Even the people who knew it wasn't going to work wanted it to be so much more. A thousand or more people have paid over the odds, £20 a ticket, give or take, to see Chris Cornell front Rage Against The Machine. That's what it comes down to. The hopes of the crowd here are split two ways - the ones who want progression, and the ones who want regeneration, nostalgia, riffs, the glory days. I wanted both - or at least one or the other, either will do - and I'm disappointed.

Everything about the Astoria is disjointed tonight. They've turned off the lights in the "Keith Moon" bar and stuck up a big red and white Guiness-style namesign that casts little more than unhappy dark grey halflight on the heads of a roomful of people looking less excited than you'd think they would. It seems a small thing but it's an anticlimax before things have even gotten started. The touts outside are charging £50 per ticket - extortionate yes, but they charged £60 for fucking Incubus tickets a year or two ago... do they know something we don't? Or rather something we do know, having heard the single 'Cochise' and the album, but aren't prepared to say out loud?

So they come onstage, and there's lots of cheering and they pick up their instruments, and there's more cheering, and Chris Cornell sticks his arms in the air, looking terrifyingly like Brad Pitt, and there's even more cheering. They play some riffs, and Cornell does some singing - he sounds a lot like that guy that fronted Soundgarden - and it's all really, like, loud... well it isn't really, but y'know... um... so what's the point of this exactly?

It's cold. It sounds dead. Remember that riff in RATM's 'Bullet In Your Head' where everything comes to a silent halt and this urgent, awesome riff starts to nag at you, and Zack De La Rocha starts roaring, and it just obliterates you? Now I know as well as everyone else that when a "supergroup" gets formed, you're Not Supposed to draw comparisons with the previous bands, you're supposed to pretend it's all completely brand new. It isn't. Not remotely.

Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine were two of the defining bands of the 90s, and covered ground that most bands can't contemplate until it's too late, until someone else with more balls has done it, the way RATM and Soundgarden did. Like it or not, Audioslave have got some impressing to do. But they don't, because they sound like they left their souls on the tourbus. The riffs are unwieldy, heavy but cumbersome, loud but ultimately pointless - they don't make you move or twitch or take a step back - it's all background noise. Cornell's vocals are as good as they've ever been, but he's not singing anything - it's just consonants and vowel sounds that apparently form words - unmemorable, meaningless, time wasted under a spotlight.

It doesn't go anywhere, it doesn't produce any justification for this collaboration, because there are no new ideas, no risks, no joy in any of this; and it sure as hell doesn't sound anywhere near as fucking good as either of the previous bands sounded, even miles beneath their separate peaks, because what each of them did was inspired by something, and this is just... what exactly? Is there a reason for any of this? Is it overly harsh to suggest that when De La Rocha left, the rest were left holding their instruments and throwing potential replacement names into the ring and this is merely the result? And yeah, it's disappointing, cos fucking hell - look at the musical potential contained in those human bodies!! But in a way it isn't, because some part of me couldn't believe, even when I frantically booked the tickets, that this would work, that these people would turn up at an appointed time in a studio or on a stage and make music that set people's heads and hearts blazing - because it just isn't that easy.

Rage have become The Machine, and Chris Cornell just looks out of place on that stage. This doesn't seem like a musical marriage of inspiration; it's a marriage of convenience. And when has music - the kind that rips you apart for all the right reasons - ever been convenient?