Penate to a raucous one for The Courteeners and a slightly subdued Mystery Jets audience, as well as a potentially dangerously slippy canteen floor, it’s hard to know what you’re going to get with Trent Uni. You could get very annoyed standing still when all you really want to be is a sweaty mess, or you could be flat on your arse with lairy lads falling on top of you whilst thinking ‘is that smell piss or cider?’, it’s quite the lottery.

So, when Foals started with the title track from the new album and barely anyone moved, I was making side glances around the largely check-shirted crowd and cursing my luck. What I hadn’t realised was the album was yet to be released so many of these people had clean consciences and had not downloaded the album, and sure enough, mere seconds into the intro of Cassius, I found myself covered in cider amongst a sea of erupting humans. It’s tiring, this pogoing lark. They power through a set just over an hour long, peppered with hits old and new; formidable TLF opener Blue Blood sounds even better live its steady build up and pumping build up and new single This Orient highlights the band’s real musical skill, whilst Red Socks Pugie sounds as fresh as ever and keeps the crowd in glorious all singing all jumping all sweating raptures, but it’s the ethereal seven-minute epic Spanish Sahara that really catapults Foals from a fun live band to a seriously good one. Starting with delicate falsetto from (the surprisingly ripped) Yannis that builds and builds (and is almost ruined by cretinous clapping from the back of the audience) and climaxes in an earth-shattering, spine-tingling swirl of celestial beauty, sheathing the audience in a real velvety envelope of a musical orgasm… If God were to treat a keyboard to seven minutes of beardy pleasure, it might well sound like this.

They finish with old fan favourite Two Steps, Twice, another typically frenetic live number that baits the exhausted audience like hungry bears (or at least that’s what it feels like in the rather annoying ‘circle pit’) with the seemingly endless chants of ‘ba ba daa, ba ba daaa’ before releasing yet another delirium-inducing chorus that no-one knows the words to - something about dubstep? I don’t know… - and leaving me drained and sodden like hair stuck in the plughole. You’ve got to say it’s a bit more enjoyable than having BBC News constantly on in the hope of a positive announcement, even if Nick Robinson’s little face is rather amusing.

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Setlist:

Total Life Forever
Cassius
Olympic Airways
Blue Blood
This Orient
Balloons
Miami
Spanish Sahara
Red Socks Pugie
Electric Bloom
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The French Open
Two Steps, Twice