Heineken Rollercoaster (Hothouse Flowers/The Revs)

I had warmed to the Revs before they ever came on stage. They are, after all, the boys who thought to pen a song called ‘Louis Walsh’ and include the immortal couplet, ‘Ooh, I’ve got your number/On your knees, Samantha Mumba’. Their singles ‘Wired to the Moon’ and ‘Alone With You’ were among the liveliest of the past year, and my only fear was that a three-piece so youthful might not yet be equipped to seduce the crowd in a venue as large as the Savoy.

Such fears proved groundless. The Revs delivered an awesome set, and did so with boundless enthusiasm. What was most striking about them was their musicianship; John McIntyre, in particular, is a guitarist who makes his considerable skills seem effortless.

The last time I saw the Hothouse Flowers play live, they had just been hailed as the best unsigned band in the world by Rolling Stone. For all their industry in the meantime, no-one could claim they have ever achieved the level of success they seemed capable of back then. I suspect they never really had the ambition; they’re simply too nice.

The Flowers remain as positively charged as ever, and songs like ‘Hallelujah Jordan’ and ‘Don’t Go’ remain among the best to come from an Irish band, but there is a uniform harmlessness to their work that begins to pall before too long.

“Raggle Taggle? Nein Danke” was the slogan coined by the professional curmudgeon Cathal Coughlan when the Flowers and the Waterboys were at their peak. On mature reflection, that judgement might seem a little harsh. The audience certainly got their money’s worth; at one point or another in the set, almost everyone got to dance on stage with Liam or Peter or Fiachna. Seldom are the objects of mass affection so free with their favours.