Linkin Park Live At The O2 Arena London Review 10th November 2010

Despite my misgivings (and I know I am far from the only one) over Linkin Park's latest offering, A Thousand Suns, there is never any questioning that they are a live act always worth seeing, so when the latest Linkin Park UK tour was announced the tickets for the O2 where they last played nearly three years ago were snapped up in short order.

Linkin Park's support bands over the years have ranged from the fantastic (Lostprophets) to the quite frankly appalling (Biffy Clyro) and this time we were treated to the Indie Electro-dance offering of "Does It Offend You, Yeah?!". They sounded like they played the same song constantly on and off for half an hour and from our groups perspective their set could not end soon enough, mercifully it was only half an hour and not the 45 minutes to an hour often afforded to main support acts.

It was to be widely expected that the A Thousand Suns songs would form a fair percentage of the Linkin Park setlist, the only question would be how much. Come 8:30 the lights were down and along with an impressive visual display the intro to A Thousand Suns The Radience kicked the show off as one by one the members of Linkin Park took up their stage positions.

Chester, Mike and co kicked things off proper with Wretches and Kings from A Thousand Suns, a track that is much more impressive live than on record, with the main riff containing an awful lot more bite in person. We were then treated to a nice burst of classic Linkin Park from across the LP back catalogue, launching into Papercut, the always awesome live Given Up and New Divide. That was then Followed up with the fantastic Faint with Chester throwing himself around the stage like a lunatic, and The O2 was absolutely buzzing.

Linkin Park in full flow on stage at the O2 arena in London, November 2010

Linkin Park: Wretches and Kings indeed.

New songs lead in Empty Spaces and When They Come For Me took some of the wind out of the crowds sails, but it was quickly replaced by a thumping rendition of No More Sorrow, extended with some more heavy riffs and growling vocals from Chester for a nice touch. In my opinion, at this point, the band made a little bit of a mistake. They played four new songs in a row. Even though two of them were shorter numbers, it was enough to kill the crowd somewhat. The new songs were still received fairly well, but nowhere the level of the songs from the previous three albums.

Fortunately, the distinctive chimes of the intro to Numb from DJ Hahn signified that Linkin Park were moving up another gear and from this point the hits came thick and fast: Numb, Breaking The Habit, Shadow of the Day, Crawling and a ferocious One Step Closer bringing the main part of the evening to an end. The encore was pretty fast in coming with The Catalyst gaining the loudest reaction of all the songs from A Thousand Suns, though the accoustic "The Messenger" did not go down quite so well. In The End swiftly brought people back round, and at the end of In The End is where I made a swift exit, though I was sad to miss the awesome What I've Done before the show was finished off with an extended version of Bleed It Out.

The Full Linkin Park Set List Was:

The Requiem
Wretches and Kings
Papercut
Given Up
New Divide
Faint
Empty Spaces
When They Come for Me
No More Sorrow (extended outro)
Jornada del Muerto
Waiting For The End
Wisdom, Justice, and Love
Iridescent
Numb
The Radiance
Breaking The Habit
Shadow Of The Day
Crawling
One Step Closer
==================================
Fallout
The Catalyst
The Messenger
In The End
What I've Done
Bleed It Out

As always, Linkin Park were on the top of their game and performed exceptionally well. That the evening dipped in places was not the fault of the performance but the fault of the new material and the fact it is considerably different to most of what has come before it in the Linkin Park song catalogue and it is going to take some time for both the fans and the band to work out how it bests fits into their live show. In particular I would not recommend them playing four in a row from A Thousand Suns consecutively again. Aside from this minor point it was a great show and I, like thousands of others I'm sure will come back to see them next time they are in town.