Slipknot - Festival Hall 12/02/2000
Supported by: The Wolves, Segression
Price: 39.90 AUD
Setlist:
1. 742617000027
2. (sic)
3. Eyeless
4. Wait and Bleed
5. Liberate
6. Surfacing
7. Purity
8. Me Inside
9. Spit It Out
10. Get This
11. Scissors
When Slipknot arrived on Australian shores in early 2000, little was known of the men behind masks. There was still a great air of mystery surrounding the band and these gigs definitely fell into the honeymoon period of the release of their first self-titled album.
The bands arrival to Festival Hall was delayed, possibly due to the signing session held at Sanity in the Melbourne CBD, and hundreds of fans waited outside listening to the brief sound check going on and things were getting rowdy. Singing, chanting, screaming, and signs getting ripped from the doors of Festival Hall, the growing crowd was getting impatient waiting for the show to get underway.
Festival Hall was packed that night and sweat dripped from the roof. The stage was decorated with a Slipknot logo banner behind Joey’s drum kit and also two “people = shit’ signs either side.
After the 2 support acts, the lights dipped, and the over the PA a clip from the movie Gummo, two kids screaming obscenities, which leads into Slipknot’s album intro began the the 9 slowly started appearing on the stage. Joey first appeared by the drum kit, then Clown carrying a large flood light, and the suspense built over the next 5 minutes or so while the rest wandered out, the crowd waiting for the mayhem to start.
The band plowed through their first 5 songs without taking a breath, (SIC), Eyeless followed by Wait and Bleed, Liberate and Surfacing. Half the set was done with the songs being played even faster than they are on the album and the energy on the stage is intense. Sid dives into the crowd a number of times while percussionists Clown and Chris dive and climb allover their drum kits and push each other around the stage. The crowd takes a breath while slower paced and darker track Purity is played, which is followed by Me Inside, which at the time was only a bonus track on the digipack edition of the album, and seems to be lesser known the previous tracks played. The climax of the set is reached when Spit it Out is played, which was the single at the time. What follows next, is Scissors,which is usually an 8 minute track that was dragged out to around 15 minutes, and felt even longer. Scissors was filled with lots feedback and noise in the mid section, and extra rants by Corey, which created a menacing atmosphere but perhaps also brought the set to an anticlimax because it went on for so long.
The set lasted no more than an hour, with a 3rd of it being taken up by the intro and Scissors. It would have been good to hear more of the tracks from the album such as No Life & Prosthetics, but with the energy and madness in Festival Hall that night, it was perhaps not a bad thing that the set ended there. The band definitely gave it everything in that hour and left a huge impression when they left Australia.
Leaving the gig, you knew that it was one of those shows that people who would become fans in the future could only dream about seeing. The band was still new, fresh, mysterious and in the ‘nu-metal’ scene at the time, were a lot more aggressive than the other bands such as Linkin Park and Korn. It was also very raw. They didn’t have the more expensive stage shows with pyro and rotating drum kits that would come on later tours and they wore the original masks and jumpsuits that they first became famous in .
There is a really bad bootleg around of the show, and also this audio clip of ‘Me Inside’uploaded by seeme45 on Youtube.
update! this show has now been posted on youtube!
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