CHILDREN OF BODOM, CANNIBAL CORPSE, DIABLO

To be fair, DIABLO weren’t given a particularly fair chance from the off. Besides the fact that it has to be a challenge at the best of times to open for two of the biggest bands on the metal radar at the moment such as CANNIBAL CORPSE and CHILDREN OF BODOM, it’s been over an hour and a half since the doors opened and the stage is still devoid of music. The crowd are visibly and audibly impatient, and when Finnish metallers DIABLO finally emerge onto the Forum stage, no one really seems to care. Plus, the taunting chants of “Who are ya! Who are ya!” in typically pleasant London fashion probably aren’t making the quintet feel particularly welcome. If you placed the frontman next to 80s era James Hetfield you’d struggle to tell the difference, from his shaggy blonde hair and playing stance right down to how he wears his sweatbands, which of course evokes further ridicule from the impetuous crowd who are, rightly so, brimming with anticipation for CANNIBAL CORPSE to grace the UK shores with their first appearance in what feels like forever.

So when CORPSE begin ripping into their setlist, the frenzy of circle pits and walls of death that ensue are pretty intense. Charmingly, the band’s chief growler/grunter George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher dedicates “Fucked with a Knife” to all the ladies in the room. Nice man. After they were done belting out this number, if anyone needed any evidence that in actual fact – if we’re totally honest with ourselves – a lot of CORPSE’s material sounds very similar in a live environment, there’s a yell from the front row: “Play Fucked With A Knife!” A little clarification may be necessary for anyone present who had been living under a rock for the last millennium and were unfamiliar with CANNIBAL CORPSE and what they’re generally about. The raucous shouts flying out from the front were not from Tourette’s sufferers who’d stumbled in to the wrong event, but in fact song requests. “Hammer Smashed Face!” they cry, “Butchered at Birth!” and possibly the most brilliant song title ever; “Entrails Ripped from a Virgin’s Cunt!” In terms of actual performance, there isn’t an awful lot to say. The entire band remained virtually static for a sizeable portion of the set, and yet, because these veterans are so high up and respected in the metal hierarchy, they still commanded a certain stage presence that had the whole Forum captivated.

That is, until CHILDREN OF BODOM storm the stage, giving London no less than they expected: an ultra tight performance. The setlist had a few welcomed surprises; with “Bodom Beach Terror” and “Bed of Razors” clawing their way out from the back of the closet, receiving their first live airings in a number of years. Halfway through (what we thought was) the penultimate “Downfall”, the same gang of die-hard Hate Crew-ers that earned a mention in the last Bodom review eagerly awaited the epic finale that would be “Hate Crew Deathroll” (if our many previous BODOM experiences were anything to go by). As everything suddenly grinds to a halt, the stage empties and there’s some kerfuffle before Janne comes to the front mic with a sentence that we soon learned has the capacity to turn a room of several thousand people homicidal in about seven seconds: “Sorry guys, our show is done. Someone threw beer over the mixer desk, so if you see that guy, please beat the FUCK outta him!” A big well done, whoever you are, for not only wasting a perfectly good beer but also cutting short an otherwise flawless performance from Finland’s finest.