FEAR FACTORY London Astoria
Gig review

None of us were really in the mood for a gig tonight. For a start it was a Saturday, which may seem like the perfect night, but secondly it was raining, and thirdly it was in London. This causes a problem because we have to travel up from Brighton. It's great on a weeknight because the Astoria is only a 10-minute bus ride from where I work, but being a rainy Saturday we were in no mood for the 2-hour journey.

Sorry about the depressing start. Anyway, it wasn't so bad once we got going, still not really up for a gig, but now we were on our way there was no use complaining or grumbling about it.

To start with I had to try and sell the spare ticket I had to a tout. God, they annoy me; I am so utterly rubbish at driving a hard bargain. I wussed out the first time I tried this, but this time I was determined I'd get more than I'd actually paid for the thing in the first place. Ok, I managed to get £2 more, but it was still not enough. I swear I could have got more too, but I couldn't really be bothered haggling all night.

Anyway, this was a sold out gig, a sold out metal gig nonetheless, which meant the place was teaming with scrappy 16 year-olds in black hoodies and chains. If you ever want to feel really old and out of place, just go to one of these things.

The doors were meant to open at 7pm, but for some reason we all started to eventually move at around 6:30pm, which was great because I really hate 'tension building' waiting around.

The great thing about the Astoria is the large seating section upstairs. Now some people may say it's boring, but I tell you, I'm a lot more comfortable at the end of the night than the scraps down in the pit. It depends want you want out of a gig I guess, personally I prefer to listen to the music and watch the performance these days compared with the survival of the fittest moshing down in front of the stage.

But I did get a little worried when there were no spare tables, were we going to have to stand? Surely not; but we managed to find two spare seats opposite some grumpy girl so things weren't going to be too bad after all.

The first support band came on surprisingly quickly. Enter Republic 26:

Now I'm not sure whether these guys actually played 6 different songs, or whether they played just the one 6 different times, but it all sounded the same to me. Anyway, I kind of tuned out after the first two, so the next thing I knew they had left the stage. But Jodi wants me to mention that she thought the singer had cute clothes on. *Shrug*

Anyway, the next support band came on in lightning time, and I couldn't wait, surely a band as large as Fear Factory would have a great support band, right? Was it going to be Spineshank, or Linkin Park? Nope, please welcome Earthtone 9:

If at this point you're thinking "Who…?" then you'd not be alone. I was thinking pretty much the same thing, but with more anger and confusion, especially when they received a huge applause from the audience. Anyway, these guys sucked too, even more so that Republic 26. The singer was a fat guy who could have been the town butcher, or maybe a northern workingman's club comedian and had ridiculous trousers on. I'm sure they meant well, but I'm sure I remember nodding off once or twice.

At last Fear Factory arrived, and this may not be the first thing to notice in a live performance, but I think I ought to make a note of how their appearance has changed. Burton C. Bell has started to grow his hair long again, but now it's kind of scraggly and he's dyed it black (oh dear). The bassist (Christian Olde Wolbers) has the haircut of a schoolboy, Dino Cazarez is still the fat little pudding he's always been, and the drummer (Raymond Herrera) has arms like Ken from Fist Of The North Star.

They made a powerful entrance, albeit with what sounded like a new song that no one really knew, then after shouting "hello!" to everyone, they launched into 'Self Bias Resistor'. From there on in it was a pretty solid set of the best tunes from 'Demanufacture' and 'Obsolete'.

There were a few new tracks from the forthcoming album 'Digimortal' (which Burton kept getting the audience to repeat the name of, whether this was remind us or him I'm not sure, but myself and Jodi couldn't helping launching into "Digimon, digital monsters, Digimon are the champions" each time it was mentioned), like the title track, 'Digimortal', 'What Will Become' and 'Linchpin'; all sounding pretty good too.

I think the problem with metal like this though is that it really doesn't translate well to live performance. Dino and Christian had radio unit on their guitars allowing them to run back and forth across the stage (extremely entertaining when you consider Dino's frame), but the music, because it's so heavy, just comes out as a sort of rumble. Now I know most of the songs pretty well, but even I couldn't pick out the tunes at times.

Anyway, we all had to get out by 10 because there was a gay night with Westlife on afterwards (which promoted Burton to rip-up a poster of Westlife on-stage), which also meant that it was a pretty short set (around 50-60 minutes) with no encore. Not the most appropriate follow up to a metal gig, but there you go.

Probably the most entertaining part of the night though was when a huge balloon spiral thing managed to detach one end of itself from the ceiling and fall into the crowd. Now the only analogy I can think of is when you see someone drop a leg of lamb into a tank of piranhas. But what was amusing was to see the band, trying to act very mean and moody during their song, surrounded by umpteen red shiny balloons. I'm sure I saw Burton smile.

david twomey

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