Wow. What a gig. Last night, Four Tet played our local venue, Central Station. I've been a fan for some time, and I was interested to see how it would work live... and work it damn well did. Taking tunes from his most recent albums, Pause, Rounds and Everything Ecstatic, Four Tet tore the place to pieces with stutters, tweaks and bass to bring the roof down: "Louder, louder!" he calls to the sound engineer at the back of the room, just two tracks in. Dylan called it "the soundtrack to the apocalypse".

There's definitely a harder edge to Four Tet live - the most chilled tracks are twisted into stomping monsters that you just can't help but move to. Spirit Fingers, performed as the first track of two in his encore, is a good example: the bass drum included live drives the tune much harder than the hi-hat on the album version.

The only downer I guess, is that one bloke behind two laptops and a few boxes isn't all that much to look at. I was expecting/hoping for some visuals, considering that several of his singles have featured some great videos, and Everything Ecstatic has just been released as a DVD chock full of eye-goodness.

I also managed to have a quick chat with the man himself, Kieran Hebden, after the gig. And what a nice, smiley, accommodating bloke he is. He smiled at my slightly drunken praise of the fantastic Rounds. He smiled at my anecdote about my interview for HMV a couple of years back (I basically got the job after ten minutes as the manager asked me what music I was into: the rest of the interview was spent raving about Rounds). And he freely divulged that all the drums on his albums so far have been programmed - I always assumed that a lot of the drumming (especially on tunes such as Sun Drums and Soil and the fantastic remix of Super Furry Animals' Piccolo Snare from Phantom Phorce) was, if not live, then at least sampled from live drums. In fact, a lot of it is sampled from classical and jazz music and played 'live' through a sampler. So I was almost right.

However, he has been playing recently with a live rummer in the Steve Reid Ensemble, with another date scheduled at The Luminaire in London on 21st December after a sell-out show at the Hammersmith Palais.

I was gutted, though, when I found out the Central Station gig was the last on the tour without the fantastic Kid Koala on board for support. Bugger.