# Kula Shaker support Ocean Colour Scene on 2025 Tour

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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 su

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