A word first about the support band. You go to a show to forget the world and its troubles. During the White Williams’ set my mind turned to a relative’s illness, an unpleasant trip to the dentist earlier in the day and a bit of botched DIY to distract me from what was happening on stage. The set started on a low point and got worse but it did defy the laws of space and time by making five minutes feel like fifty years. Some fool had sold them one of those children’s keyboards that you blow into and they used it to create what they considered a Mogwai style soundscape. They failed in that endeavour but they did create a world of pain and torment. It went on and on for what felt like decades. The band seemed tired and cheesed off at the end of their stint supporting the next big thing and it transmitted to the performance. Though I’d heard one or two of their tunes on the radio and they’d sounded pretty good. Maybe it was just a bad night.

By any normal measure Vampire Weekend should inhabit that daytime XFM sludgy netherworld of bands with half an idea of their own and a ripoff of three other groups’ good bits. A-punk sounds like The Beat were pulled out of retirement to write it. Cape Cod Kwassa could have been inspired by The Bhundu Boys and M79 seems to describe a bus journey by a lovelorn undergraduate to the accompaniment of a string quartet playing Bach in the rear seat. It’s effete foppishness pushed to the max but by god it’s great music. It’s so effete in parts that, like many others, I’d assumed they were from Massachusetts but we were told tonight that they are New Yorkers.

The album has been a favourite in this house since its release and for the first time ever I bought a concert ticket from an Ebay tout at nearly three times the face value. The first surprise was when it arrived. The bigger surprise was when it turned out to be legit and fingers crossed the profits aren’t being used to finance unspeakable criminality in Guildford.

For a band that only released its first album Vampire Weekend already inspire a lot of affection in their fans. The Electric Ballroom was packed. I’ve never had a harder time slipping to the back of the hall for the encore the crowd was so dense. There were several singalong moments, the call and response on Blake’s got a new face being particularly popular. To prove the point about effeteness part of the lyric goes:

Occident out on the weekend
That’s the way that we relax
English Breakfast tastes like Darjeeling
But she’s too cute to even ask

Is that the way Americans really talk? Most American tourists I hear communicate using a vocabulary consisting of “like”, “so”, “like” “I”, “like”, “he””, “like”, “she”, “like”.

The band’s entire repertoire comprises a forty minute album and two untitled new songs – so we got the lot. A ruthless editing process seems to be part of the band’s winning formula. They avoided the temptation to cram their first CD with the full seventy minutes and focussed on pulling together a strong set of songs. The live versions lack a lot of the polish of the record but the energetic performances and audience response compensate.

The omens are good for Vampire Weekend. They drink nothing but water on stage, look clean and healthy and the new material is as strong as the “old” stuff. I’ll give them the kiss of death and predict that they’ll be enormous in eighteen months.