18.25, Radio 1 Stage

When a band’s arrival is heralded by the music from Kubrick’s classic ‘A Clockwork Orange’ blaring out of the PA, you’re prepared to be brutalised and utterly disorientated, but this is absolute fucking insanity. If The Sights are looking backwards, THE MARS VOLTA are most definitely looking forwards, and creating the sort of music that feels as though it has only ever been imagined in the heads of those onstage. One minute guitars slash, drums pound and shards of chorus stab into your head, and the next it’s back to the free jazz meanderings that twist and turn but never quite peter out. I gulp, feeling as though I need a PhD in chaos theory to understand it all, and find myself wondering how long it’ll be before Cedric Bixler skewers himself with the mic stand and marvelling at the fact that each musician seems to know exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. How many songs have they played? I have no idea. By the end of a 45 minute set, all I know for certain is that they didn’t play extraordinarily accessible new single (well, everything’s relative…) ‘Inertiatic ESP’. So, are they actually any good? Well, come back to me with that one in fifty years, by which time I might just about have started to get my head round their LP – but, for the time being, what is frequently breathtaking on record is simply a bit too much live.