Manchester Arena
There's a torchlit parade, a giant red honeycomb thing, walls of fire, lots of taut muscles, a keyboard player in a glitter suit walking on a treadmill, burning microphones, fire-breathing musicians and a stage set like Fritz Lang's Metropolis meets The World at War – and that's just the opening 20 minutes.
The greatest hits extravaganza by Teutonic loons Rammstein will take some beating as the rock show of the year. There's something undeniably disturbing about bare-chested Germans getting an arena to raise their arms and listen to amplified marching feet while watching a man wearing giant strap-on eagles wings that are ablaze, but a Rammstein show works on multiple levels. It's sinister and subversive, macho yet camp, rude yet very, very funny, not least when singer/hypnotic orator Till Lindemann dons a blond wig and spanks keyboardist Christian "Flake" Lorenz.
Ostensibly the world's biggest industrial metal band, Rammstein sound like a mixture of Laibach's situationist anthems, Front 242's "electronic body music", German drinking songs, opera, T Rex-like riffs, with songs about everything from homoerotic cannibalism (Mein Teil) to the dominance of American culture. The sublime Engel, meanwhile, is metal with eerie whistling, while Keine Lust could be the work of a German Lady Gaga. This is music that revels in the harsh beauty of the German language.
A section using minimal instrumentation and a tiny drumkit shows how powerful they can be without gimmicks, but the visuals soon return to stoke rising euphoria. The hapless Lorenz gets "cooked" in a giant stewpot and surfs the crowd in a rubber dinghy, before Lindemann unveils his piece de resistance, spraying white stuff over the crowd from a giant phallus