Kula Shaker Live: A Dream Double Bill, Thirty Years in the Making

There are some epic gigs out there, not all gracing massive stadiums, we’re talking intimate, up close venues that many people might glance over because they thing that small means poor production and has been artists.

 And in my humble opinion, these are often ones that stay lodged somewhere behind your ribcage for years afterwards when you get epic photos, a clash of greatness and the you walk in already buzzing before the support has even hit the first chord, because you just know something genuinely special is about to happen.

The 2025 Ocean Colour Scene UK tour, with Kula Shaker as very special guests, was that kind of night.

Here at Blanc Creative, Lee Blanchflower has been following both of these bands since his twenties. That’s not a throwaway detail that’s a chunk of a person’s life measured in vinyl, in concert stubs, in late nights and long drives home with the stereo turned up.

So when the announcement dropped in autumn 2024 that Kula Shaker would be joining OCS across a 19-date run, the reaction wasn’t a polite nod. It was considerably louder than that.

The Kula Shaker Story is one steeped in bad press and a religious backlash that today, just wouldn’t have happened.

Kula Shaker’s story after K is one of British music’s more fascinating cautionary tales, and also one of its better comeback stories.

The debut went to number one, sold over a million copies, spawned four Top 10 singles, and announced the band as one of the most genuinely original acts of the Brit pop era. Then things got complicated.

Crispian Mills gave an interview in 1997 in which he made comments about the swastika, attempting to reclaim it as an ancient Hindu symbol, which it is, but doing so in terms that landed badly and generated a wave of press that was almost impossible to recover from.

The backlash was severe. Follow-up album Peasants, Pigs and Astronauts came out in 1999, reached the Top 10, but the momentum had gone.

The band split that same year, and the era was over almost as quickly as it had started. Mills went off to direct films, Darlington ended up touring the world with Oasis, and Kula Shaker became one of those bands people referenced in the past tense. The reformation came quietly in 2006, and the four albums that followed.  Strangefolk, Pilgrims Progress, K 2.0, 1st Congregational Church of Eternal Love and Free Hugs built a loyal audience back up without ever quite breaking through to the mainstream again.

Then Darlington came back in 2022, the original four-piece were together for the first time since 1999, and something reignited. Natural Magick in 2024 felt like a band finally free of the weight of that first chapter, not running from it, but no longer defined by it either.

They’re making music on their own terms, with no major label breathing down their necks, and the results speak for themselves.

The connection between Kula Shaker and Ocean Colour Scene goes back further than most people realise. It goes all the way to the early nineties, before either band had a record deal or a hit single to their name. They were playing the same small London venues on the same circuit, including nights at the Splash Club in London, knocking around in the same world of guitar bands trying to get noticed.

That shared history meant that when the 2025 tour came together, it wasn’t a promoter pairing two vaguely compatible nineties acts for a nostalgia package.

It was two sets of genuine old friends getting back on the same bill for the first time in decades. Kula Shaker said as much themselves when the tour was announced:

“We go way back with OCS great musicians and even better friends.”

OCS were equally warm about it. Simon Fowler described being “delighted that our old friends Kula Shaker will be joining us.” That word keeps coming up… Friends. Not contemporaries, not peers, not fellow nineties survivors.

Friends… And you could feel it in the shows.

There was none of the awkwardness that sometimes comes with a support slot, no sense of two camps coexisting on the same bill. The energy between the two camps was genuinely warm, and the audience picked up on it immediately.

The 2025 tour came about partly because of where both bands were at the same moment. Ocean Colour Scene were on a genuine high — they’d played the Acoustic Stage at Glastonbury in 2024, they had a major UK tour planned, and the demand for tickets was strong enough that extra dates had to be added almost immediately.

They needed a support act that would genuinely complement the bill rather than just fill the slot, and Kula Shaker, fresh off the back of Natural Magick topping the Independent Albums Chart, with the original four-piece reunited and a sell-out UK tour already under their belt in 2024 were in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

The fit was obvious.

Same generation, same roots, same audience. Fans who’d been buying OCS records since Moseley Shoals were largely the same people who’d worn out their copy of K.

Putting them on the same bill wasn’t a gamble, it was a gift. And with the friendship and the shared history going back to those early London club nights, there was no awkward negotiation about billing or ego.

It was, by all accounts, two bands who genuinely wanted to be in the same room again. The audience felt that. You always can.

