Half way through George Clinton’s stanking funk explosion I realise that I’ve been listening to tunes built on his genius groove for my entire life. That killer chorus from We Got the Funk has elevated house tracks and hip hop bombs for three decades, and still flies straight from the heart of the cosmos to your dancing ass..So when the God-knows how many members of Funkadelic squeeze every last drop out of tonight, they’re not playing a song, they’re laying down a goddam religion.. and the crowd go wild. JUMP they shout, and you know we leap.

Clinton is without his trademark rainbow dreads, and dressed fairly somberly (for him) in an electric blue suit that he appears to have borrowed off previous act Dr John. It doesn’t make any difference to his holler, which switches from growl to whoop at the flick of a snare. Outside of that, the Funkadelic circus is it’s usual wild trip from the mothership- Do you need a sexy nurse on rollerskates as a backing singer? If you got the funk then HELL YES. Do you need Sir Nose, the contortionist dancer with the pimp swagger and the pinnochio nose to show up mid set and stretch his shit out? Do you even need to ask?

As you can tell, I enjoyed this show. I feel like Clinton just took thousands of people to a finer, funkier place. The sun came out. They played Atomic Dog. Had Snoop Dogg come out at that point I would have prolapsed in excitement, so it’s probably for the best he didn’t. What we got was near perfect, and one of the best gigs I’ve seen all year. Hats off to the big man- if you have any love of soul, RnB, hip hop, funk, house, whatever, I urge you to see him, a genuine legend.