ON the other side of the Clyde a chant was cutting across the river, following those of us walking away from Glasgow Green.

It penetrated across to the Southside of the city and back over the East End, reaching sideways to the Merchant City - it was, to cut a long story short, piercing everywhere.

The night was turning navy blue as the daylight faded but the air was being turned metaphorically blue from the repeated words: "F**k the Tories", over and over, over and over.

If there was a theme to this weekend's TRNSMT festival it was that: a verbal two fingers up to the Conservatives and all they currently stand for.

It came from the bands on stage. Wet Leg, an Isle of Wight pop group currently delighting the charts with a quirky, double-entre laden song, whispered it into a microphone.

Jamie Webster, fresh from trying the same trick at Glastonbury last month, yelled the phrase at his audience to delighted response. Sam Fender did the same, as did Maximo Park.

Artists from across the UK were united in repeating the slogan and the crowd was just as invested.

During the three-day festival, the chant could be heard across the site at regular intervals, someone starting it off and others needing no encouragement to keep it going.

By Sunday afternoon some entrepreneurial wag had commissioned blue bucket hats with "Tory Scum" printed in white on the front and these were perched on heads bobbing about the festival site.

I've been covering T in the Park and then TRNSMT since 2008 and it's the first time the event has had anything like such a political theme.

Politics and music go hand in hand, of course. Music is political. It's impossible to separate the two – even the mainstream music and chart hits of a festival like TRNSMT.

Writing music, performing it and how the audience receives it are all acts that exist in the same space as the current political and social trends of the day.

Songs, often especially pop songs, are an exploration of feelings and realities that are influenced by the experiences of those who write them - and we are all affected by politics.

Glastonbury has had its headline political moments. Jeremy Corbyn on the main Pyramid Stage in 2017, making a speech about unity, obviously springs to mind.

It's five years since the veteran Channel 4 broadcaster Jon Snow had a brief lapse in memory after being accused of shouting "f**k the Tories" while having his photo taken with a group of admirers at Glastonbury.

The now 74-year-old claimed to be unable to remember if it was true or not, generating admiring and chiding headlines, depending on the publication writing them.

That seems like nothing more than a bit of a tease now, given how comprehensively the political party was being battered this weekend in Glasgow.

The city, famously, is not Tory blue - it's a left-leaning place.

TRNSMT is full of young people who are instinctively anti-Tory and align themselves more naturally with socialist principles. It is also, of course, full of musicians who also tend to cleave to the left.

So it would be almost beyond the scope of human endeavour to imagine what the Conservatives might have to achieve in order to earn favourable chants sung about them at a festival in Glasgow.

While reluctant to quote Boris Johnson, a lot of the relentless singing this weekend will have been the herd mentality he mentioned in his leaving speech last week.

Much of it will have been the result of festival-goers being nicely well-refreshed and not entirely at their best critical-thinking selves.

For singers, it's cheap and fast audience engagement. A quick "F**k the Tories" is guaranteed to get the people going and elicit an encouraging cheer.

It's not quite a statistically significant sample but I asked a few people on site over the weekend why exactly they thought the Tories should be dealt with in such a manner.

The responses fell under a loose umbrella that could be summarised as "because they're bad".

It's a tricky thing, looking for nuanced views at a music festival. Young folk are switched on and engaged and I have no doubt a lot of the people singing could give pretty robust reasons to back up their song choice.

At the same time, they're at a music festival and don't want to justify themselves to some woman asking them questions when they're merely trying to have fun.

The current list of reasons one might give for disliking the present crop of Conservatives is rich, long and varied. Where to start, really?

While it's good to see politics enter a mainstream cultural event, the chanting is useful for little else than letting off steam. Not that that's a bad thing. But chanting mindless slogans often doesn't take us very far.

What an achievement, though, from the current Westminster government - creating enough unfettered fury with its ongoing shenanigans to turn a roasting hot, light-hearted music festival weekend into an impromptu platform for exorcising voter frustrations.