Support bands aren’t meant to be the main draw of an evening’s gig-going. It’s just not polite, delivering a set so electrifying that all synapses are frazzled long before the show’s headliner takes the stage; it’s not the done thing to leap and jump and crawl and writhe and wriggle and pounce and shimmy and swagger and dribble and dance before an assembled throng in a manner that’s only ever going to burn the image forever onto the onlooker’s minds eye. Clearly nobody went over such protocol with These Arms Are Snakes.

Pelican are a wonderful band, don’t get me wrong – their muscular metal-echoing instrumental rock makes for mighty fine listening, particularly when delivered live. But their thunder – and they are thunderous – is absolutely stolen by their tour-mates, and in particular by TAAS’s vocalist-cum-gymnast Steve Snere. With trousers defying the laws of gravity to stay just below his waist and shirt wide open exposing a chest glistening with sweat, Snere’s antics are impossible to see beyond – his colleagues could be sacrificing newborn lambs or clubbing baby seals to death either side of him, and still all attentions would be focused on the singer, twirling to the sounds inside his head, almost entirely independent of the music around him.

He’s in the crowd one minute, behind the back curtain the next. He is the star around which his band-mates orbit, each of them pulled and pushed by the immense gravitas of such a performance. He shines so brightly it’s a miracle the spotlight shows up on his frame as it chases him around the insides of one of London’s usually so sterile venues. Okay, there is no spotlight – Snere doesn’t need one anyway. He provides all the grime and stink necessary to transform these squeaky clean walls and floor into the cesspit a band so out of the loop of fashion so regularly can be found in.

Songs, the band plays some: calls for ‘Angela’s Secret’ are rewarded; ‘The Shit Sisters’ nearly has the ceiling in; and ‘Subtle Body’ is the overall standout in the almost-intolerable intensity stakes. But what is played pales in significance when compared to who is playing it: These Arms Are Snakes have a mixed track record when it comes to their on-disc output – certain critics have been far from kind – but live they are, genuinely, one of the finest acts around. They wrap their sound around a room, enveloping all before them in fuzzing and buzzing rock music that should probably be suffixed with a ‘post’ if only such dressing mattered a damn. They are a band you cannot take your eyes off, a band whose music infects your senses for a whole set, rendering you helpless to do so much as order another overpriced pint.

They’re the worst support band in the world.

Photograph by Simon Menhinick