Joel O’Keeffe, the unleashed leader of Airbourne /
The Cimarrón Cuarteto Austral radiated their school rock AC/DC and threw glasses at the audience in the packed Luxua room at the BEC
The Australians Airbourne, putative sons of AC/DC, returned to Bilbao this Saturday and performed at the Luxua room of the BEC at the same time as the Argentina 2 – Australia 1 World Cup match. The final whistle was blown by the antipodean leader saying that Australia was out. The Luxua room sold out the capacity of 1,500 seats, the same as the Santana 27 room. The southerners were referred to the Luxua from the CuBEC, where they can put more than 4,000 souls, because the advance sale was not what was expected.
Airbourne (Warrnambool, Victoria, 2003) are on a European tour, 14 concerts in seven countries (in Germany they have five dates). In Bilbao, the Swedish Blues Pills opened, four long-haired men who played 9 songs in 43 minutes with the focus on their blonde vocalist, Elin Larsson, who between jumps and aerobics (which has changed: we saw her much more paradita in March 2016 in a full Antzoki and we titled that the group was a bluff) radiated a pretty hard retro rock with a show like Vintage Trouble but with less vibes and less credible.
Elin Larsson, singer of the Blues Pills /
Then there was an intermission or change of scenery in which Pato looked around and commented: “all the shirts are from classic groups.” Indeed, we find almost always black t-shirts from Kiss, Rainbow, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, Motörhead, Metallica (a girl in a white t-shirt!), Blind Guardian, Judas Priest, Yesterday & Today, Pantera, Volbeat and dozens of Airbourne garments. In merchandising, the current Airbourne designs were sold at 35 euros.
Airbourne left very punctually at 9 pm to the stage of the Luxua room, a rectangular space of 2,400 square meters of little depth with the stage placed in a corner and in width instead of in length. In addition, the ceiling is very low, so much so that Airbourne could not fully display its backdrop, which was half covered by the wall of Marshall amplifiers.
From that stage, the antipodes played 14 songs in 87 rather stretched minutes through their brown rock circus numbers: the leader, guitarist and singer with a raspy voice (waterfall, judged by an anonymous rocker) and bare chest, Joel O’Keeffe, did not take long in walking through the public mounted on the shoulders of a technician and in hitting a beer can against his big head until it breaks and waters the audience. Also, his brother the drummer Ryan came out alone in the encore to have a drink on a beer to sound a real siren. And the four performers stretched their usual songs, from fifteen years ago now, through solos and interaction with the public: asking for claps, asking them to light lighters (not mobile ones: and there were many lighters), throwing glasses of alcohol, mixed drinks to the people, a couple of them caught in the air by two spectators who were on the shoulders of burly men (at one point there were seven like this, among them three guys with bare chests plus a girl, she’s dressed, huh?), or at the most filler moment with Joel making bourbon concoctions in a mobile minibar called ‘Lemmy’s Bar’ (for his Motörhead frontman influence, you know). And this without mentioning the oe-oé soccer fans, the spontaneous choruses of the public on the plucking of the inaugural ‘Ready to rock’…
Joel O’Keeffe at Lemmy’s Bar /
Too much populist circus and garrulo intersperse Airbourne in their concerts. But we already knew that, so it didn’t take us by surprise and we enjoyed them like the first time of the at least four times we’ve seen them live. Wouldn’t it be better if they forgot about crude humor and played 70 minutes and the same songs? That they remove some jokes, as we recommend to Gilipojazz? Well, yes, but the southerners have already verified that people, especially the younger ones, want to party, like those who formed a circle among the mass and mounted a fairly strong pogo, dancing wildly.
The thousand souls present knew the lesson by heart and the musicians also knew it and repeated it in a manner during the 14 songs in 87 minutes of Airbourne, among which those influenced by fire by AC/DC prevailed due to quality and quantity: the the riffs of the two guitars, the torn voice of Joel O’Keeffe, the choirs of his two mercenaries… Such was the acedecesque influence that at one point Pato said: “They all sound like AC/DC”, and he began to sing “ridin ‘ down the highway / goin’ to a show’ (the opening of ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)’), and it fit perfectly with what Airbourne was playing then, the sixth, ‘Burnout the Nitro’!
Airbourne and the low ceiling /
Abusing the request for clapping, throwing every two by three glasses of beers and long drinks from the stage towards the audience (glasses half full or full that left a trail of liquids on the mass), taking a shower with beer to cool off the big boss Joel O ‘Keeffe and this one coming to kick two empty cans also against the public, Airbourne also played songs and the best of the 14 were these five: the fourth and accelerated ‘Girls in Black’ («dedicated to all the beautiful girls dressed in black”, Joel presented it), the aforementioned sixth ‘Burnout the Nitro’ (with hey-hey-hey tribal peasants, who began to bounce in unison making the BEC floor shake), the dizzying and nervous eleventh , just before the encore, ‘It’s All for Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (which was when a pogo circle was created next to us), plus the last two, the 13th, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll for Life’ (wild and with rockabilly substrate), and goodbye with the 14th, the stretched ‘Runnin’ Wild’, agra Ended with one of his best choruses, with a nod to Black Sabbath, with more hey-hey-heys from the gang, the pogo spread over a large area of the public, an Australian flag waving in front of the jumping mass, an individual passing over of our heads in a horizontal pose, and the parting line from the vehement Joel O’Keeffe: “thank you for fucking believing in rock and roll.”
And when evacuating the crowd from that place with a dirty and wet floor, sometimes sticky sometimes dangerously slippery, we verified that almost all of them wore t-shirts of the same classic groups as before, although among the herd, or rather the herd, we saw some of Los Soft (my home is rock and roll!) and Royal Blood. Hum…, when in two or three years we see Airbourne again they will play the same songs and they will do the same paripé full of beer garrulism.