Credit: Matthew Field (http://www.photography.mattfield.com)

He walks onstage at the Hammermsith Apollo, hips swinging and a-swaggering like a desert-rock buccaneer. At 6’ 5”, Josh Homme cuts a figure like that of the Jolly Green (well, Ginger) Giant, but instead of pushing sickly-tasting canned sweetcorn onto children reluctant to eat vegetables unless they’re being pimped by a grotesque corn-munching mutant, he’s leading Queens Of The Stone Age on to rattle every corner of the Hammersmth Apollo till even the rats in the walls have tinnitus.

QOTSA are one of those bands that make music you didn’t even know you loved.

Played live, with the force and volume to drive out any bowel parasites that have taken up residence in the crowd, they are something else entirely, something even more potent. With much of the set being taken from last year’s Era Vulgaris album, QOTSA sound revitalised, with Homme in particular seeming to revel in the newer tracks, shaking his hips during ‘I’m Designer’ and winking at the throng crushing the barriers during ‘Into The Hollow’.

When ‘In The Fade’ thrums out of the amp stacks, the sense of joy in the Apollo is palpable. Rated-R was the album that most fans were introduced into the almighty bosom of QOTSA, and as our first taste of the classic record tonight it tastes all the sweeter. If we’d known how little of Rated-R we were going to get at the time though…

Tonight wasn’t the Josh Homme Show, or Josh Homme and Friends, this was Queens of the Stone Age. While Homme might be the towering figure (literally) whom the media orbits around like a desert-rock deity, on stage when Michael Shuman is staggering about as if he is having to wrestle his bass guitar under control or Troy Van  Leeuwen thrashing the living skin off of his guitar, you can tell that while they’re onstage, they’re pummelling the crowd united as Queens Of The Stone Age. This ain’t no vaity project; this is rock’n’fucking’roll.

After 17 songs of pure rock abandon, the band return back onstage for an encore. Starting with‘You Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar But I Feel Like A Millionaire’, they quickly barge on through to a thundering, swirling, apocalyptic explosion of a rendition of ‘A Song For The Dead’ and…and…