After one of the hottest weeks the UK has seen in quite a while, Zakk Wylde brings his explosive brand of guitar pyrotechnics to London to further heat things up!

Black Label Society’s show at the O2 Forum Kentish Town felt less like a standard tour stop and more like a gathering of the faithful, and by the time I walked into the venue a little after 7pm, the room was already thick with anticipation, sweat, beer, battle jackets and the low rumble of a crowd ready to be flattened by riffs.

DARK CHAPEL

Dark Chapel had the awkward job of opening a night built around heavyweight names. Fronted by Dario Lorina, who is pulling double duty with BLS playing alongside Zakk, they were first on a bill topped by Black Label Society, with Venom Inc. also appearing; a line-up that did not exactly promise a gentle room.

What made their performance interesting was how little they tried to bludgeon their way into the evening. Rather than arriving as a smaller version of the headliner, Dark Chapel offered something moodier and more polished: something more akin to Alice In Chains or Soundgarden; heavy rock with a gothic glow, big choruses, and a sense of drama. In a venue like the Forum, still filling up and still buzzing with the pre-headliner churn of pints, patches and battle jackets, that restraint was a risk. For the most part, it paid off.

They opened with Afterglow; a smart first move. It gave the set an immediate sense of atmosphere without wasting time on scene-setting. The song’s title suited the band’s whole presence: not quite doom, not quite radio-rock, but something lit from behind, with a sleek, shadowy confidence. The setlist was concise (six songs in total) with Afterglow, Hollow Smile, Hit Of Your Love, Sign Of Life, Ain’t No Sunshine, and We Are Remade.

The biggest strength of the performance was pacing. Support slots can often feel like a band frantically throwing every weapon they have at a room that has not yet decided whether to care, and Dark Chapel avoided that trap. Hollow Smile and Hit Of Your Love kept the momentum moving, but neither felt desperate. There was a confidence in the way the band let the songs breathe. The guitars had bite, but they were not overstuffed; the melodies carried as much weight as the riffs.

The cover of Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine was the set’s boldest choice. On paper, it could have been a gimmick: a classic soul lament dragged through a dark-rock filter. Live, it worked because the band did not treat it as a novelty. They leaned into the ache of the song rather than merely darkening the arrangement for effect. In a room primed for metal theatrics, it gave the set a welcome change of pace.

That said, there were moments when the grandeur slightly outpaced the impact. The band’s sound is clearly built for drama, but early in the evening, with the crowd still settling, some of the more expansive passages had to work harder than they might have in a headline environment. Dark Chapel have songs that want a room fully surrendered to them, and at Kentish Town they were sometimes playing to an audience still deciding whether to lean in. That is the curse of the opening slot.

By the time they reached We Are Remade, though, they had carved out their own space. It was the right closer: broad, declarative, and just anthemic enough to leave a mark without overstaying its welcome. In a six-song set, you need a final number that tells people who you are. This one did.

Dark Chapel’s performance was not about overwhelming the Forum; it was about persuasion. They arrived before the full storm of Black Label Society and Venom Inc., but they did not sound like an afterthought. They brought atmosphere, melody and a darker kind of theatricality to a night otherwise powered by legacy, leather and distortion.

VENOM INC.

Venom Inc. were never going to offer a polite warm-up. Sandwiched between Dark Chapel and Black Label Society, they arrived as the night’s blast of old-school extremity: grimy, fast, satanic in tone, and proudly rough around the edges.

Their set began at around 8:15pm, giving them a proper middle-slot chance to shake the room awake (if it wasn’t already) before Zakk Wylde’s headliners took over. From the start, Venom Inc. sounded less like a support band and more like a hostile takeover. Where Black Label Society deal in huge groove and guitar-hero drama, Venom Inc. brought speed, filth and a punkish sense of danger.

The set leaned into their own material rather than simply acting as a Venom nostalgia act. Songs played included Ave Satanas, War, There’s Only Black, Preacher Man, Cursed, Come To Me, Inferno, Black n’ Roll and The Hammer played in tribute to the late great Phil Campbell, which received thunderous roars of approval. That made for a compact but forceful run: no wasted motion, no overlong theatre, just a band hammering through blackened metal with veteran confidence.

Tony ‘Demolition Man’ Dolan was the focal point, barking and commanding with the authority of someone who understands exactly what this music needs. It did not need finesse. It needed menace, speed, and conviction. Curran ‘Beleth’ Murphy’s guitar had that chainsaw-riffing, evil-tinted bite that makes Venom-related music feel permanently stained, while the rhythm section kept the set charging forward with a pleasing lack of polish.

The strongest moments came when the band’s black metal heritage collided with rock ’n’ roll swagger. There’s Only Black and Inferno hit with particular force, but Black n’ Roll summed up the appeal best: Venom Inc. are at their most effective when they sound like a gang kicking open the back door of heavy metal history and laughing as the hinges come off.

It was not a subtle performance, and it was not meant to be. Some of the sound blurred in the Forum’s mid-evening crush, and a few songs landed more through sheer attack than detail. But that suited the band’s character. Venom Inc. are not selling precision; they are selling atmosphere, legacy and violent impact.

By the end, they had given the evening a nastier, more feral edge. As a bridge between Dark Chapel’s gothic and grunge melodicism and Black Label Society’s riff-heavy headliner set, Venom Inc. were perfectly placed: ugly, loud, unrepentant and far more than a token legacy name on the poster.

