Airbourne/Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown - Barrowlands, Glasgow, 21 November 2019

Well, that was a bit mental.  All the elements of your typical Airbourne show appeared to be present and correct the other night.  If my ears will stop ringing, let’s see if I can summarise.

“Here-we, here-we, here we fucking go,” into a ‘Sin City Ain’t Bad Place For Riff Raff To Give The Dog A Bone’ barrage of jackhammer riffage, a wall of not-quite-noise pounding out of a cliff-face of Marshall stacks.  Lead singer and guitarist Joel O’Keeffe pinballs around the place ripping out screaming licks while bassist Justin Street and rhythm guitarist Harri Harrison career back and forth, swapping sides of the stage in between delivering football terrace shoutalong backing vocals on the choruses of favourites like ‘Raise The Flag’ and ‘Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast’.

Joel O'Keeffe - that beer can's existence is almost over

There’s sweat, feedback, crowd-surfing, and helicopter-haired headbanging from Street.  There’s manic “Here’s Johnny!” leering from O’Keeffe, and colourful bouts of swearing from him devoted to the joys – no, the necessity, of getting pissed.  Twenty minutes in there’s his ritual shoulders-aloft wander through the audience during the magnificent ‘Girls On Black’, pausing only to smash a beer can against his head till it explodes.

But wait, what’s this?  During their long-standing ode to hanging tough, ‘Bottom Of The Well’ they get into some subtle dynamics, bringing things down between choruses and giving O’Keeffe room to undertake some meditative guitar explorations – well, almost meditative.

Cranking it out again on the likes of ‘It’s All For Rock’n’Roll’, O’Keeffe is sat on the apron of the stage soloing when a flight case emblazoned with the Gothic logo ‘Lemmy’s Bar’ is rolled on behind him, bearing 5 plastic pint cups filled with ice, a bottle of JD, and cans of Coke.  So O’Keeffe plays barman, doling out the Jack and Cokes and distributing them to band and audience members.

There’s an air raid siren solo by drummer Ryan O’Keeffe, accompanied by ear-splitting, thunder-laden sound effects, heralding his little brother’s appearance up by the PA stack.  There’s beer-throwing, and in the midst of it all the frenetic, anthemic ‘Live It Up’ and ‘Stand Up For Rock’n’Roll’, both good tunes beneath the mayhem and sheer volume.

They don’t go large on the new album Boneshaker – both the title track and the brief ‘Backset Boogie’ sit well amongst earlier material, but to these ears ‘Burnout The Nitro’ is a bit of a racket.  But the sound doesn’t seem great to be honest – everything is louder than everything else to the point nothing stands out.  But this ain’t my first rodeo with Airbourne, and let’s face it, nuance is scarcely the order of the day.  Their offering is an out-and-out, high voltage, rock’n’roll party – and that, they indubitably deliver.

This is though, my first live experience of Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown.  I’ve enjoyed their last two albums - the most recent, Truth And Lies, showing off a very modern-sounding hard rock band with a strong understanding of the blues in their armoury – so I’m keen to see what they have to offer.

The first thing to be said is that Tyler Bryant himself is a bona fide rock star in the making. 

Tyler Bryant shows off his star quality

Fashionably thin, clad in a loose-fitting shirt, skinny tie askew, and a waistcoat, with a boyish grin and hair that constantly needs to be flicked out of his face, he’s certainly photogenic enough.  But he’s also possessed of a distinctive voice, capable of both raunch and sensitivity, and shows off some zinging guitar skills as he skulks around the stage in a hunched duck walk.

And when they hit their stride, as on the driving ‘On To The Next’ and the rolling blues rock groove of ‘Ride’, The Shakedown sure as hell live up to their promise.

‘Weak And Weepin’’ sports a riff that could have come straight out of co-guitarist Graham Whitford’s band Aerosmith, and if there’s a satisfying Zep-like crunch to ‘Eye To Eye’, it also has some more twenty-first century touches in a manner similar to Dan Patlansky. I could live without their moments of full throttle squalling heaviness though, as on the set closer ‘Lipstick Wonder Woman’, and the spell when drummer Caleb Crosby comes to the front of the stage to belt the bejeezus out of a drum as accompaniment.  But maybe they feel the need to give Bryant more support, as Whitford is a stolid presence to one side of the stage and bassist Noah Denney seems almost to be pushed to the wings on the other.

But for my money they really show their worth when Bryant straps on a Resonator guitar and grabs a slide for a cover of ‘That’s Alright Mama’, which becomes a springboard for some anything but unplugged exploring of bluesy outer limits.  Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown surely have a big future, but I reckon their strength is really in their roots.

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.