I’ve never liked support bands. Even when they’ve been support bands I’ve liked, I’ve never liked support bands. Bands that are on before my preferred band on a festival bill count as a support band. They tend to serve nothing more than a better (though this is often not the case…) way to pass the time than staring morosely at a drum-kit and backdrop while supporting myself on the barrier because I no longer have the will to stand up straight.

   Jet were, at first, in the unfortunate position of being such a band. Two bands on before the Manics at Optimus Alive Festival in Portugal, I hadn’t even fully recovered from the sprint to the barrier in temperatures of over thirty-five degrees.

(For those of you who don’t know or can’t remember who Jet are, think “Dum dum dum du-du-dum da-da-da duh-duh-duh-da-da-duh-duh So, one two three take my hand and come with me because you look so fine and I really wanna make you mine!” Yes, that was the only song I knew of theirs too.)

   A vague memory of owning one album while only knowing one song at the age of sixteen was all I had to make me interested. Then they came onstage.

   It was symptomatic of my ignorance of them post-2006 that I was surprised at Are You Gonna Be My Girl? being played in the middle of the set. Why would they play their best song before the end? I thought. Turns out, to my surprise, that it isn’t their best song. Not by far.

   Vocalist and rhythm guitarist Nic Cester has benefited massively from cutting his hair, not least because his stage presence (which he has in excess) is now reinforced by the realisation that he is very, very attractive. The squeal of, “Ooh, the singer’s cute!” to my right confirmed my theory. He also has the perfect (almost to the point of rock parody) voice for this style of music.

   She’s A Genius was the song I could still hum afterwards and that I could sing along to after one chorus. It’s an exemplary song as far as gritty rock goes, with a riff that goes straight to your elbows and seems to demand a Michael Stipe-esque dance*. Rip It Up also ranked high in the singalong ranks. Black Hearts (and I must admit Youtube and Wikipedia have aided me in discovering what these songs were actually called) had the same effect, but with a great melody to match. There are countless chants here, made for a mass clap-along.

   By the end of the set I was genuinely sorry to see them leave the stage, which they did to a residue chant from their moment of audience participation during the catchy, but oddly moving, Seventeen. Their set had been such an unexpected jolt of fun that I had even failed to notice the festival photographers taking many shots of me gazing up at the stage, with the sort of smile on my face that made me look like I was on day release and had lost my medication…

   I don’t know enough about them to write an informed and Q-worthy review, yet reviewing them I am. Upon returning from Portugal after the end of the festival the first thing I did was check what UK dates they were playing. I have nothing to convey, nothing of journalistic worth, apart from total over-excitement in the realisation that a band I had forgotten about have not only been rediscovered, but have become rather brilliant in the years that passed. 

   If you, like me, have the opening riff of Are You Gonna Be My Girl? imprinted in your mind until the end of humanity, you will be surprised at how far they have come since. If you, like me, love uplifting, dirty and raw rock ‘n’ roll, buy Shaka Rock and I can guarantee you will not be disappointed.

* I feel the need to add, as a disclaimer, that this may be because I was on the barrier and therefore unable to move anything but my arms and my head…

So it transpires that football isn’t the only thing that the Portuguese are superior at. Music festivals can also be added to the (somewhat extensive) list.

   Optimus Alive festival is a three-day heavy rock affair in Alges, up-town Lisbon. The line-up was a failsafe combination of Florence & The Machine, Kasabian, Manic Street Preachers, Pearl Jam, Deftones, Faith No More, Jet and LCD Soundsystem. The temperature wasn’t predicted to drop below thirty degrees. There was going to be free Iced Tea. I was sold.

   So frequently in the UK festivals are much more enjoyable in advance than in the grim mud-soaked, piss-stained, beer-saturated reality. Festivals such as Glastonbury and T in the Park, costing around £200 per ticket, have gone from being lairy gatherings of over-excited music lovers to magnets for every wannabe indie kid and irritant poser under the age of 20. Those who would be content with taking amphetamines with WKD in a field for five days without seeing a single band are in the vast majority. No matter how good the line-up, I find it hard to concentrate on the immense experience of the music past the near-uncontrollable urge to line the rest of the crowd up against a wall and shoot them with air guns.

   Enter the foreign festival. Enter Optimus Alive.

   Firstly, it’s unbelievably clean. Even on the third day, pre-Pearl Jam, on a Saturday, when the queues for the portaloos (which were really more like clever portable communal bathrooms) demanded a fifteen-minute wait, they were nothing less than spotless and full of clean toilet paper. Seeing Pearl Jam without having to attempt the notorious “hover” manoeuvre to avoid syphilis, was mind-blowing.

   Secondly, the people were awesome. I mean genuinely awesome. The people who you would seek out at parties. That no one was visibly paralytic and/or throwing glasses of their own urine over parts of the crowd was instantly a step up from previous British experiences. But everyone I met while there had brilliant stories of musical escapades to tell; Madrid to see Bon Jovi, Rome to see U2, a row of Deftones fans racing Manics fans to the main stage barrier. Great scenes.

   The atmosphere is electric but never tips over into aggressiveness. Seeing siblings looking after their eleven-year-old brother near the back of the main stage whilst sipping pints of beer during Pearl Jam was particularly touching. At the front it was lairy but self-contained; even the mosh-pits were exhilarating rather than a desperate struggle to keep your femurs intact.

   It’s romantic, maybe naïve, to want British festivals to retain this sense of fun, this sense of wonder, without the cheap posturing and exhibitionism. But at least there’s always the chance to go overseas, which, when the combined cost of both the flight and weekend ticket comes to less than a Glastonbury or Reading/Leeds ticket alone, is a lot more affordable than you’d think.

   Lisbon, Germany, Spain, even Belgium. They all beat the British festivals in this Champions League.