BLACK LABEL SOCIETY

Zakk Wylde and his doom-laden brotherhood did not so much play a gig as conduct a full-volume ritual: part biker-church sermon, part Southern-metal wake, part guitar-shop fever dream. The Forum remains one of London’s better rooms for this sort of thing: grand enough to give the night a sense of occasion, cramped enough that the riffs feel like they are being fired directly into your ribcage. By the time the taped intro of Whole Lotta Sabbath rolled out, the mood had already tipped from anticipation into pure ceremony.

Then came Funeral Bell, and with it the familiar Black Label Society equation: huge down-tuned guitars, slow-motion menace, a rhythm section built like reinforced concrete, and Wylde standing at the centre like a Norse biker-god who has just discovered pinch harmonics and never intends to stop using them.

What followed was not a career-spanning nostalgia package in the tidy, museum-glass sense. It was heavier, looser, more stubborn than that. The set pulled from the band’s old warhorses and newer material, including Name In Blood from Engines of Demolition, alongside staples such as The Blessed Hellride, Fire It Up, Suicide Messiah and the inevitable closer Stillborn. The sequencing had a blunt, effective logic: no delicate opening gambit, no slow seduction. Black Label Society came out swinging.

Name In Blood was an early statement of intent, its placement near the top of the show suggesting Wylde is not treating the new material as polite catalogue filler. The song sat comfortably among the older crushers, partly because BLS have never been a band obsessed with reinvention. Their world is built from a few sacred materials: Sabbathian weight, biker-bar swagger, bluesy melancholy, Ozzy-adjacent theatricality, and the pleasure is in hearing them rearranged with increasing force. Where some bands age by smoothing out their edges, Black Label Society seem to fossilize into something harder.

The heart of the evening belonged, naturally, to Wylde. There is something almost comic-book about him now: the beard, the stance, the target-pattern guitars, the heroic overstatement of every solo. But the cartoonish surface hides an important truth. Wylde’s excess works because it is sincere. His playing is not tasteful, and it is not trying to be. It is volcanic, devotional, sometimes absurd, often dazzling. During A Love Unreal and Heart Of Darkness, he seemed to treat the guitar solo less as a musical passage than as a test of endurance between himself, the audience and the laws of physics.

That can be both the thrill and the weakness of a Black Label Society show. There are moments when the sheer quantity of soloing threatens to blur into one endless cathedral-window spray of notes. The tone is magnificent; thick, vocal, instantly recognizable, but subtlety is rarely invited to the party. Still, complaining that Zakk Wylde plays too much guitar at a Black Label Society gig is a little like complaining that Motörhead were loud. This is the contract; you sign it at the door.

The emotional centre came with the Ozzy-linked material. No More Tears appeared in the set in partial form with the famous guitar solo and a verse and chorus; a reminder of Wylde’s long history as Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, while recent track Ozzy’s Song brought the night’s most openly elegiac note with an emotionally driven performance and blistering solo. Zakk made that guitar cry for his old Boss. In lesser hands, such moments can feel like brand management dressed as tribute. Here, they carried real weight. Wylde’s relationship with Osbourne is woven so deeply into his musical identity that even the heaviest passages seemed to bend toward remembrance. The crowd understood it, too. The room’s usual roar gave way to something closer to collective respect.

In This River deepened that mood. Long one of BLS’s most affecting songs, it remains the point in the evening where the macho armour cracks and something bruised shows through. Black Label Society’s best trick has always been this contrast: the ability to move from knuckle-dragging riff violence to wounded, almost hymnal melancholy without seeming embarrassed by either. In Kentish Town, that duality felt especially powerful. For all the skulls, denim, leather and battle-vest theatre, this is a band whose emotional language is grief as much as aggression.

The second half restored the boot to the accelerator. The Blessed Hellride had the crowd moving as one thick black tide as Zakk wielded a dual neck guitar; Set You Free and Fire It Up leaned into the band’s groove-metal instincts; Suicide Messiah arrived with the sort of riff that makes necks surrender voluntarily. By the time Stillborn closed the night, the Forum had the drained, sweaty, slightly stunned atmosphere of a room that had been comprehensively worked over.

Credit should also go to the machinery around Wylde. John DeServio’s bass playing gave the riffs their low-slung heft, Jeff Fabb’s drumming kept the show from collapsing into sludge, and Dario Lorina’s guitar work added necessary sharpness and symmetry. The current line-up (Wylde, DeServio, Fabb and Lorina) is the current Black Label Society formation, and in London it sounded like a unit built for impact rather than just set dressing.

Was it elegant? Not remotely. Was it varied? Only within the fairly specific range that Black Label Society allow themselves. But that is part of the point. BLS are not in the business of shapeshifting. They are custodians of a particular heavy-metal faith: one where the riff is holy, the solo is scripture, loyalty matters, grief is loud, and the best way through the darkness is to hit an open chord and let it ring until the walls drip with sweat.

London got exactly what it came for: a night of crushing volume; old-school metal theatre, and guitar heroics delivered with total conviction. At this stage, Black Label Society does not need to surprise anyone. They need to make the faithful feel like the brotherhood still means something, and on that warm Friday night in Kentish Town, it did.

All concert photography by Graham Hilling. You can check out more of his work on his website, here.

Black Label Society: Website

Venom Inc.: Website

Dark Chapel: Website

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