In an age where unassuming folkish rock rules the roost it’s nice to see a band unafraid of a little melodrama. With a touch of theatre, curtains dropped on the East Brunswick stage leaving those waiting to see the Wild Beasts first ever Melbourne show off the back of this year’s Laneway Festival in a state of hushed suspense.

Lights dimmed, snuffing out the whimsical, happy-go-lucky mood set by the adorably awkward support act Crayon Fields and their saccharine brand of 60s-inflected indie pop. A track from an audio book blared out from the speakers as the curtains lifted, a reading from works perhaps recognisable to those more literary but the rest of us could only hazard a guess that it was something vaguely fauvist and then nod along as if we knew what that meant.

And then those rapturous vocals began. The peaks of Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto and the troughs of Tom Fleming’s Morissey-like baritone, live, are sounds to behold.

Even those put off by the shrillness of tracks like Hooting and Howling might find that live, Hayden’s startling falsetto wafts its way through the buzz of speakers and the murmurs of the crowd to envelop you like incense rich with ethereal beauty.

Operatic is how you might describe Wild Beasts on stage performance. It’s not just Hayden and Tom’s heart-stopping vocals but the larger-than-life drumming and percussion. Drummer ‘Bert’ ( Chris Talbot ) could be seen at one point wrapping rags around his drumsticks to give his garden-variety drum kit an orchestral boom. When Tom wasn’t beating on a cowbell for Two Dancers he could be seen thwacking his guitar with a spare drumsticks lying around.

Which makes you wonder what the Wild Beasts are capable of back in their natural habitat of the English Lake District. Qantas’s excessive baggage prices, Wild Beasts announced, meant they had to leave but a few of their guitars behind, suggesting that we saw but a glimpse of their instrumental range and ferocity.

Stingy airlines aside, Tom and Hayden sung Australia’s praises as a place where Wild Beasts feel very much at home. Apart from the spiders, they were quick to add. And the sweltering heat, which kept all crammed into the East Brunswick bandroom covered in a thick film of sweat for most of the night.

Having reached desperation point, Hayden at one point asked if anyone in the audience had a towel, singling out the same girl who had lent him her pair of sunglasses at Laneway a few days earlier. Although she kindly offered to go and retrieve one from her car outside, Wild Beasts soldiered on regardless with a mesmerising set that left Hayden almost expiring with perspiration and Tom with a fat lip from a run-in with his mike.

Once recovered from their Antipodean antics, we can only hope Wild Beasts are as enamoured of our local friendliness as we were by their brilliance so that we might see them return to our shores sometime very soon.