I don’t even know where to start with this gig: Bring Me The Horizon in Berlin at Columbia Club. Supporting were Architects, The Devil Wears Prada and Tek-One. Obviously it was a night of nights for Berlin’s rock scene, sweat, booze and good fucking times.
Live dubstep trio Tek-One opened with an aggressive set of hard rhythms fronted by the cool as fuck Tonn Piper. The choice of a dubstep band opening for Bring Me The Horizon was a courageous one considering the kind of kids making it to this show, but the decision proved itself to be a good move and it didn’t take long for hands to make it into the air. The short of it is that TEK-ONE were really good.
I was hanging towards the back of the room, but really it didn’t matter where you stood, it was easy to see that there was a big reaction to when The Devil Wears Prada hit the stage. Through the course of their three albums and repeated visits here to Berlin, they’ve managed to build up enough of their own following that people knew the best bits to mosh to and knew the words to their favourite songs. To say that they were the perfect opener for BMTH borders on understatement.
After a break, and after the bit where some guy spilt my beer, something he apologised for but neglected to buy me another one regardless, British metalcore act Architects gave us something to really get into, playing a bunch of numbers from the new album The Here And Now as well as some of the best bits from their back catalogue. Melodic and technical and all of it harking back to classic metal sounds, Architects were a good middle ground and tied together everything that we’d heard so far.
Following a very decent set from Architects and thanks to hard work from TDWP & Tek One, the mosh-pit’s now devolving into the special kind of fucking chaos that only a show like this is ever going to be capable of creating. With absurd amounts of both sweat and good-vibed comradery now causing the crowd to become a unit rather than a group of individuals, the audience en masse start to look like some strange black machine fuelled by hard rock & metal; they. are. ready.
It doesn’t matter who’s playing, it’s only when the headliner hits the stage that you become really aware of the fact that you’re at a sold out gig, it’s almost like everyone silently acknowledges to each other that they’ve got a job to do and that’s to gee each other up as much as acutely possible. Just at his first steps out onto the stage, Oliver Sykes throws the audience into a fit of ballistic screaming, which absolutely would have been scary, if I wasn’t at it too. BMTH launch into their set featuring old favourites from, Suicide Season and, predictably enough, we were finally given the chance to get find some new kicks with new material from There Is A Hell, Believe Me I’ve Seen It There Is A Heaven, Let’s Keep It A Secret, probably live for the first time for a lot of people. From front to back the crowd was heaving by this point and it was just a good fucking scene and stayed like that for the rest of the night.
Good to know: What I’ve learnt is that if Oliver Sykes, at a sold out BMTH gig, calls out for a wall of death, it’s expected that you do it with an almost military enthusiasm. If it’s a circle of death that is the humble request, you either: lead, follow, or get the fuck out of the way.
The set kicked on for an hour which felt too short at first but really wasn’t when we got a chance to take a breath in and realise that we were all really tired after a massive night. I can’t really talk too much about encores since I was in the toilet helping someone throw up, but by that point we were weak at the knees and ringing in the ears and feeling awesome (well, everyone except my friend with her head in the toilet bowl) and we weren’t troubled by much at all. Well done to the sound people for really nailing it right across the night and a word to the guy who spilt my beer ~ I know where you live.
