As the doors open on tonight’s sold-out performance, the drinks start flowing and people loosen up. The crowd tonight has come with their dancing shoes, and some don’t even wait for a band to start before offering up the odd gyration to whatever is piping over the house P.A. Then Tom Thum takes the stage and blows everybody away with the sounds he’s capable of making with his mouth. The beatboxer proves you don’t need instruments to make funky music that will get crowds moving.

Madre Monte keep things going by injecting some authentic Latin flavours into the evening, which go down a treat for the world music aficionados in the crowd this evening.

With the release of Steal the Light nearly a year and a half in the past, The Cat Empire can do what they do best, namely doing whatever the hell they want to. There’s no longer the new album to be promoted, so everybody can let their hair down. Even in the Tivoli tonight, where tickets are sold out, the dudes seem to pay no heed to the conventional construction of a set. Oh sure, versions of songs like How to Explain?, All Night Loud and The Wine Song all get a look in, but not like how fans would have heard them before. You could suggest that The Cat Empire gleefully disavow fans what they came to see, but everyone seems too laidback here tonight, in too good a mood, to get curmudgeonly and demand the songs sound like they do on the album.

When The Cat Empire are onstage, it’s so evident they’re having fun that it’s infectious, their deviations from the script don’t come to feel like meanderings of bored or frustrated musicians, but special moments shared with the crowd. Some of them seem at least a little bit rehearsed – when Tom Thum challenges the band’s instruments to a beat box challenge in a break during Hello – but that doesn’t stop it from being a lot of fun… and from the crowd going absolutely apeshit over the fact that a person could make the sounds of a trumpet with his mouth. Then there are the moments that seem utterly fresh and exciting, like when the band get competition winner Geoffrey Fabila to ‘didjbox’ in front of the crowd, which makes the already ebullient mood in the theatre seem all the more upbeat.

So upbeat is the mood, at the behest of the band strangers are at one point linking arms and dancing. And if the Cat Empire can keep putting on shows with this much spirit, energy and the same sense of infectious fun, they’ll be packing out venues for a long time to come.