This probably isn’t an analogy you’re expecting, granted…but I think of a particular Graham Taylor philosophy at some point towards the end of Swans’ titanic gig at London’s Koko.

In the process of re-writing football logic with his joyously applecart-upsetting Watford side in the late seventies, Taylor noted that teams chasing a slender deficit in the last stages of a game would play with greatly increased urgency and energy and often pin their opponents onto the ropes in the process. He reasoned: If you could play like that, why the bloody hell didn’t you do so all along?

Which is a question every other rock band ought to be asking themselves right now. Because Swans spend this triumphant evening pushing themselves and their audience to the limits and beyond. There are frequent moments when they – and especially drummer Phil Puleo – appear to be operating on the outer fringes of what is physically possible. As the six of them, sweat-dripping and spent, take a bow at the front of the stage and receive the applause of an overwhelmed audience at the end of two and a half hours, you could be forgiven for mistaking this for a farewell gig. It feels so utterly draining and exhausting, so absolutely unrepeatable. And yet they’re playing Glasgow tonight, Manchester after that, seven consecutive nights in Europe next week. This is just another gig.

A number of things become clear. Michael Gira has been absolutely adamant that the ‘reformed’ Swans won’t be playing the retro fetish game…and when Gira’s adamant about something, that tends to be that. Having watched the late-eighties/early-nineties versions of Swans fighting relentless battles over their right to seek out new ground rather than play “Raping A Slave” for all eternity, it seems that they finally have the audience they deserve. For all that a few cheers go up at the intro to “Coward”, the only old song on show, there appears barely any appetite for revival; people are here for whatever brutal, beautiful experience Gira wants to envelope them in, not for a second-hand macho myth. Extraordinary, in the current climate, but it strikes me that they’d actually get a smaller crowd if they announced they were just going to play “Cop” from start to finish, that they’d disappoint many more people than they’d delight…

There was a time – a long time – when any Swans review was obliged to begin with tales of bleeding eardrums and locked doors, of public castration and all that jazz. That time has gone, further proof that this is a band not merely re-formed but re-born: we can now talk without apology of joy and oblivion and radiance and annihilation and beauty and the sheer fucking ecstasy of sound that’s at once so brutal and so gorgeous that it erases everything in a moment that you want to last forever…and that then, by dint of relentless repetition, does pretty much last forever. We can now talk of the things that Swans were always about, if you bothered to experience them rather than stand to one side and take notes.

The question to be asked of reformed bands is always: are you actually adding anything to the here and now? Would we give you a second glance if your back catalogue burnt, memories were wiped and you were starting afresh? The answer to be given by most is, at best, a bit of an apologetic shrug. Swans, however, have left no room for doubt. This incarnation represents the culmination of Gira’s growth as an orchestrator of sound and pure molten intensity: there’s a lightness of touch here, even at the heaviest moments, which emerges from the mistakes and missteps of thirty years. His vision is being realised more vividly than ever before. If you strip away context and history and reputation, they only seem even more magnificent, even more untouchable. They reach for the miraculous. There are moments when they just obliterate everything, past and future, and leave only one searing, screaming present.

They have never been better, never been more vital. If you have to, sell your knees to see them.

Ian Grant