203. Tool

The O2 Arena

9 May 2022

Some gigs you survive, some gigs you almost survive and some gigs you attend for exactly two songs before fleeing into the night, like escaping a Lovecraftian nightmare. This was a close encounter of the third kind.

The plan had been simple. Me and one of my best friends, two grown men of often questionable musical taste and limited neck mobility, would finally go and see Tool, those high priests of precision, paranoia, and polymeters. This was a band that made it onto the playlist of every record-playing session in my Voodoo Lounge that he participated in, but a band we had yet to see tour, because they generally only ever did it once per decade.

However, my friend had bailed, which meant that my daughter, my increasingly seasoned gig companion, stepped in. She’d recently weathered, even loved, Numan’s dystopian cathedral of light, so how bad could a little cerebral prog-metal be?

The evening started promisingly enough. VIP seats, right by the stage, prime position. Unfortunately, that also meant right by the speaker stacks, which, as it turned out, is roughly equivalent to sitting inside the mouth of Godzilla.

The lights dimmed. A soft hum filled the arena. And then, in a burst of blinding light and seismic bass, Maynard James Keenan emerged, part undead ringmaster, part alien cult leader, part performance art project. He took his position high on a riser, flanked by Danny Carey’s weaponised drum fortress, and the opening notes of “Fear Inoculum” rolled out like the soundtrack to the end of the world.

It wasn’t so much music as tectonic movement. The air molecules coagulated. The seats trembled. My sternum attempted to escape my chest. I glanced at my daughter, she was wide-eyed, pale, clutching the armrest like it was a flotation device. By the end of song one, she looked mildly traumatised. By song two, “Pneuma”, she’d crossed over into full-blown panic attack, the kind you can only get from exposure to spiritually weaponised bass frequencies.

I did the only thing a decent dad should do, swept her up, whispered a calm “let’s go,” and together we wove our way out through the strobing chaos. Outside, the night air on the Greenwich waterfront was mercifully cool, the hum of the city a lullaby after the sonic hurricane we’d just endured. My daughter took deep breaths, colour slowly returning to her face. Behind us, Tool were still detonating metaphysical riffs inside the arena and so, we left them to it.