Did Wolfmother spring from outer space, or drift down to Earth from the tail of a comet? Did they slip into our age from another dimension, burrowing through a wormhole in the space-time continuum to land in Sydney, Australia in the 21st century? Where did they come from? Never, except for tribute bands, have I witnessed a group performing in one era whose music owes so much to another. These hairy Australian rockers are steeped in the lore of late-Sixties psychedelia and early-Seventies hard rock, their singer Andrew Stockdale shrieks like Ozzy Osbourne, Ian Gillan and the rest of the rock-wailers, and their songs are masterpieces of riffery, with all manner of proggy noodling and tricky time signatures and changes of pace.
This is the kind of stuff that I was brought up on, so throughout last night’s two-hour show – the last date on a three-night UK tour – I was in my element. But so, too, was my 17-year-old son, who came across the band when he heard their music used on a computer game (Wolfmother are also big on Guitar Hero). He was not alone: the audience at this gig was a sea of fresh-faced young fans. It’s 2011 and teenagers and young adults – and not wholly male ones, either - are banging their heads to Sabbath-style riffs and giving the Devil’s-horn salute. Who’d have thought it?
I guess it’s testimony to the enduring power of the cathartic riff, the soaring chorus, the power chord. Also, perhaps Wolfmother offer these young things in their Led Zeppelin T-shirts a connection with a period in music that's seen as somehow more authentic, more real.
This show was not without its faults. First, it went on for a bit too long – it was hot and sweaty and after 90 minutes I’d had enough. Second, Stockdale (the only remaining member of the band’s original line-up) performed some nimble fingerwork on the guitar, but he is no soloist: his rambling peregrinations across the fretboard contained almost nothing of interest, being just a blur of semi-random notes, and served no purpose other than to give the people in the mosh pit a breather before the next bout of slamming and jumping. Also, his voice became a bit wearing after a while. But I found it impossible not to like these four unreconstructed rockers with their big hair and their guitar-strutting, while Stockdale just looked really cool and insouciant.
Against a crudely drawn backdrop featuring the band’s refreshingly amateurish logo and a pair of leopards, the foursome swaggered and sweated and pounded and preened: opening with “Dimension” from their 2005 debut album, they cranked up the volume and the intensity with “New Moon Rising”, and from then on the Forum was in their command, from the more sedate head-nodders at the back to the mad moshers at the front. The title track of their 2009 album Cosmic Egg was an epic of twiddling and diddling; the final song, "The Joker and the Thief", sparked mayhem. In between times they also found time to pay tribute to their influences (that word alone casts the mind back to countless interviews in Sounds and Melody Maker: “So, what are your influences?”): snippets of “Riders on the Storm”, “Dear Prudence” and the dreaded “Stairway to Heaven”; plus the whole of “Baba O’Riley”, which was actually pretty well done (though obviously not a patch on The Who, who were, let’s face it, the best live band in the world in their heyday).
The earth didn’t move. My life didn’t change. I wasn’t taken on an emotional journey. But I did spend an evening listening to some inordinately good rock music, and when I looked around at the crowd going bonkers, I just laughed: it was big loud dumb fun.
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