America is so big it doesn't actually exist. Yeah, it's there alright and every so often it does leap up to announce itself with a great show-off flight of stupidity like the recent coronation of George Dubya but these fripperies aside though there really is no such entity as the United States of A. It's just too f**king vast for our tiny little minds to manage.

What it does boast though is room aplenty to bury yourself on one of its go-nowhere roads and room enough to disinter yourself again years later utterly reborn. Enough blank corners for an insectoid geek called Brian Warner to reinvent himself as the world's most other-wordly rock star; enough hungry nothingness in fact for him to exact revenge upon every muscle-bound sports jock who mocked him in the showers or every all-teeth-and-t*ts cheerleader to have blanked his shy glance in science class.

Only in America, as Don King might bellow, could Marilyn Manson have marketed this misanthropy with such cold, calculating, Coca-Cola success. And now here he is visiting his bile upon a cavernous Ice Hockey hall in London and guess what? Unfortunately it's all rather dull.

His entrance was pretty damned impressive though I'll give him that, schlock-horror theatrics scored by what sounded like the gossiping of a million angry locusts. Gangly frame silhouetted against a blank white sheet the inevitable avalanche of bottles soon begins and as some Wagner-arranged-by-John-Carpenter gut-twisting rock song floods the arena BANG he's there and he's taller and skinnier and whiter than you could ever have imagined. And then he starts to croak in that affected 60-a-day Ziggy way of his and almost immediately the excitement fogs and your mind begins to wander.

If nothing else Goth Metal has always afforded people the opportunity to dress up, kids so desperate to believe in something that they're more than happy to squeeze their awkward selves into a uniform no matter how ridiculous it might be. It's like an end of term outing for police cadets here as dreamt by Hieronymous Bosch after a big feed of cheddar. Hey but don't assume though that Manson doesn't in any way encourage self-expression or individuality; there's at least nine different branded t-shirts available in the corner that explodes that lie into just so much shrapnel.

Ah yes, the music. 'Disposable Teens' is Burundi drumming gone berserk and the best stab at Adam and the Ants covering Alvin Stardust for 20 long years. 'The Fight Song' is all communal-chant, Nuremberg flash and has everyone's inner-child stamping along with an overtired fractious abandon. The rest unfortunately is a disappointing mix and match sludge of jackhammer guitar chords and over-wrought vocals and proves nothing so much as how easy it remains to wind up Christians.

As keenly choreographed then as Disney on Ice and far less truly subversive than a Britney show, Marilyn Manson is the meticulously-styled grotesque sum of the western world's whiney white teenage angst. He might not offer any real response to the hypocrisies and cant of life other than a loud, ripe raspberry but when you're 16 years old that can be a very satisfying noise to make. Just try it yourself. Put your lips together and blow. Hot air apparently remains all the rage...

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