I went out and caught up with a couple of friends I hadn’t seen for a while on Saturday night. It started out as a night of confusion, though. We’d agreed earlier in the week to go see a new-ish band managed by one of my friends. The band is called Airbourne and I will get to them a bit later.
I turned up to the venue at the designated time after having waited around for a bus that didn’t come, getting frustrated waiting and flagging down a taxi to take me instead. I waited around outside for my friend to show when he rang me on my mobile. He was waiting outside for me at a different venue. I’d gone to the wrong place. Somehow, when I looked up the gig details online, I’d looked at the Friday gig instead of the Saturday gig. So I jumped into another cab and took off for the right place.
‘Spectrum’ is the venue name and is one of the signs of a healthier live scene here in Sydney than in previous years. Sydney, for those who don’t know, has long held a reputation, perhaps unfairly, for not being supportive of live music venues. Poker and card machines have meant a lot of pubs don’t need to provide entertainment. They just need to provide plenty of machines to choose from, which they do.
Recently, a series of smaller venues have opened, catering to diverse tastes in music. Spectrum is on such place and is pretty much a rock club. If it doesn’t have live music, it has DJ’s spinning rock tunes. It is a place where you’d hear classics like ’Highway To Hell’ or ’The Boys Are Back In Town’ next to new tunes by acts I don’t even know the names of.
The venue probably had a capacity of 200 max. It was dingy in a cool way, like all good rock venues should be and it reminded me of the venues I was playing and hanging out at 15 years ago. These sorts of venues are the lifeblood of a healthy scene, giving young bands a chance to strut their stuff on the same boards as more seasoned acts. I really liked the place.
So I found my friends, we shot the shit, had a few beers and lied about how well we were all doing. Well, lied probably an exaggeration but you know how it is when you catch up with people who used to mean a lot to you but you don’t much see anymore. You don’t tend to go into the negatives of your life because you don’t want to bring the mood down. I have nothing to complain about anyway. Except for dodgy knees but that is another story (coming soon).
So my friend’s band comes on stage. From the very first big, fat, loud open chord, I was transported back to, oh, let’s say 1978, when I was 15 and AC/DC ruled my world (along with a bunch of other bands but allow me to elaborate). The lead singer/lead guitarist was like a clone of Bon Scott and Angus Young. In fact, he kind of looked like a young Bon. There were no fancy lighting, no tricks or costumes or makeup or piercing or tattoos anywhere on stage. Four young men, two guitars, one bass, one drum kit and amplifiers all round are often all that is needed. That and ability to play said instruments and write a bunch of kick-arse, balls-to-the-floor rock tunes. These guys had all this and more. I watched, whooped, and grinned from ear to ear.
The band played the small crowd like we were 20,000 people. At one point, when the leader ran through the crowd and hopped on the bar to do a blistering solo before leaping onto one of the front-of-house speakers and doing another blistering solo. It was truly an awesome show and, apparently, par for the course with this band.
What they also did is restore some of my lagging faith in music. Maybe I’m just getting old, but a lot of music of late is popular more by image, huge public relations budgets and stylists while the songs usually sucked. Seeing some great songs and artists ignored for ‘bling’ icons really got me down.
‘Airbourne’ aren’t gonna change the world. But they might just end up making it cool for musicians to forget about everything else and just concentrate on making good music, regardless of the genre.
