I’d like to thank Chino Moreno…

Eight days before Deftones came to London, I could have been found crying in a pub in Vauxhall. What had started as a cute Valentines week date in the Tate Britain devolved into a post-mortem of a relationship that hadn’t yet expired but was deteriorating at a breathless pace. I thought briefly I was going to get dumped in a bus stop, where we were standing and talking to escape the rain, before deciding the pub over the road was a better place to shelter.

The man in question – we’ll call him Paul – was floating away from me, to the point that he wouldn’t even touch me. He was emotionally unavailable; I was a hypervigilant, raw nerve of a person and we set each other’s trip wires off. I cried all of my makeup off on the Tube to Kentish Town, where I was reviewing a gig that night, reapplied it and then cried it all off again. I still hate Vauxhall.

Safe to say, in the week of Deftones’ show at The O2, I felt like my heart had been stamped on. Paul had stopped short of actually breaking up with me – in fact, I’d break up with him a few weeks later – and the whole thing became horribly drawn out. Instead of severing ties with a neat, clean axe chop, it’s like he was sawing at it, creating a slow, painful splinter. But, as Friday drew closer, I vowed to put my pain down, just for a while. I didn’t want it to tarnish my first experience of Deftones live. I was going to dress up, and I was going to feel better.

Gigs are where I find my centre. Often, they’re a means of connecting with yourself, especially when music forms such a major part of who you are. The Lorna Shore gig I went to a couple of weeks prior to this incident had done that for me, arriving at the tail end of an equally horrific week of worrying for Paul’s mental health, thanks to the rather toxic work environment he was in (was he just burnt out or losing interest? Both.) At Alexandra Palace, pummelled by heaviness, I remembered what feeling normal was like. I hoped Deftones would be a sanctuary in a similar way. And it was.

After wolfing down some pre-gig chicken paitan at the Marugame Udon in The O2 (very underrated, in my opinion), I followed the curved path to the entrance and took in the sight of all the young women and girls who had dressed up for tonight like I had. Maybe they were trying to empower themselves too. Maybe tonight was so important to them that it just had to be dressed up for. Collectively, we were declaring Deftones ours, in whatever way that meant to us, and taking up space in a way we might not have always felt we could. It’s one of the reasons I felt that I was seeing them live for the first time at the best possible moment.