Kasabian — Finsbury Park, London — 4 July 2026
Sometimes the best gigs aren’t just about what happens on stage. Kasabian at Finsbury Park reminded me why I fell in love with live music in the first place.
There are gigs you remember because of the setlist. There are gigs you remember because a band was particularly good.
And then there are days where everything seems to come together.
Kasabian at Finsbury Park was one of those days.
I went with a friend and we got to Finsbury Park at around 1pm. Before we’d even gone through the gates, we found ourselves outside a nearby pub having a drink.
The place was already buzzing.
People were laughing, drinking and talking about what was coming. There was that feeling you get before a massive gig where everyone knows they’re heading to the same place for the same reason.
And this was before we’d even got inside.
It felt like a festival
Walking into Finsbury Park, the first thing that struck me was simply the scale of it.
It was enormous.
The best way I can describe it is that it felt like a mini festival — except there was only one stage.
The bill ran throughout the afternoon with SOFY, Miles Kane, The K’s, Razorlight and Louis Dunford all appearing before Kasabian.
We saw all of them, although if I’m being truthful, there was one support act I paid considerably more attention to than the others.
Razorlight.
I’ve seen them around five times over the years, and somehow they still sounded every bit as good as I remember them a couple of decades ago.
Then they played America.
That was one of those moments.
Thousands of individual people suddenly seemed to become one crowd. Everyone singing the same song together, arms in the air, completely lost in it.
But as good as they were, there was still one reason most of us were there.
Kasabian were coming.
Ten minutes
I’ll always remember the countdown.
The screens beside the stage suddenly showed a timer.
10:00.
And it started ticking down.
That’s when I knew we were cooking on gas.
The anticipation around the place changed almost immediately. The crowd was getting louder and increasingly rowdy.
At one point, a chant of “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” broke out around us — I’ve even got the video to prove that particular Finsbury Park moment happened.
But underneath all the laughing and chanting, I was actually slightly apprehensive.
This was my first time seeing Kasabian without Tom Meighan fronting the band.
Could Serge Pizzorno really command a crowd of this size?
The timer kept disappearing.
Three minutes.
Two.
One.
Then it reached zero.
Everything went quiet.
And then…
Club Foot.
The proverbial roof came off a park that didn’t have one.
The crowd absolutely erupted.
And within minutes, most of the doubts I’d brought into Finsbury Park with me had disappeared.
Serge won me over
Serge was brilliant.
He was energetic from the start — running, jumping, getting down towards the crowd and constantly interacting with the people in front of him.
More importantly, he could hold them.
At times it felt like he could almost command the entire crowd.
That’s not an easy thing to do in a venue that size.
I’ve got a couple of minor criticisms. I think Serge could perhaps have a little more range vocally, and I would’ve loved to hear The Great Pretender.
But that’s me nitpicking.
As a frontman, he won me over.
And visually, I’ll always associate the gig with Serge charging around that enormous stage in that wonderfully strange denim jacket covered in painted faces.
“Yep. I’m here.”
Then came Hippie Sunshine.
And strangely, that was probably the moment the gig really clicked for me.
It wasn’t necessarily the loudest moment of the night. It wasn’t the grand finale.
It was simply the point where I remember thinking:
Yep. I’m here. I’m living this moment.
The newer material worked live, too. Hippie Sunshine and SUPERPOWERS were the two songs from ACT III included in the Finsbury Park set, and neither felt like an interruption while everybody waited for another old hit.
The crowd responded to them.
But naturally, some of those older songs produced something else entirely.
L.S.F. was huge.
Thousands of people singing together turned it into much more than another song in the set.
Outdoor sound has come a long way
Something else deserves mentioning: the sound.
For a huge outdoor event, the quality was excellent.
I’ve been around music long enough to remember outdoor shows where the sound could become a muddy mess depending on where you happened to be standing.
This wasn’t that.
Live sound has clearly come a very long way.
There was still the sheer scale and physical impact you’d expect from a show like this, but it wasn’t at the expense of actually being able to enjoy the music.
The crowd itself was similar.
In places it was mental.
But it was friendly mental.
People were having it, people were drinking, people were bouncing around — but there was also a feeling of everybody being together.
And oddly enough, that’s where my favourite memory of the entire day comes from.
It wasn’t a song.
The best moment wasn’t Kasabian
If somebody gave me five minutes from 4 July and said I could experience them again, I wouldn’t choose Club Foot.
I wouldn’t choose Hippie Sunshine.
I wouldn’t even choose Fire.
I’d go back to the Budweiser stand.
I remember standing up there with a beer, looking out across Finsbury Park towards the stage.
The sun was shining.
People were laughing.
The banter was everywhere.
I was surrounded by like-minded people and, for a little while at least, it felt like nobody had a worry in the world.
I felt almost like I was at home.
And I met some amazing people.
They were complete strangers. People I’d probably never have spoken to anywhere else and may never see again.
One conversation in particular has stayed with me.
A woman told me about having come through cancer and how the experience had changed the way she now looked at life.
I’m not going to tell somebody else’s story for them.
But listening to her was humbling.
It made me think about my own outlook and, if I’m truthful, made me feel slightly guilty about the way I’d been looking at certain things in my own life.
That’s the strange thing about live music.
You buy a ticket to watch a band.
Sometimes you come home remembering a conversation with a stranger.
Forty quid for a T-shirt?!
The day wasn’t completely immune from taking the piss.
I was going to buy a T-shirt.
Then I saw they were around £40.
Nope.
Apparently even an 11/10 day has limits.
Strangely, the food and drink were much more reasonable than I’d expected for a massive London event.
Two Budweisers cost me around £15 — I’d gone in expecting closer to £20 — and burger and chips was roughly a tenner.
Not too shabby at all.
Just don’t ask me to spend forty quid on a bloody T-shirt.
And then came Fire
Kasabian kept going.
Underdog. Days Are Forgotten. Shoot the Runner. Empire. You’re in Love With a Psycho. Vlad the Impaler. Goodbye Kiss.
The main set eventually finished with L.S.F., before the band returned for an encore of Ill Ray (The King) and Bless This Acid House.
And then there was only one way this could end.
Fire.
It blew me away.
There’s something about that song closing a Kasabian show that is difficult to reproduce on a record. After everything that had happened during the day, it felt enormous.
And then it stopped.
That was probably the worst bit.
It was over.
Nobody wanted to go home
As thousands of us made our way out of Finsbury Park, I was gutted.
People were still singing.
People were still buzzing.
The atmosphere hadn’t suddenly disappeared because the PA had been switched off.
It felt like nobody particularly wanted to admit that the day had finished.
And I understood why.
I’d gone into Finsbury Park slightly unsure about what Kasabian would be like without Tom.
I came out thinking that if somebody asked me whether they should see this version of the band, my answer would be simple:
Go with an open mind and expect greatness.
But something else happened that day.
I’d lost a little faith in music lately.
Not in the sense that I’d stopped loving it or stopped making it. It just hadn’t been giving me quite the same feeling that it once did.
Finsbury Park reminded me of it.
Not because Kasabian somehow changed my life.
Because for one sunny day there was great music, decent beer, laughter, ridiculous banter, conversations with complete strangers and thousands of people who all seemed to understand why being there mattered.
And when Fire finished, I looked at that stage with a strange mixture of amazement, sadness and awe.
Part of me wanted to be the person standing up there.
Maybe that’s what I really took home from Finsbury Park.
Not some profound revelation.
Just a reminder of why I love music.
Kasabian at Finsbury Park: 11/10.
A day of great unexpected things.
