Leaping about in a mad mop of denim tassels at Kasabian’ s not-so-secret Glastonbury gig last weekend, Serge Pizzorno looked like a Hungarian sheepdog with a giddy case of the zoomies. Splicing samples from The Prodigy and Fatboy Slim into their set, the man behind the Noughties band’s dance-rock songs got the overflowing Woodsies crowd bouncing around as madly as him , to both old hits (“Club Foot” and “Shoot the Runner”) and tracks from their zingy new album, Happenings . It’s a resurgence that few would have expected.
Kasabian’s beery-blokey vibe had long been falling from fashion when their lairy frontman, Tom Meighan , was fired after being convicted of assaulting his girlfriend in 2020. But Pizzorno brings both a warmer energy and a proud ownership of his own material that has put fresh (rechargeable) batteries in Kasabian’s mood. That’s not to say they’ve started strumming acoustics and waving flowers.
Happenings finds the Leicester band on synth-corroding, speaker-rattling form, with Pizzorno banging out big tunes and splashing out big, bell-bottomed chords. It’s an album that opens like a spaceship landing in a sci-fi film: electronic notes beaming through a wind-blown effect. You’d be forgiven for thinking something rather proggy is about to slither down the metal gangplank.
Instead, there’s an abrupt jump cut to the disco-bass pulse of “Darkest Lullaby”, on which Pizzorno laments a lack of destination: “I don’t know where I’m g.