For a band with 30 years of history behind them, Primal Scream sounded as vital and as fresh as they did when they first started out when they appeared for the first time in the Isle of Man.

From the first note to the last, the rock giants had the crowd in their hands, starting out with one of their most famous songs and never dropping the pace or the energy from there.

They walked out without much in the way of fanfare and went straight into ’Moving On Up’, which itself played out like an entire concert.

The slow anthemic build-up had the crowd shouting out the each word, the drums exploded into life, and the audience danced along.

Singer Bobby Gillespie held out the microphone, was met by a 1000-voice chorus of ’my light shines on’, and the song finished to a glorious, emotional crescendo.

All around, there were happy grins, arms around shoulders, hands raised in the air and a sense of everything being right in the world.

I had to remind myself that this was the first song, and we had a another hour and a half of this to come.

Famously, Bobby Gillespie is a man of few words. The only words he spoke to the audience within the first six songs were: ’We’ve never been to the Isle of Man. So, er...’

Luckily, though no one was there for the conversation, and as the concert grew in pace, you could visibily see the band unfolding and really enjoying themselves onstage.

Then the big hits started to come out, and the stunning group of the final four songs proved what an incredibly diverse band they are.

They went from a shattering, techno-metal version of ’Swastika Eyes’, straight into the blissed out genre-defining, psychedelia-blues of ’Loaded’.

raucous

They channelled their inner Small Faces influences for ’Country Girl’, and finished the first set off with a blistering, raucous version of ’Rocks’.

With these classic songs done, the encores actually felt like they were played for the love of the gig, and not just because they were going through the motions. ’Kill All Hippies’ was followed by an anthemic ’Come Together’, which finished with the band trooping off with beaming smiles across their faces, hands in the air, and with Bobby alone onstage conducting the crowd in an emotional final chant of the song’s title.

For a band this big, the fact that this concert felt so intimate, and the band clearly enjoyed themselves, made the night so much more memorable.

After the show, both Bobby and guitarist Andrew Innes said they were blown away by the reception they had from the crowd, with Andrew adding that it was the most fun he’d had onstage for a while, and that they would love to come back here again.

That must go some way towards paying off the hard work by promoter Lenny Conroy, from Triskel Promotions, in bringing them to the island. His efforts in trying to book the band for over eight years were rewarded in one of the best concerts I have seen at the Villa.

Support came from local group Baad Acid, who played a great, original set and made the most of their time on the big stage, going down well with the audience, and gaining a lot of new fans.