Three months after Memorial Day there's still no release date set, although there has been a new Eminem song, Survival, taken from the album for use in the trailer for the forthcoming Call of Duty: Ghosts video game and featuring big arena rock guitars not too far from 2010'sRecovery. Two weeks ago Mr Porter, Em's hype man, tweeted: "Some of these Em fans will have something to talk about soon. Thank god cause y'all be killing my timeline." But then he is his hype man.
The Glasgow Summer Sessions are a new series of gigs, three nights headlined by Kings of Leon, Avicii and Eminem in Bellahouston Park, a couple of miles outside the city centre. Entering the park on the south side of Glasgow we're greeted by a temporary electronic sign blinking forlornly through the drizzle, "SUMMER'S NOT OVER YET". It isn't convincing anyone. But while there may be very little sign of summer, there's much evidence of the sessions. Quite a lot of the young crowd has evidently embarked on their session around lunchtime and with gusto. After an excess of high spirits at the Avicii gig last Saturday – which, according to the Daily Record, "turned into an orgy of drink and drug-fuelled violence" – there's a heavy police and security presence tonight.
First impressions are more of an orgy of drink and steroid-fuelled tribal tattoos. If there was a getting wasted event in next year's Commonwealth Games here in Glasgow, on this evidence the city's young residents would assure Scotland at the very least a medal placing, if not gold, and their winning/losing team would probably have more tattoos than the All Blacks. Not that Glasgow is alone in this sartorial approach. Depressingly, the in-look for young men at big gigs like this, from Creamfields to V festival, appears to be somewhere in between Blackpool strippergram and Stoke City centre forward.
The only violence I witness during the show involves a young kid who puts up such a fight against arrest he's eventually pinned down by a dozen police and trussed up as tightly as Eminem was in the video to his breakthrough My Name Is, one of the highlights of tonight's career-spanning set.
The gig opens with Survival, but it will be the only new material of the evening. The kid from the wrong side of Detroit's 8 Mile Road is now a millionaire who flew in on a private jet. His clothes remain the same, however, and he prowls the stage with a youthful energy that belies his 40 years. Dressed in three-quarter-length cargo shorts with a hoody over a baseball cap, he would probably have been asked for ID had he stopped at an offy for a bottle of Buckfast on the way here. Still, it's a little unedifying to hear him ask: "How many of y'all out there got a problem with your mom… or your dad?", urging the crowd to sing "Fuck you, Mom" when he comes to Cleanin' Out My Closet, then urging the crowd to sing "Fuck you, Mom!, fuck you, Dad!"
But crowd-pleasing platitudes aside, we are given a reminder of his hugely impressive stage presence. One of his greatest songs, Stan, is still a remarkable treatise about the relationship between an imaginary obsessive fan and a role model, although it will never not seem odd to see it performed as it is tonight, with the lines of the unhinged fan sung back word for word by those equally obsessed. Eminem changes the line "Remember when we met in Denver" to "Glasgow", and when he comes to "I even got a tattoo with your name across my chest", a couple of fans lift their shirts to show him theirs.
If anyone isn't yet convinced, the encore of Lose Yourself is remarkable. Delivered with the urgency and potency that cemented his meteoric rise when it was released a decade ago, it's a reminder of the daunting high-water mark in Eminem's career that subsequent albums have struggled to reach. Whether the forthcoming album can remains to be seen.
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