With Napalm Death going on tour, bassist Shane Embury must have thought that it was a good idea bring some of his other acts along for the ride. He was there anyway, right?
Thus it came to be that Lock Up opened this night, the first one on the tour.

“Welcome one and all.”
- Shane Embury (bass)

Time and time again I have stated that Lock Up isn’t for me, so having them open the night didn’t exactly move me. I came in too late to experience Peter Tägtgren, and I have never caught exactly why Tomas ‘Tompa’ Lindberg is so revered in metal circles. Lock Up has been good at delivering brutality, but in my opinion, not much else. Now however, there was another familiar face behind the mic, and it would seem that this did all the difference in the world.
Kevin Sharp (ex-Brutal Truth) stood there in all his barefoot and cowboy hat clad greatness, and with that, the energy and the atmosphere was completely different. It felt, contrary to the still brutal music, familiar, friendly, and fun! The rest of the band, Shane Embury on bass, Georg Anton Reisenegger von Oepen on guitar, and Nicholas ‘Nick’ Barker on drums, was still intact and rocking hard.
The music was delivered with all due aggression, but between songs the band quickly relaxed, and Sharp even took the time to talk a bit. Usually nothing much, but enough to keep up the good atmosphere, and keeping the fans happen. The most time talking was spent after breaking the skin on one of his toes, and leaving a small yet bloody trail around the stage – this prompted him to tell us just why he was barefoot.

“You wanna know the story? Actually, I was just telling Anton, or maybe I wasn’t? Anyway, back when I started making music we didn’t have things like monitors, so I took my shoes off to feel the vibrations of the bass drum in the floor. And now I have a bloody toe.”
- Kevin Sharp (vocals)

There weren’t many around to see Lock Up this night however. Honestly, the crowd never got that big, but at this time, a lot of folks were still standing in line to get in. Of course, the crowd grew over the course of the show, but people still had to find their favoured spots, get a beer, properly land so to say.
Still, Lock Up managed to garner a positive response from the audience, even though it never got as wild as it could have been.
The band itself had not yet properly calculated the time the set took, and had to spurt through the last part of the set in order not to go over time, but even so they still kept a good level of entertainment going.
Lock Up won me over completely with this show, surely in no small way thanks to Kevin Sharp, and made for a surprisingly good opener. Most surprising of all, was that I felt I wanted more time with them when the show ended, and that’s about as much praise as anyone can get I suppose.

Setlist:

Necropolis Transparent
Feeding On The Opiate
Detestation
Blood And Emptiness
Void
Demons Raging
Accelerated Mutation
Brethren Of The Pentagram
Slaughterous Ways
The Plague That Stalks The Darkness
Submission
Desolation Architect
After Life In Purgatory