Kasabian bring special guests and huge hits to close day one of Reading 2017

As Queens of the Stone Age’s not-so-secret set on the NME tent comes to a close, what feels like the whole festival march their way up the gradual hill to the main stage just in time to see Kasabian crash into opener ‘Ill Ray (The King)’.

From the moment the new album opener’s first chords rush out across the packed field, the hits don’t stop, and the energy doesn’t let up either. ‘Eez-Eh’, ‘Underdog’ and ‘Shoot The Runner’ are casually thrown out within the first 15 minutes, and there’s no shortage of anthems to back it up.

The band tear into an actually-quite-brilliant cover of Nirvana’s ‘All Apologies’ before ‘L.S.F.’ closes the main set with a lung-bursting singalong. Out for over a decade now, the track is still one of the ultimate festival anthems, and can define any set.

Rolling into an encore that begins with ‘Comeback Kid’ - and yes, “sasquatch in a bin bag” is still the funniest lyric of 2017 - the band then roll into the vicious, spiky ‘Vlad The Impaler’, helped out by an old friend.

Noel Fielding bounds out onto the stage in his getup as “the real Dracula” and leads the band through the set’s highlight. After all, he owes Serge one after the guitarist persuaded him to join the line-up for the new series of bake-off.

Absurd, ridiculous, and more fun than any other set this weekend guaranteed, it could only be Kasabian.