Airbourne - “The Wizard of Oz”

Airbourne school us on the history of Australian R&R

One listen to Airbourne’s debut album, the beer-swilling, riff-raking Runnin’ Wild, is all it takes for the Darkness comparisons to kick in. Which isn’t really fair. After all, frontman Joel O’Keeffe spares us of any falsetto-flaunting Freddie Mercury action, and the band’s got one hell of a background story—one much more interesting than the Darkness’ simple tale. (Guitarist Dan Hawkins heard his brother Justin sing a ripping version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” on New Year’s Eve; they decided to form a band and play pubs; much rocking and rehab ensued; end of story.)

“Growing up in Warrnambool [a small rural town in Australia] taught us that if ya don’t entertain the crowd, you’ll either get a beer bottle in the face or ya teeth kicked in out the back of the pub,” explains O’Keeffe, who got his start rehearsing with his brother, drummer Ryan, in their early teens. “The town has the highest alcohol consumption for its size in Australia—at every show, there were fights and lots of wild good times.

He adds, “The cops would always come when we rehearsed ’cause the neighbors kept complaining about the volume. They’d come to stop fights out in the front of gigs, too, so we knew most of them by their first names in the end.”

Such sex/drugs/rock ‘n’ roll talk is to be expected, so we gave O’Keeffe the ultimate test of his true-or-false relation to r&r: Hey Joel, how’s about a crash course in Australian rock according to Airbourne?

Aussie pub rock all started with Lobby Loyde and his Coloured Balls and Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. In the ’60s and early ’70s, Thorpe and Loyde were two ferociously LOUD and RAW Aussie pub rock bands—they were the first two bands in Australia to really crank up the volume and blow people away with nothing more than a wall of guitar amps. The songs were about sex, drugs, good times and rock ‘n’ roll. As this sound grew, three distinct bands started to develop it all. AC/DC, Rose Tattoo and the Angels came thundering onto the stage with massive amounts of voltage and sex-charged rock ‘n’ roll anthems. All hell broke loose and Aussie pub rock exploded all over Australia. Then there came bands like Cold Chisel, Jimmy Barnes, the Baby Animals, Kings of the Sun, the Screaming Jets and the Poor. By this time, Aussie pub rock had many hard rockin’Aussie bands flying Lobby and Billy’s flag, and if that wasn’t enough, AC/DC were the biggest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.

Then in the mid ’90s, poker machines and noise pollution governments closed a majority of the legendary pubs down—pubs that gave direct birth to Aussie pub rock ‘n’ roll. And for a while, all looked pretty grim for the future of this sound. But now the tables are turning back again and Aussie pub rock is reclaiming its old stomping grounds and telling neighbors and crying emo [kids] that they can either shut up or f*ck off.

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