Eminem patronage group of six brings its vision of reprobate entertainment

A warm-up for the Reading Festi by D-12 ought to be much better than what they deliver at the Themes site. For all the volume of personae this is a club-type proposition and not yet ready to face 50 thousnad sun-crisped music lover on a three-day camping ticket. And, it almost worked that way despite lasting only some 40 minutes.

D-12 suffer from the same malady of the rest of the hip-hop world and that is - uniformity. Once revolutionary musical expression has become a cliché and they do, as hundreds of others, what is expected. It is a mould and they hardly ever try to break it. There is precious little on the 'Devil's Night' album or tonight to merit much attention if it weren't for the troubled superstar, Mr Mathers.

Eminem is something else but within D-12 - named after a fact that, with their alter-egos, there are Dirty Dozen of them - is just a regulation rapinghood. It is hooky and easy to adjust for the mass-consumption: 'Devil's Night''s 'Purple Pills' became 'Purple Hills'. Congratulations on integrity. Eminem's solo work is astute and funny outpourings of a lunatic individual's twisted mind.

From the powerful street-poetry hip-hop in general has become just another genre exploited by the majors and D-12 come to you thanks to Universal, despite of the label sporting the Em's Shady Records logo. For all the display of four-letter words this is far from the true wrath of rappers, it is more like the playground hip-hop. The behaviour is bog-standard, the onstage moshing and joshing, mock-hostility of out-rhyming each other.

The opening part of the show was luck-lustre due to the absense of Em and only when he appeared, for the outfit's debut hit, 'S**On You', the atmosphere shifted several gears. Bizarre (weighing 20 stone) might be more than twice the size of Em but it is the rap superstar's size of performing ego (4 times, approx.) that dominates the rest of the show which becomes all-too-obvious when the adulation lifts the roof with 'Purple Pills' kicking in.