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Review: Apocalyptica, Colston Hall
There’s a bitingly cold wind outside. But it’s a walk in the park – presumably in a T-shirt – for hardy Finn Eicca Toppinen (the blond one), who’s amused to observe that we Brits are finally enjoying a proper winter. When he founded Apocalyptica, he explains, the ambition was simply to record Metallica covers on four cellos with fellow Sibelius Academy graduates, shifting maybe a thousand copies.
Four million album sales on, they’ve come full circle to 1996’s Plays Metallica by Four Cellos for a 20th anniversary tour that has now stretched into its second year. Whereas Apocalyptica’s previous show in Bristol (at the Academy back in November 2015) drew mainly metalheads, whom they threatened to “punish with classical music”, their Colston Hall debut has also pulled in the Classic FM audience. Now it’s their turn to be punished with metal. On four cellos. It’s safe to suggest they’ve experienced few recitals at which musicians flash devil horns and exclaim “Fuck, yeah!” at the end of a performance.
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With no support act, this is an epic show of two halves. First up, we get the Plays Metallica by Four Cellos album in its entirety, performed in sequence, with the quartet more-or-less seated. This gets off to a flying start with a trio of classic thrashers – Enter Sandman, Master of Puppets and Harvester of Sorrow – which underline the effectiveness of these thrillingly percussive interpretations, with Toppinen and lead cellist Perttu Kivilaakso taking turns on the solos while Paavo Lötjönen underpins it all on bass cello – the Cliff Burton of Apocalyptica, if you will.
The furious pace slows a little with The Unforgiven, reminding us of how carefully they sequenced the album. Long-absent Antero Manninen, who left Apocalyptica back in 2009 to return to the world of symphony orchestras, gets an exquisite solo on the set-concluding Welcome Home (Sanitarium), his sober, stone-faced persona making an amusing contrast to his bandmates’ wild headbanging.
A gargantuan drum kit is unveiled during the interval, presaging what Kivilaakso describes as the ‘heavier set’. Mikko Sirén, who joined Apocalyptica seven years after that debut, takes up his position and (most of) the cellists roam around the stage in bona fide rock star style as we’re whisked back to Ride the Lightning – the first truly great Metallica album – for the magnificent trio of Fade to Black (with Manninen once again taking the solo), For Whom the Bell Tolls and a suitably frantic Fight Fire with Fire.
As so often with Apolcayptica, that rare proggy instrumental, Orion – originally something of a showcase for the late Cliff Burton – proves an absolute highlight. It’s back to Ride the Lightning for Escape, a curio that even Metallica themselves don’t play, and which, as Toppinen observes, they later cannibalised for several other songs.
He also confesses that the quartet couldn’t have tackled Battery back in the 90s, but they pull it off magnificently tonight with Sirén’s thunderous drumming, getting everyone on their feet. Seek and Destroy keeps the energy levels up with its call-and-response lyrics supplied by the audience, albeit polluting the pure Metallica with a teasing snippet of AC/DC’s Thunderstruck (earlier, Kivilaakso had joked that they could have done AC/DC on two cellos or Massive Attack on one cello).
That lovely reading of Nothing Else Matters, which remains Apocalyptica’s best known cover, is the first encore. But rather than leave us on a mellow note, they promptly dive into One for a delirious, hair-flailing climax. It’s a show that’s hard to fault: superb musicianship, plenty of self-deprecating humour and a few pleasant surprises to leaven the inherent predictability of a ‘classic album’ tour.
All photos by Mike Evans
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