Deftones

This is London Arena - famed for its terrible acoustics as well as some of the major events held here, like terrorist bombings, unfortunately not of Bros or Westlife. As the background music is played, it sounds terrible. Just how London Arena is meant to. It gets worse.

*Taproot *appear on-stage after much anticipation but as the applause fades, the crowd is subjected to a band who have seemingly arrived with no sound technicians. They have come a long way just to be let down by poor acoustics and technicians. Much was expected, yet little was received.

*Linkin Park *clearly have a large following as their Bizkit-esque nu-metal stance had many singing along to the majority of their album. Their strength, however, is their live performance: visually stunning as their twin vocalists jump around like crazed loons and the pair also satisfy you sonically as their sound technicians were on the right track. It seems as though their soundcheck was well spent.

Although the warm-up acts had formidable support, it was *Deftones *people were really here to see. at over 80 minutes, there were no complaints of the set which included a mixture of their 3 albums concocted to create a cacophony of a classic gig which people will remember for many revolutions of the moon. Opening with their biggest UK hit to date - Be Quiet & Drive - was clearly the way to go as their biggest show outside the US began as a success for the crowd and nothing stopped until Chino said so. Half way through the set, some members of the audience (all of them) went a bit too mental and some youngsters got crushed near the front. as nobody saw fit to pick them up off the dirty, dirty floor, Mr. Moreno said "Hold up!" and they did.

In these 2-minute interludes - increasingly common following recent disasters at Roskilde (Pearl Jam) and Indonesia (A1) - the crowd calms down and loses momentum somewhat, but the sight of several thousand fists pumping the air is always an extraordinary sight. Service was once again resumed but the temperament was slightly subdued and it's unclear whether it was the fault of the general atmosphere or the band, but the set seemed to drag toward the middle section.

Overall it was a stunning performance from Deftones in which Chino Moreno's impressive vocal range was superb throughout as was Stephen Carpenter's guitar. Chi Cheng's Korean outburst was overshadowed by his talent of slinging his bass around himself repeatedly. FX and programming was held together by the DJ man that is so necessary in metal these days and Abe Cunningham's drumming was a formidable spinal chord for the other members to feed off.