SO it was a Monday night and The Feelers are a little known band from the other side of the planet.

Upstairs at Oxford's O2 Academy for the first night of their UK tour was always going to be a hard-sell to pull in large numbers of locals.

The audience was pretty much as you'd expect it: small and almost exclusively New Zealanders over in the UK. There was even the cliched Kiwi traveller wearing his beer-branded hoodie with a picture of New Zealand on the front and matching woollen beanie.

The band, just a couple of days after getting off a lengthy flight from Singapore, also had the added distraction of using borrowed instruments after their own gear blew up.

Still, it did little to prevent them putting their rocking backs into it. The added bonus of space on the floor meant singer James Reid could wander out and run through the audience a couple of times.

The expectation for the tour was the audience would be Kiwis there just for a touch of nostalgia to listen to one of the country's most dominant bands of the past 14 years.

In that there was no disappointment because The Feelers produced what you'd read on the tin - nice and loud, fast pub rock.

Highlights were largely their early hits - love song Venus, Pressure Man and Communicate.

But Dasvidanyia, one of the singles off the new album Hope Nature Forgives that you can see the video of below, stood up alongside these standards expectionally well.

The Feelers will be in Birmingham, Bristol and at Dingwalls in Camden over coming days. Their tour finishes in Cardiff the night the All Blacks play Wales in the capital on Saturday.