Children Of Bodom destroy London!

CHILDREN OF BODOM fansite Scythes Of Bodom has issued the following news:

The start of 2008 has been a quiet one in the live front for Children Of Bodom as the band has mainly focused on doing an excessive amount of promotion for the upcoming album and rehearsing for the start of their world tour that kicks off with Gigantour 2008 in April. However, the past weekend the Hate Crew took their circus to London, UK for a one-off appearance at the Spinefarm UK Launch event in the legendary Astoria concert hall.

The long ago sold out show drew a lot of nation- and worldwide interest among fans and media as it was one of the two chances to see the band in Europe this year before the summer's festival season. The tickets, which cost 16.50 GBP in the ticket office, were faught so intensely for that they were succesfully re-sold to desperate fans for ridiculous prices as high as 40-80 GBP both online and outside the venue.

Before the show the band pulled in approximately the same amount of people as to the show itself (Astoria's capacity is about 2000) across the street to Zavvi Oxford Street, one of Europe's biggest CD stores, for a two hour signing session. Already a few hours before the band showed up, an army of Zavvi security crew had organized several hundreds of fans into a seemingly endless line that curved between the cd stalls from one floor to another. The whole band finally showed up a bit behind the schedule triggering a loud bodom chant that echoed across the multistorey shop, making sure that everyone knew who were in the house.

The Zavvi crew kept pushing people forward at a quick pace and at times even enforcing a one item to be signed per person rule. This was necessary in order to give everyone the opportunity to shake hands and exchange a word or two with the band. Most popular items to be signed were definitely the diferent versions of the new Blooddrunk singles, in particular the vinyl versions of it, but also older releases, shirts, guitars, flags and Jack Daniel´s bottles were asked to be signed.

Onto the show. After the support acts the band jumped on stage to the tunes of their old "They're Coming To Take Me Away Ha-Ha" intro. Astoria offered a rather poor light show and the Are You Dead Yet? backdrop was exceptionally replaced with the older backdrop that only has the band's logo on it. The highlights of the show were arguably the world live premiere of the new single "Blooddrunk", which blew the roof off the venue just as deadly as you would expect it to, the still very fresh "Tie My Rope" that shows a more tight and intense side of itself in a live setting and as a positive surprise older classics such as "Children Of Decadence" and "Mask Of Sanity", although just in their respective medleys with other songs. The early curfew in Astoria forced the band to drop "Hate Crew Deathroll" out of their set before "Downfall".

The atmosphere at Astoria was so tense that nothing the band threw to the audience made it out of the pit in one piece. A persistent fan managed to grab a slice of the setlist. (Click the pic for the full original setlist. Thanks to K-Man!)

The band has been notorious for having little variation and surprises on their setlists. If we once more overlook the curse of "Downfall" as the last song, the recent re-introductions of old rarities and having the balls to drop big hits like "Silent Night, Bodom Night", "Are You Dead Yet?", "Lake Bodom" and previously even "Everytime I Die" off the menu are evident signs of major improvement. All in all the Spinefarm UK Launch event was a success: The opening acts Kiuas and Moonsorrow dropped a serious bomb on their first UK visit and undoubtedly managed to recruit some new members to their fan armies, but the bodommania and buzz you could sense around the five chaps from the deep gutters of Helsinki was closer to a full scale nuclear attack.

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