Graham Bonnet Band

London The Underworld

The hits. And some Impellitteri.

He’s been making records for precisely half a century now, so it’s a spirit-sapping shame that Graham Bonnet and his four-piece band struggle to sell out the tiny Underworld, and when he sighs “I’m an old fuck now” it’s all too close to home. Yet tonight is less wake, more celebration of a great survivor’s career, and Bonnet behaves as if he were headlining The O2. With black shirt, slicked-back hair, skinny tie and David Essex’s earring, he looks ready to re-shoot the Night Games video, but the 70-year-old’s foundations-rattling howl is in remarkably fine fettle.

Rather than, say, playing Down To Earth in its entirety, Bonnet offers a career-resume from Rainbow to Long Island Tea, weirdly the only selection from this year’s Meanwhile Back In The Garage, via the shockingly underrated Alcatrazz (whose Jimmy Waldo is on keyboards tonight) and, less fathomably, Impellitteri.

Before Rock You To The Ground, Bonnet reflects ruefully on his departure from the Michael Schenker Group in 1982: “I did something ridiculous.” Nevertheless, those of us present at that drunken Sheffield Polytechnic night when Bonnet exposed himself could hardly have envisaged him sober and performing 36 years later.

When man-mountain guitarist Kurt James plays a bannister (really) during the heroic closer Lost In

Hollywood and Bonnet hollers Since You Been Gone like it’s the first time, all is well with the world.