Following the computerised E.V.E.’s by now standard disembodied warnings that the pits are “weak as fuck”, the band arrive and kick into DArkSide. From the very start, it’s a sensory overload of music, lights, incredible videos and a magic touch that leaves you incapable of turning away. Just like at Reading & Leeds and Germany’s Rock im Park and Rock am Ring, the massive screens that make up their set, starting as a cathedral, is dominating. The usual fallen angel threatens to shake the stage apart as she bangs her mighty fists on it during a rapturous Kool-Aid, while throughout BMTH are rendered in cod-futuristic, Matrix colours, or else illustrated as wolves.
“Fuckin’ hell, there’s a lot of you, in’t there?” exclaims Oli, surveying the crowd. If you want a scale on this thing, it’s bigger than Deftones or Slayer in the same slot. In fact, even before they arrived, as Evanescence performed to a phenomenal crowd, the side of the arena housing their stage was already full. Horizon were good anyway, but add scale like that to the equation and the reaction is a guaranteed slam dunk.
Even if you’ve seen this show before over the past 18 months, it simply does not get old. As has been mentioned so many times, maybe that’s because of the band’s still keen Yorkshire charm. Or maybe, frankly, that they’re better than literally anyone else here. Whatever it is, it’s absolute dynamite.
A lucky fan is brought onstage to sing their way through the prickly Antivist, as Oli lounges on the onstage steps. At another point, he demands – and gets – a frankly silly-sized pit. Among the wild amounts of fire, massive staging and eye-melting screens, it’s his foul-mouthed charm that (still) gives them so much of their presence and character, keeps them real. With a show of this size, sometimes it’s easy for bands to get lost among it all and lose some of their energy and seem, ironically, quite boring. Not a problem here.