I really wish I could say how good this gig was. I was a hardcore fan of THE USED when I was around 16/17. Once I even drove all the way from Byron Bay to the Ipswich raceway in Queensland to see them play at a Crusty Demon’s show, not to mention the amazing 2005 Taste of Chaos tour.

So I was really looking forwards to seeing them once again.

But I really wish I hadn’t.

One part of me (the 17-year-old) loved it. Just being there and seeing them, hearing those songs that once meant so much to me at one stage of my life. Songs that I still listen to and adore.

But the rest of me was severely disappointed and basically disgusted.

It was the worst gig I have seen in such a long time, namely due to lead singer Bert McCracken. He was completely smashed. Over the top wasted. And it ruined the whole performance.

He was flicking lit cigarettes and hocking gollies into the crowd. Rambling on for ten minutes or more between each song about absolute crap and for not one song did he complete an entire line of the lyrics.

No screams. No jumping his voice up and down between beautiful, pitch perfect, controlled notes. I spent the whole night listening to the five or six hundred people there shouting out the lyrics for him.

Supporting act STEALING O’NEAL had a better performance than the headliners, even if they didn’t have the backing of most of the crowd.

Lead singer Chris Scott has a truly gorgeous voice, which sounds so much better live than on their recordings. He does remind me a lot of Claudio Sanchez, lead singer of Coheed & Cambria, but better -more substance.

Next to the way Bert was singing it was Scott who sounded like the true headliner.

Not only was Bert awful, but the sound quality was shit – the levels were so out of whack, the sound guy must have been whacked out of his brain as well.

When the band came back out for an ‘encore’, they decided to play the soft and gorgeous On My Own – and utterly destroyed it.

I wasn’t the only person who was rather unimpressed. Looking around I saw the majority of people just standing still, no emotion on their face whatsoever. A lot of people even forced to start calling out ‘F#*@ing PLAY!’ when Bert got going on one of his drunken rambles, either talking about nothing or just rolling around the stage.

There were two things I was impressed by, slightly.

The first was a sweet little rap kind of thing replacing the second chorus of The Taste of Ink – pity I couldn’t understand a word he said due to his drunken slurring and the shit sound quality.

The next came straight after that when they did these amazing little segues from Taste of Ink into All That I’ve Got. And then from Bulimic back into All That I’ve Got.

But apart from these brief moments of almost brilliance, the whole thing was fucking terrible (sorry mum. But really, it was that bad I needed to swear).

I’m giving it a three out of ten – purely because they played all their old songs that I used to love and not their unknown new stuff.

- Stevey-Lee Ginger, Festivals & Nightlife