The Bare Bones

You know where you stand with Airbourne. Ever since they erupted from their Antipodean jam room with 2007’s Runnin’ Wild album and one of the most thrilling live shows available to human eyes, Joel O’Keeffe and his comrades have stuck proudly and rigidly to a blueprint forged by AC/DC and Rose Tattoo four decades ago, adding a dash of their own snotty exuberance but essentially delivering the goods as advertised. As a result, the news that they’ve jettisoned the rulebook and taken a wildly new approach on their fifth full-length may come as a surprise. As the prerelease blurb would have it, the new Airbourne album sees the quartet going, er, back-to-basics for what is described as a “fucking rock’n’roll record”. Somewhat puzzled, Hammer speaks with Joel as the album’s release looms, and we ask him: if the new album is a stripped-down rock’n’roll record, what the fuck were the last four albums supposed to be?

“Ha ha ha! Oh mate, coat of paint on them, this one is like raw wood! There’s nothing on it, no varnish, no . We just chopped a tree down and said, ‘There, that’s it!’”