There didn’t seem to be any takers.

That aside, the duo’s set was great. Their hyperactive take on punky rock power was little short of infectious. With lots of leaping about, songs about cars, guns and death, their enthusiasm was catching: especially when you consider that it sounded (and looked) like they’d just rolled out of a bedroom somewhere where they’d been practising their Big Rock Moves for a couple of years. Hell, it’s hard to add aplomb to your performance when you’re playing drums on a stand-up kit, but Andy managed it. This was wonderfully stupid bedroom rockin’-out at its finest. More!

Sadly, the lure of cheap beer meant that this reviewer missed most of Dan Kelly & The Alpha Males. Judging from the amount of people who’d squeezed into The Gaelic Club to see their set (it was as packed as it’d normally be for a headlining act), they were an act not to be missed. But in the little I saw, it was obvious that their groove had been firmly established by set’s end, with most heads bobbing in time with their hip-swinging tunes. There was even, in the last song, room for a drum solo – the big rock theme of the night was continuing.

Finally, it was time. The Beasts of Bourbon swaggered onstage with Pat Bourke (Dallas Crane) bravely standing in for Brian Hooper, who’d suffered serious back and internal injuries after falling from a balcony, and for whom a donation bucket had been positioned at the front door. Jumping into The Low Road, the band’s sound was as tense as it’d ever been. At this point in their evolution, there’s a certain air of addictive ruin-skating that’s missing, but it’s been replaced with a muscularity that’s well-honed. Indeed, the Beasts have always been loud enough to terrify, but it’s only now that you get a feeling that they know how to use that blackjack in the back pocket – and have no compunction about doing so. Older Beasts gigs seemed to be more about the crowd waiting for the whole show to fall apart – now it’s more about audience waiting for the band to go batshit insane and either kill or fuck everyone in the venue. Or both.

As if to prove that they meant business, the second song of the night was Chase The Dragon. There’d be no quarter for the rest of the set, which drew heavily on material from The Low Road. There were mellow singalong moments – Ride On being a crowd favourite – and more frenzied aural attacks in the form of tunes like Saturated. Charlie Owen’s incendiary soloing throughout was a highlight.

Broadly speaking, there’s two types of people who go to Beasts gigs: those who want to shag Tex, and those that want to be Tex. And the reason for this? Two words: Cocksucker Blues. Amid a howl of almost neanderthal guitar, the band’s version of the Jagger/Richards classic tore the place up. Sporting a flower in his hair from an audience member, Tex played up the role of the lonesome schoolboy – beseeching, horny and sneering – as the band ground on behind him, creating a cavern of feedback. If you’d ever wanted to see a crowd sit right in a frontman’s palm, this was the place to be.

Bringing an ecstatic crowd to fever-pitch with the second-encore wham of Let’s Get Funky, The Beasts Of Bourbon left the stage having proved – once more – that they’re the consummate rock band. The closest things we’ve got to the Stones? Certainly, they’re our nation’s closest contenders to capped-letter Rock Gods that’re still unafraid to crank it.