With the Red Hot Chili Peppers, what you see is what you hear: four men with dodgy haircuts playing their socks off. “Thirty years we’ve been coming to London,” bellowed bassist Flea, waving a triumphant fist in the air at the first of four sold-out nights at the O2 Arena. Indeed, the first time I saw them was at a dingy rock club in Camden in 1985 (when the aforementioned socks were draped over their rudest appendages and you really didn’t want them to come off). They were fantastic then, and they are fantastic now.

The California punk funk quartet hark back to a time before the great fakery that has become ingrained in live music performance. There were none of the backing tracks, click tracks, sequencers, vocal doubling, autotune and chorus effects that have become ubiquitous at big concerts. Every beat and note was produced on stage before our very ears by a committed, competitive, super-tight band. Its sheer liveness was utterly thrilling.