Steven Tyler
London The Forum
Aerosmith frontman gets his solo wings in debut UK show.
“This what happens when you’re busy making plans,” says Steven Tyler a few songs into his first ever UK solo show. Throwaway quip or sly dig at absent friends? Given the Great American Soap Opera masquerading as Aerosmith’s latter‑day career, you can take a safe guess.
Tyler has spent the last few years in a quandary, seemingly desperate to break free of the band with whom he made his name and his fortune, but either unwilling or incapable of letting go. Like a couple trapped in a loveless marriage getting rat‑arsed at a dinner party, those emotions are always going to boil over given the opportunity.
Tyler’s countrified 2016 solo album, the twang‑ tastic We’re All Somebody From Somewhere, was the sound of a man dipping his toes into the fast‑flowing waters of freedom, only to find it a little bit too nippy for his liking. It was a fine, underappreciated album, just loaded with too much rock’n’roll for the Nashville audience he was aiming at, and with not enough Joe Perry for the rock’n’roll set. And so Tyler returned to the bosom of Aerosmith, lips held high, like nothing had happened.
This stop‑off on his debut solo European tour shows he hasn’t quite given up on his dream of becoming the new Garth Brooks, or maybe Shania Twain. America may be sniffy but if the 2,000 people packed into a furnace‑like Forum on an over‑cooked Wednesday evening are any indication, us Brits will take the Tyler package any which way it’s served up.
The ironic thing is that, tonight at least, he looks like he’s never needed his original band less. Backed by Loving Mary, the Nashville outfit who played on his solo album, Tyler is electrifying. If Aerosmith’s live shows have the whiff of five men in their own mental and physical postcodes these days, the Steven Tyler solo revue is an all‑singin’, all‑dancin’, all‑limbs‑ a‑flailin’ extravaganza, where the man in the centre of it looks like he’s having the best time of all.
But whether he likes it or not, Tyler and Aerosmith will always be indivisible. The flashes of honky‑tonk piano that pepper opener Sweet Emotion are fooling nobody: this is a ’Smith set in all but billing. We get Dream On, Janie’s Got A Gun, Cryin’ and Living On The Edge, simultaneously sharpened up and loosened down. There are expected covers (Train Kept A-Rollin’, The Beatles’ Come Together and I’m Down) and some unexpected ones (Janis Joplin’s Piece Of My Heart, Fleetwood Mac’s Rattlesnake Shake). When he does bust out the occasional solo song – Only Heaven and the album’s title track, for instance – they fly so close to the mothership as to be indistinguishable.
Tyler is 70 now, an age his 25‑year‑old self would never have put money on reaching. Maybe those bones are creakier than this livewire performance suggests, which could explain why he doesn’t play for much longer than 80 minutes. Or maybe he’s just saving his energy for Aerosmith’s one‑last‑job Vegas residency to mark their 50th anniversary next year.
Still, we’ll grab what we can. He ends, predictably enough, with Walk This Way, which bleeds, unpredictably, into a teasing burst of Whole Lotta
Love, which only makes you wonder what might have happened if Tyler and the remnants of Zeppelin had got together in the wake of the latter’s O2 reunion.
Two thousand people hold their breath for Jimmy Page to walk on. He doesn’t. No matter. Tyler has already given us more than enough bang for our twang.