TV Review
When old rockers get together, the chat is determinedly upbeat.
Diana Wichtel
Brian Johnson, cloth-capped long-time lead singer of AC/DC, recalls hitting the US back in the day and being so gobsmacked at the size of the T-bone steaks, he wrapped one in tinfoil and packed it, a medium-rare wonder of the world, to show them back in working-class Newcastle.
Such are the gritty anecdotes exchanged on Prime’s Brian Johnson’s A Life on the Road. Think a longer, more lavishly produced, rocker version of Jerry Seinfeld’s web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Like Seinfeld, Johnson rocks up in a different cool car in each episode to talk shop with old mates. On the list are the likes of Lars Ulrich, Sting, Joe Elliott and Robert Plant.
First up, Shepherd’s Bush in a Morris Minor convertible to meet the Who’s Roger Daltrey. This combination proved irresistibly nostalgic to those of us who once owned a Morris Minor convertible (like many elderly rockers, a wheezing wreck subject to random breakdown) and who are old enough to have experienced the Who generating an unintelligible racket as they destroyed their equipment on stage at the Auckland Town Hall in 1968.
The band’s Dada-esque destructive streak has never been fully critically appreciated, Daltrey complained to Johnson. “No one wrote about the sound. It was like the ritual slaughter of some mythological animal. The thing used to scream.”
The ritual sacking of hotel rooms was what made headlines. “Some of those hotel rooms needed smashing up,” mused Daltrey. The band always paid cash, he noted, then hotel managers claimed on their insurance. Whole hotels got redecorated. Simpler times.
Daltrey looked good for 73. He put it down to advice he had from an acid manufacturer to avoid that sort of thing and stick to weed. “To this day, I promise you, I haven’t even tried cocaine.” Lest things get too wholesome, there were the Keith Moon stories: driving a car into a swimming pool; keeping a piranha in a bathtub and feeding it room-service steaks. What were the 60s but a cherry bomb in the hotel toilet bowl of the Establishment?
The chat was determinedly upbeat, although fallen comrades were saluted. Moon died of an accidental overdose in 1978. “John Entwistle died a rock’n’roll death in 2002, suffering a cocaine-induced heart attack while in bed with a prostitute.” A few days after the episode screened here, AC/DC guitarist Malcolm Young, who had been suffering from dementia, died.
“I hope I die before I get old,” goes that immortal line of BS in the Who’s My Generation. Johnson is grappling with hearing problems, but he and Daltrey seemed pretty content to be still above ground and swapping war stories. Johnson admitted he’d attempted to copy Daltrey’s virtuoso microphone-twirling stage moves. “I tried. I was too scared,” he said. “You can’t be scared when you do it,” advised Daltrey. “I could take a cigarette out of someone’s mouth at 20 paces.” It was a bit of a boys’ club. Women only got a look in as groupies climbing in from hotel balconies or erupting out of closets. Those were the days.
Back in 2017, once you got past the Mike Hosking cameo, Three’s New Zealand
Music Awards showcased a confident, diverse new age of home-grown brilliance – Ladi6, Teeks, SWIDT – and, well, a new age. Lorde, 21, breezed in from her campaign for world domination to pick up six
Tuis. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, 37, presented her with the People’s Choice Award and a hug that seemed like a still-slightly-astonished celebration of a generational shift.
Debbie Harwood highlighted how far we’ve come when she presented veteran singer-songwriter Sharon O’Neill with her Legacy Award. “She’s not down the hallway in the smaller room called women’s music. That’s an odd perspective. That’s gone. That’s over. It wasn’t real in the first place.”
BRIAN JOHNSON’S A LIFE ON THE ROAD, Prime, Tuesday, 8.35pm.
“To this day, I promise you, I haven’t even tried cocaine.”