Kula Shaker. The Tour of sorts

The run kicked off in Leeds on 27 March 2025 and rolled through the country until 20 April in Liverpool with  19 dates taking in Sheffield, Birmingham, London’s O2 Academy Brixton, Manchester, two nights in Glasgow, Cambridge, Bristol, Nottingham, Plymouth and more. Kula Shaker weren’t just on the bill.

They were billed as very special guests, and they played like it.

The bands had history long before any of this. In their own words: “We go way back with Ocean Colour Scene. great musicians and even better friends. Some of our earliest gigs were with them, including shows at the Splash Club in London before Kula Shaker were signed.” Decades on from those early London club nights, landing together on stages around the country — it felt properly earned. Demand was extraordinary. OCS had to add extra dates to the original schedule, eventually turning it into a 29-show affair. Most of the run sold out.

Kula Shaker in 2025

To appreciate what Kula Shaker brought to this tour, you need to know where they were standing when they walked on stage.

Their seventh album, Natural Magick, had come out in February 2024 and gone straight to number one on the UK Independent Albums Chart.

More significantly, it was the first record since 1999’s Peasants, Pigs and Astronauts to feature all four original members together  because Jay Darlington, the Hammond organ wizard who had spent the best part of a decade touring with Oasis and its various post-Oasis incarnations, had finally come back.

His first show back with the band had been at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in December 2022, and from that moment the chemistry was immediate.

Natural Magick sounded like a band enormously confident in their own skin.

Gaslighting had a Rolling Stones strut. Waves bounced infectiously. Broke As Folk showed Darlington’s organ at its enchanting best.

XS Noize called it a new masterpiece. Crispian Mills himself described it as possibly the best studio album they’d ever made.

Having listened to it on repeat since release, it’s hard to argue.

What Kula Shaker Live Actually Feels Like

These are not concerts. They are something closer to communal events.

Before the band had played a single note, the stage was already loaded with joss sticks and incense, the scent drifting out into the crowd.

Flowers. A full psychedelic backdrop projected onto a large screen with swirling kaleidoscopic visuals pulling the room back fifty years to underground London clubs and Carnaby Street happenings.

One reviewer called it a sixties happening, and they weren’t wrong.

The lighting was spectacular in a way that no corporate production can fake.

Colours bleeding and shifting through the set, deep purples and burning golds during the heavier passages, everything softening and narrowing during the devotional moments until the room felt genuinely sacred.

Crispian Mills silhouetted against the screen with that extraordinary guitar pedal board of his, wah-wah pedals engaged, solos climbing. Jay Darlington at the Hammond bathed in warm light, completely transported. Paul Winter-Hart driving the kit with something close to shamanic force. Alonza Bevan anchoring everything on bass, cool and grounded.

As a set of photographs, Kula Shaker live in 2025 is genuinely extraordinary.

The colour, the light, the physical energy — the images speak completely for themselves. This is a band who understand instinctively that a gig is a visual event as much as a musical one, and the production they brought to a support slot would have been remarkable on a headline tour.

The Room

Multiple venues were rammed to capacity. Cambridge Corn Exchange.  1,400 capacity, rammed to the rafters. We were seated, wished we’d been standing, but from up on the balcony, there’s the benefit of shooting the band way after the pit’s general 3 songs, no flash ruling.

Th honest review

Here’s the honest version. A certain generation of music fans, those who bought K and Moseley Shoals in their twenties, who still know every word of Tattva and The Riverboat Song by heart, needed this to be as good as they remembered.

They needed to stand in a room with both of these bands and feel the music the same way they felt it the first time, without any of that sadness that creeps in when things don’t hold up.

It held up. More than held up. Kula Shaker live in 2025 was not a band trading on memory. It was a band with the original four-piece back in the room together, operating at the peak of their powers, playing music that still matters to them as much as it ever did.

Standing in one of those rooms in spring 2025 with thirty years of reference points behind, the show was every bit as good as he needed it to be. Maybe better. As an avid Ocean Coloure Scene fan and Steve Craddock, sitting as one of my heroes alongside Paul; Weller, Maybe Kula Shaker should have been the headline act….. Just maybe.

That’s not nothing. That’s quite a lot, actually. Possibly one of the best intimate gigs I’ve ever had the pleasure to photograph.

Blanc Creative is a professional music photography and Festival video production company who also specialise in podcast production and creative content.

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