There’s really no point in getting bogged down in the finer details of Slayer’s considerable oeuvre. To fully appreciate them you must first disengage yourself from everything you know. Forget you’ve ever heard about music. Forget everything you know about heavy metal and the many exponents of it that you have already seen. Pretend you’ve never seen a band. Pretend you’ve never sipped beer, have no concept of electricity as a conduit for social change or volume a canvas on which to paint an ugly landscape.

I have no clue what songs Slayer played tonight and don’t care. Some will find this offensive or lazy, but more than any other band Slayer are to be felt. Their live performance is not to be analysed in four-minute segments but instead absorbed for what it is: a glorious two-hour blast of wooooarrrrgh. A face-ripping catharsis.

You already know that every song is about death or mayhem or bloodshed or redemption, so what difference does it make? Jaw-dropping drum fills follow shredding guitar solos before the quartet lock on together again, galloping off towards the horizon, heads nodding in motion, hitting their guitars like a circle jerk race to see who can come the quickest and the loudest - and the furthest. Spurting arcs of musical spunk is Slayer’s trade. Over and over and over until songs clatter collide like a car-crash pile-up. Soon the senses begin to solidify. In the face of volume, sentences become impossibility and begin to break down.

Then thoughts become incoherent, lost amidst more ricochet blast beats and guttural moans. A cigarette burns down to your fingers. Slayer have sucked you in, brother. Hook line and sinker. They’ve rearranged your DNA. And yet still you stand transfixed thinking: these forceful syncopated polyrhythms and symphonic constructs must have been what Hitler heard when he concocted genocide to the strains of Wagner resounding around Bavarian ballrooms. This is the sound of the bloodiest Norsemen raping and pillaging their way through the sagas of thousand years ago, beautifully doomed in their misguided notions of totalitarianism. It’s music that sears beyond heavy metal as a late-20th century American imperialist conceit. It’s the soundtrack to the cold wind and the death and decay of an autumn that blows hard outside across shitty old London town, where the rat-faced bootleggers moan “Bring out your dead…” and the Brixton sirens wail like banshees.

It’s all you can do but stop yourself from ripping your clothes and sticking your cock into the nearest hole, or biting a security guard’s nose off, or jumping head first off the 150-foot-high proscenium arch that towers above this stage of drama and tragedy. “Are you ready for WAR?” asks Tom Araya, without giving us time to answer, but I’m already leaving in order to sustain the high, to avoid the emptiness of the silence that follows. Besides Slayer have done enough tonight. More than enough.

I feel murdered.

I mean, these cunts have killed me.