Airbourne - Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh, 9 June 2017

Many moons ago, when I were a lad, I saw AC/DC playing at Sheffield Polytechnic, with Bon Scott.  Standing next to me in the audience that night was some guy togged out in the full Angus costume, schoolboy shorts and cap, the lot.  As their set got going he made repeated calls for “MORE VOL-YOOM”.  A few weeks later at a Scorpions gig at Sheffield City Hall, I saw the same guy crawling along the front of the stage in front of the PA stacks, while the support band was playing.

That lad would have been in his element watching Airbourne.  In the enclosed confines of

Joel O'Keeffe has "a bit of a CHINWAG" with the audience

the Liquid Rooms, with Marshall stacks filling the stage, they make a racket akin to being in the middle of the D-Day landings.  The rhythm section delivers a physical punch to the gut that makes you feel the need for a bulletproof vest.  And in the midst of all that, Airbourne are huge, huge fun.

It’s very easy to describe Airbourne as AC/DC juniors.  The younger Aussies have the same way with a steamhammer guitar riff, a thunderous rhythm section, and screeching vocals.  But they also inject a Motorhead-like frenzy into the mix, and a post-grunge sensibility that makes them more contemporary than their inspirations.

At the epicentre of this storm is lead guitarist and vocalist Joel O’Keeffe.  If Bon Scott came across like a casually lascivious, leering black sheep of an uncle, then O’Keeffe seems like a wild-eyed, manic cousin cut from the same cloth.  Wiry and bare-chested, his between songs patter features regular squawked encouragement to “get pissed on a Friday night, EDINBURGH”.  And this audience, no shower of curious casuals, is well up for both that challenge and Airbourne’s set.  To say the joint starts jumping is putting it mildly - down the front there is clearly what I believe the young people call a mosh pit going on.

There’s some simple but effective choreographed guitar bashing, and Justin Street on bass and David Roads on rhythm guitar make frequent sprinted excursions from one side of the stage to the other, while Street demonstrates degree-standard headbanging to further enliven proceedings.

Now, you might be asking about the music.  Well hell, what do you think?  Songs like ‘Girls In Black’, ‘No Way But The Hard Way’ and ‘Runnin’ Wild’ feature riffs as tight as a cork in a champagne bottle, while O’Keeffe effortlessly cranks out screaming solos in between working the crowd.  It's rock’n’roll compressed to its core, a hurtling rollercoaster fuelled by adrenaline and beer.

But this is really all about the live experience, and the connection between the band and the crowd.  O’Keeffe does the Angus tour around the crowd solo thing, on a roadie’s shoulders.  He chucks cans of frothing beer to audience members, and – his party piece – smacks them off his head till they explode.  He encourages chants of “here we, here we, here we fucking go” – though they don’t need much encouragement, having got there first anyway.  Even his drummer brother Ryan gets in on the showmanship, kicking off the encores by hand-cranking an air raid siren.

Airbourne have been off my radar for a few years, since I saw them play the late, lamented Caley Picture House in Edinburgh back in 2010.  But clearly they continue to be an electrifying live force, with a committed fan base.  And they don’t half stand up for the liberating power of rock’n’roll.

Hayseed Dixie - Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, 17 October 2015

As previously noted in this blog, my other half Jill has a liking for bluegrass.  So what better way to indulge her interest than a Hayseed Dixie gig?  Like Alabama 3’s cross-pollination of “sweet pretty country acid house music”, Hayseed Dixie’s “Rockgrass” mash-up works a treat.

Famously originating in the epiphany that Hank Williams’ Lost Highway and AC/DC’s Highway to Hell were one and the same, the band duly deliver some slices of that initial inspiration early in their set, with ‘Hell’s Bells’ and ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’.  But anyone expecting a one-trick High Voltage pony or merely a dumb joke should think again, for three reasons.  One - over the years their repertoire has evolved to cover a wide variety

Hippy Joe Hymas makes with the mandolin

of rock anthems, plus original material and, er, Norwegian classics.  Two – these boys can’t half play.  And three, it may all be a bit of a laugh, but it’s a smart and knowing laugh; as main man John Wheeler says at the end of a philosophical rap about Hegelian synthesis, these are educated rednecks.

So on a bare stage they set about demonstrating just what “an acoustic band that plays fuckin’ loud” can do, with the likes of Edwin Starr’s ‘War’ seguing into Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ – personally I’d have preferred more of Edwin, but each to their own.  They collide ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ with a middle section channelling ‘Ghost Riders In The Sky’.  Hell, they even manage to take a piece of high-cholesterol AOR schlock like ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, and turn it into something that has the crowd progress from smiling to laughing to whooping as if it’s the very stuff of life.

The show would have better balance if they did more of their own stuff, like the excellent ‘Hangovers Hurt More Than They Used To’ and ‘She Was Skinny When I Met Her’.  Apart from anything else they need to give all concerned a rest from the furious pace evident on the likes of ‘Ace Of Spades’ and ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’ (the latter working far better than the earlier ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’).  Along the way Hippy Joe Hymas and Johnny Butten respectively turn in blistering mandolin and banjo solos, while Wheeler occasionally swaps acoustic guitar for suitably frantic fiddle.

They encore with a medley that takes in everything from ‘Hotel California’ to Wham, two blasts of Dio, and a snatch of Abba en route to ‘Highway To Hell’.  As brilliantly bonkers as it is, I’d like a decent slab of Bon Scott-era AC/DC myself.  But hey, this is a show that demonstrates, as John Wheeler says, that “Coldplay sucks!”

Ah, hard rock support bands I have known!  Anyone remember Dedringer? Samson?  Actually The Jokers aren’t that bad, and do a decent job of warming up proceedings.  Front man Wane Parry has a good way with the crowd, even if his singing is inaudible half the time.  Meanwhile Paul Hurst isn’t as gormless on guitar as his goofy gurning and shape-throwing suggests, and they have a thumpingly tight rhythm section.  They may have a look that suggests Metallica, but in their better moments they echo classic rock in the vein of Bad Company and UFO, and they certainly seem to love what they’re doing.

   

Flashback #2 - 'Whole Lotta Rosie'

Bon Scott - stick this in your fusebox!

It was 1976, I was 14, I was mooching around in the old Virgin Records shop in Edinburgh, and about to have an encounter with the manic blues rock of none other than AC/DC.
This was nothing like the Megastores of later years of course - themselves gone the way of all flesh now.  It was a single unit in a side street, albeit in the centre of town. I didn't have the funds to buy too many albums back then, so I decided to splurge something like 75p on a single of 'Whole Lotta Rosie'. I can't remember exactly how I'd lighted upon it.  I'd heard some of their stuff on a rock show on the local radio station, Radio Forth, mostly from Powerage I guess, which was their most recent studio album. And probably I'd been reading good things about their upcoming live album, If You Want Blood, You Got It, in Sounds.
I think I may even have had a listen to 'Rosie' in one of those old booths with headphones they used to have in record stores back then. And of course it was terrific: the chanting of "Angus! Angus!" alternating with the first blasts of that guitar riff; Bon Scott's bluesy drawl of the opening lines, building up to his delightfully daft yell of "42-39-56 - You can see she's got it all!"; and then lift off, into three minutes or so of supercharged mayhem.
Of course, this was the "single edit", with a couple of minutes or so lopped off the album version, but I've always had a soft spot for it regardless. It's lean, direct, no messing, and the call and response guitar section has always seemed sharper to me for being half as long as in the full version. Great stuff.

Anyway, here they are giving the song some welly on the BBC TV show Rock Goes To College.  Enjoy!