Kasabian - Finsbury Park 2026 - Live Review

There are evenings where everything seems to line up. Saturday night, in Finsbury Park, somewhere around 45,000 people and Kasabian headlining their largest London show. The football shirts everywhere told you exactly what kind of crowd this was going to be, and my heart was racing at the prospect of the next 90 minutes.

The warm-up started well before the band came on. Sweet Caroline got the whole park singing, then Hey Jude. By the time the chants of football's coming home were bouncing around and the stage lights changed, you could feel the place hold its breath before Club Foot hit. Name me a better song to open with. I'm genuinely asking. The buzz in the air was incredible.

From there it never really let up. Serge Pizzorno, in a denim jacket covered in painted faces, barely stopped moving. On the runway, in front of the barrier, back to the stage, repeat. The set has a proper shape to it, more than just a greatest hits run through in any order. Days Are Forgotten sounded vast out in the open air, the kind of chorus that fills a park and keeps going. Treat arrived preceded by Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us, which wrong-footed a lot of people for a split second before the penny dropped and the whole thing became something close to a mass rave. Vlad the Impaler got a Faithless Insomnia intro that in retrospect made complete sense, and You're In Love With A Psycho stretched out into We Are Your Friends without anyone seeming to mind the detour.

LSF closed the main set and you could still hear the park singing it after the guitars had stopped. The encore built through Ill Ray and Bless This Acid House before Fire closed everything out. For a band in their third decade, the energy did not drop once.

Leaving Finsbury Park, people were still singing. That says enough.

Support across the day was worth arriving early for.

Miles Kane opened by asking whether we were ready for the best 35 minutes of our lives. Whether or not the captain's armband he was wearing was a quiet nod to Leighton Baines, it got people talking. Rearrange and Don't Forget Who You Are are songs that land the same way every time, and he is one of those performers who carries something that looks effortless until you realise it absolutely isn't.

Razorlight gave the crowd what they came for, which was essentially 2004. Johnny Borrell, shirtless (mid-set) in white jeans, took the set straight back to the early catalogue and mostly stayed there. Before I Fall to Pieces drew one of the biggest singalongs of the afternoon, and when America closed things out, you could hear the whole park find the words without thinking. Some songs just stay put in the memory and refuse to leave.

The K's thanked the crowd for turning out early and mentioned they had played with Kasabian before and loved it. They were not wrong to flag the connection - they clearly brought plenty of their own people along, and those people were singing every word back at them. Glass Towns and Hometown got the loudest reactions, and the set had enough momentum that it was hard not to be drawn in even if you'd barely known them going in. A band I love seeing live.

Louis Dunford walked on pre Kasabian and immediately said he had been sh1tting himself and had never been on a stage this big. He lives just around the corner from the park, which he mentioned, and the set felt like it came from that place. He played an unreleased track - The Streets My Friends Died On - which held the crowd's attention in a way that takes real confidence to pull off in front of 45,000 people. He closed with The Angel and The Local, both of which felt properly earned by that point. Being that close to Arsenals stadium, you could tell there were a few Gunners in the park.