Tame Impala, Hammersmith Apollo, London

The Hammersmith Apollo isn’t just any stage; it’s an amphitheatre with tiered seats reaching vertigo-inducing heights. It’s hosted The Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Queen, Radiohead and basically any other band or artist that you could pluck out of an ‘Iconic Gigs’ textbook. Sold out tonight, there are 5,000 tiny people furnishing the place. To put that in perspective, you could’ve fitted the entire population of my West Country hometown (it’s barely a parish town, but a town regardless) into Tame Impala’s venue tonight.

They would’ve been in for a treat, too, because Tame Impala deliver a resplendent performance that is both introspective and completely engrossing. Kevin Parker is not flailing around the stage throwing cliched shapes; he’s concentrating too hard on delivering glimmering psychedelia for any of that nonsense. Subtly shepherding his band through complex jam sections and improvisation that thrills the crowd, Parker is every inch the quietly commanding frontman, presenting songs from both ‘Innerspeaker’ and ‘Lonerism’ with dreamy perfection. Tame Impala revisit their first eponymous EP, too, with the pounding guitar romp ‘Half Full Glass Of Wine’. It’s an apt song choice because tonight feels like such a celebration of Tame Impala’s cemented status that the air of optimism is inescapable. The glass isn’t just half full, it’s positively over-brimming with bubbly effervescence.

Excitement also appears in the formidable shape of ‘Elephant’, which inspires some questionable dance routines and awry limbs being waved in trunk-like fashion. It’s a loud, brash, stomping affair complete with a winding guitar solo that rings right to the dizzying back row. The Hammersmith Apollo, on this humid midsummer night, feels more like a festival, and the suspicious whiffs of smoke meandering their way over the audience only add to the general feeling. ‘It Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’ unites 5,000 people in swaying euphoria, and increasingly Tame Impala’s music doesn’t feel nostalgic. It feels like music that creates its own nostalgia.

Parker’s music does have that ability to transport you somewhere else. The philosophically-minded debut album opener ‘It Isn’t Meant To Be’ rings with richly-toned guitars and a bright, tinny sheen of crashing cymbals. ‘Solitude Is Bliss’ reaches similar heights of lucid wonder. Watching the modulating shapes contract and explode behind the band, it’s all-absorbing. There can be a temptation to dub gigs as ‘amazing’ when they are merely ‘very good’. For tonight, though, amazing is probably the only word that will quite fit the bill.

After a playful encore that sees the band wander round the stage for at least five minutes having casual conversations, Tame Impala wrap up the night with the relatively modest ‘Nothing That Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything That We Could Control’, and it’s typical Kevin Parker not to insist on exiting in a cacophony of fireworks and glittery confetti. As the red lettering outside the venue gets taken down (reading, amusingly as ‘Jonathame Impala’ for a short time) it feels like a shame. Tame Impala have owned Hammersmith in a way only a band of their unique caliber could manage.