Page 35 - Black Velvet Rock Magazine Issue 103

BV103 pg34-37 Airbourne_BV103 pg35 23/12/2019 00:48 Page 2

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Shaken,
Shaken,

Not
Not

Stirred
Stirred

hile the world changes, there are some
Wthings you can always rely on and one of
them is that a new Airbourne album will always
rock harder than almost anything else, and their
live show will kick your arse harder than the ma-
jority of bands could ever dream of. While new
album 'Boneshaker' features the hard rock party
tunes about girls, beer and fast cars that you know
and love from the band, songs that you can cut
loose and listen to while the worries of the day
slip away, a closer inspection reveals there are
some subtle changes that we have never seen from
them before. Happy to talk to us more about
those changes is one of the changes himself, new
guitarist Matt 'Harri' Harrison who joined the
ranks in 2017 and is enjoying the fruits of his
labour on his first studio album with Airbourne.

att Harrison, or Harri to his friends, joined the band in 2017 and thus
M'Boneshaker' is his first record alongside original members, brothers
Joel and Ryan O'Keeffe, on lead guitars and vocals and drums respectively,
and bassist Justin Street who joined the brothers shortly after the band’s birth.
Although Harri's addition to the ranks on rhythm guitar is also somewhat sub-
tle as when you take a look at them in action, if you didn't know he was new
to the team there is a good chance the change would pass you by. He fits
into the mould so well.
"I've got the unique perspective within the band, I guess, of this being my
first album with them,” says Matt. “We've been mates for pretty much the
whole of their discography since album one and all that stuff, I've certainly,
as a close friend, seen those first four records kind of happen and transpire
and the processes they went through to write, demo and record all of those
ones and now, being in the band, I guess the thing that took the most balls
or was the riskiest thing from our point of view was the whole notion of throw-
ing the rule book out.
"It would have been much easier to do this record in a way which was
very familiar… very similar to the previous records; record it in a similar way,
using a similar amount of time in the studio, perhaps going back to a producer
who the guys had worked with before versus the intent from day one, which
was to do something that was super-raw, super-live and jump in the deep
end with a new producer who we hadn't worked with before. That was always
the intention and, even after the first phone call with Dave Cobb, who ended

AIRBOURNE