Metal’s - no make that rock’s - foremost vaudeville experience took up a three night residency in the capital with a show that elicited as passionate an audience response as tourdates has seen in many a year.

My God, it was a moshing Olympics out there and, to any deaf members of the audience, this might have appeared to be any other bare-chested nu-metal testosterone-fest.

But the Iowa nine-piece are about a lot more than uncompromising thrash. They’re about the kind of theatricality Kiss brought to hard rock, although this is a very un-camp Kiss viewed through a prism of extreme nihilism.

Something else, though: dark and heavy thought the band’s output certainly is, an innate musicality keeps peeping through the extraordinary noise they make. Only four albums in 10 years suggest they give their music considerable thought, evidenced by little inventive sampling tweaks, bits of quirky syncopation and - almost as though they can’t help themselves - proper tunes, something which will not suprise anyone familiar with singer Cory Taylor and guitarist Jim Root’s side project Stone Sour.

Few live bands, though, can match the excitement generated by Slipknot’s combination of brutal riffs and otherworldly stage personas. Those grotesquely expressionless masks lend a quality of detatchment to their otherwise furious preformance which means they manage the tricky feat of not coming across like grown men dressed up. When the opening bars of ‘Psychosocial’ take hold, the audience responds as though being entertained by the world’s hardest rocking zombie ensemble because it’s easy to believe that to be the case.

It’s a weirdly engaging experience that gets to the root of the ‘otherness’ of live performance - big stars up on stage are not like the rest of us, and Slipknot are less like the rest of us than any other band on the planet. Support act Machine Head were ace too.

Richard Hodkinson
Photo: londontourpix