Deftones at The Paramount Theatre – Seattle on 2011-04-14 by Dave Lichterman under licence CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Chino Moreno is my spirit animal. He was there when I was a teenage metalhead with a closet full of “unacceptable” music tastes, outing himself as a fan of everything from Depeche Mode to Björk. And he was over a decade later when I was scared shitless of moving to Berlin – when I changed our one-way flight to see his band play the Brixton Academy, they gave me the strength to commit to my new life. He even proved that it’s possible to come back after your “fat years”, a valuable lesson for anyone who finds themselves sliding towards a fate similar to Elvis Presley’s.
In short, the Deftones have always been there, and I hope they always will. They’re back in Berlin tomorrow night, in support of their sophisticated new album “KOI NO YOKAN”, and lucky ticket-holders will find me curled up, sucking my thumb, in the middle of the pit. Whether you can make it or not, here’s a blast from the past for all the old school Def’heads – the band’s complete performance at Bizarre Festival in Cologne, 1998.
Deftones play Huxley’s Neue Welt tomorrow, February 26th. It’s SOLD OUT, sorry!