Brixton Academy, London
13 May 2002
Quick question. Have you ever done, like, TONS of acid, read the entire works of HP Lovecraft AND watched Audition, all in one night? No? Well, whoever sorts out Tool‘s visuals certainly has. So we don’t have to. Let’s just say “thanks” now, shall we? But of the visuals, more later.
Tool. A band I’d avoided for years, cos I thought they’d be shit, despite having had a picture of Bill Hicks as album artwork. I dunno – I think it was their audience that put me off – the big shorts thing never really worked for me. Then came Lateralus. Which was big. AND clever. So I had to check out the back catalogue, really. Which led to me being in Brixton, off my fucking face, surrounded by very tall children in very big shorts, watching a fucking amazing live band.
When they say “Nu-metal”, I think they actually mean “Nu-prog” in Tool’s case. Five fucking minutes of instrumental rock madness, with accompanying visuals, then Maynard deigns to appear. And spends the entire gig BEHIND the band, (though still rocking out nonetheless) caught in silhouette like some Victorian Gothic monster-child, but with the voice of a really fucked-off angel- one minute yelling, the next whispering – if he wasn’t in a band, I swear he’d be locked up in someone’s attic a century ago.
Music? Oh yeah, it was great. Pretty much all of Lateralus, with the notable exception of “Ticks and Leeches”, which was the one I though would go down best with the big shorts crowd, and which, unsurprisingly enough, is my least favourite Tool song. Instead we get the full-on, centuries-long versions of “The Patient”, “Stinkfist”, and “The Grudge”. Never, or at least since The Cure last went overboard on playing “A Forest” live, have a bunch of decent musicians rocked out for quite so long on a single track. And Pink Floyd don’t count, `cos they’re shit.
But the visuals – fuck, don’t get me wrong, they rocked like bastards – but the visuals almost outdid the music. A headless man waves from the corner of a shadowy room- a skinned torso develops flaming eyes in the palms of its hands – fractals spin around eyes to let you know what Cthulhu’s thinking – armless torsos kick on the floor. Eye surgery. Toilets. Just – Fuck. Fuck, man. The entire gig. Not just part of it. The whole two hours. More and more weird shit. Space full of eyes. Cosmic fucking horror.
Fundamentally Lovecraftian. Tool rock a shoggoth’s ass. And that’s official.
-Deuteronemu 90210, the black goat of the woods with a thousand young-
