Lacuna Coil released The 119 Show – Live in London on November 9, 2018, through Century Media. The live album and concert film captured their January 19 performance at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town, celebrating 20 years since their debut EP. The band built the evening around 25 songs and a collaboration with British circus company Incandescence, giving the retrospective a full theatrical production.
Century Media marked the release with the concert video for “Nothing Stands in Our Way,” the song that closed the London set.
The circus idea grew out of the visual world Lacuna Coil had already developed. “We have always loved very weird, dark atmospheres,” Cristina Scabbia told CrypticRock in 2018. Their lighting technician introduced them to the performers, and the two groups began working out how to share the stage. Distance made preparation difficult: the circus company was in Britain, while the band had to plan around people whose movements would become part of the show. Scabbia said they performed the complete production twice on the day, without breaks. That gave the camera crew a chance to learn what was coming and additional footage to work with.
The finished set made those demands easy to understand. Production supplier Sound of Music built a curved structure dressed in red-and-white fabric and strings of lights to suggest a circus tent. Mimes, stilt walkers and aerial performers worked alongside the musicians. Scabbia became part of the aerial staging herself, lifted above the stage in a concealed parachute harness while an enormous skirt spread beneath her. During “Falling,” her voice was accompanied by piano, placing one of the evening’s quietest arrangements inside one of its biggest visual moments.
Scabbia later spoke candidly about the strain behind that scene. Speaking to Screamer Magazine in 2019, she recalled being frightened by the lift and feeling the pressure of getting it right for a filmed performance. She described relief afterward, once the show had been completed. The elaborate staging had required the singer to take on a physical role beyond her vocal performance.
The music gave the production its historical purpose. After the introduction, “A Current Obsession” and “1.19” opened the set, both drawn from Unleashed Memories. “Soul into Hades” and “Falling” reached back to the self-titled debut EP, while “The House of Shame” represented the band’s 2016 album Delirium. The running order moved back and forth through the catalog, putting songs from the band’s first EP alongside material released nearly two decades later.
The release preserved that combination in audio and on film. The original physical editions included a DVD with two CDs and a limited package adding Blu-ray; the digital audio edition ran just over two hours. The video program also included “Behind the Curtains” and “Enter the Coil,” supplementing the concert with backstage material and an extended band interview. Listeners could follow the set across the CDs, while the film retained the aerial work, costumes and staging that had been built around it.
