“You’re in a pretty good mood,” Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig notes dryly during this sold-out gig. Three songs in, the crowd of middle-aged punters, boys in Topman and underage teens are hurling themselves in a huge moshpit. School-night parents look terrified; their kids, thrilled. By the time ‘Campus’ transitions perfectly into ‘Oxford Comma’, burlier fans in the audience are piledriving each other into the floor. Who knew a song about punctuation could turn this violent?

Clad in immaculate shirts, VW know how to get a crowd going. While their albums fundamentally recreate the laid-back tropical vibe of their African and West Indian influences, the band is electrifying live. The setlist, which includes almost all of their material, is given a hypodermic injection of pure adrenalin by frenetic tempos and muscular drumming. Drummer Chris Tomson has mastered the ska/reggae beat that makes a virtue out of jerky start-stop rhythms and the pregnant pause that launches you headfirst into a glorious chorus. On ‘Run’, one of the gig’s standout tracks, Tomson pauses right before Koenig’s vocals and Rostam Batmanglij’s shimmery keyboards sweep you into the line “it strikes me that the two of us could run” – just as the eyes of the girl on the giant Contra poster behind them light up. Literally. 

That’s one of the many highlights in the gig, where light, sound and rhythm come together into a perfect blast of summer heat. Vampire Weekend is a band that has to manage the difficult balancing act of being (mostly) white, middle-class boys from a prestigious university, drawing from (mostly) black music and writing lyrics about (probably) white, middle-class youths. It’s musical imperialism in preppy cricket jumpers, critics warn - ethno-pick-n’-mix that misses the point. The musical equivalent of the gap year tragedy with the Masai bracelet and Nepalese hat.

If only it wasn’t this good. The band pull off tracks that should be unplayable, like ‘The Diplomat’s Son’, which samples M.I.A’s ‘Hussel’ and segues effortlessly between the instrumental, syncopated chatter of drum loops and Koenig’s crooned vocals. But Vampire Weekend are used to doing the impossible. They made singing about Darjeeling tea and Louis Vuitton acceptable; if anybody else in Britain tried to rhyme ‘balaclava’ with an obscure Mexican drink, they would probably get glassed for being overly precious. As the crowd roar for ‘Cousins’ and a girl is hoisted up onto somebody’s shoulders, hands in the air, it’s hard to dismiss VW as cultural tourists stealing a bit of Caribbean sunshine.