Support: The Offspring
Queens Of The Stone Age,
Megadeth
National Bowl Milton Keynes
Friday June 8
KK

AS AC/DC's famous cannons rise onto the stage to
salute the people in this half-full Milton Keynes Bowl, it's difficult not to view this event as little more than an ill- judged, ill-defined folly. As courageous as this disparate four-band bill may have appeared to anyone who didn't actually have to pay for a ticket,the fact remains that this is a Friday, and thus a work day for AC/DC fans, a school day for Offspring fans and, unfortunately for all of us, a night so cold that you have more chance of being bitten by a polar
bear than a mosquito.

Megadeth are on first -Dave Mustaine marches onto
the stage, opens up the chords to some generic metal riff or other, which could be from any Megadeth album from the past eight years -and the crowd
shrugs. It's difficult to overestimate how horrible this band have become.They're so horribie in fact that even the old songs -songs you once thought were inventive and caustic -such as Wake Up Dead or 'Tornado Of Souls' -now sound like one clumsy, doddering riff
stacked atop another. As for Dave Mustaine himself, well he got into a bit of a spin after it was suggested that his band Megadeth would have been better today if I were on drugs. Let me rephrase that probably that: Megadeth would have been better today ifthey were on drugs.

By means of contrast. Queens Of The Stone Age are fantastic. This may be because the PA suddenly,
inexplicably, coughs into life, because they have incomparable Mark Lanegan singing for the middle part of their set. or maybe it's because they follow Megadeth and, under those circumstances, the Queen of England would have sounded fantastic too. Queens Of The Stone Age, though, are a band whose best days are in the here and now, and that is something of a premium for this bill.

Perhaps The Offspring were added to the roster to prove there exists a band even more cartoon-Iike than the headliners. The set they play is a crowd-pleasing one -it features all the hits you'd expect from the past seven years , of the bands success -and guitarist Noodles may remain something of a punk rock presence but for anyone standing further away than the first 50 rows then The Offspring really lack the stage presence to fill this arena. And as they
, limp into 'Why Don't You Get A Job?' -a dead ringer for the Beatles 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' -I can't have been the only person in the crowd thinking, 'Yeah, why don't you?'.

Saying bad things about AC/DC( is a bit like waiting
outside the gates of a nursery school and telling the crying kids there's no such person as santa Claus. But, as the band chug open a four-and-half-hour version of 'The Jack' - unreconstructed sexism concerning a girl who has the clap, in an age where men and women have AID5, a couple of thoughts spring to mind. The first is that AC/DC( are not always very good and the second is that. on the contrary, sometimes AC/DC can be very bad, and very boring indeed.

There are some parts of this Milton Keynes show that
are simply amazing, most of them in the last 45 minutes. so that'll be 'HighwayTo Hell', 'Whole Lotta Rosie' and 'Let There Be Rock', in that order. 'Rock 'N' Roll Ain't Noise Pollution' and 'You Shook Me All Night Long' are also damn fine songs. But that's not really the point any more. As Brian Johnson swings on the giant hell's bell, as Angus Young duckwalks up the walkway that parts the crowd and up the staircase at the side of the stage, you realise in terms of a production, this is exactly the same show they played at Wembley Arena in December, at Sydney Opera House in January and at New York's Madison Square Garden in May.

You realise that this could be anywhere, and that AC/DC don't really care where they are. Worse still, as
Brian Johnson tells the crowd they're the loudest of the
tour so far, you know that. just like Bruce Forsyth, he's lying, and that he'll say exactiy the same thing to crowds in the Germany or Holland. And in that sense, AC/DC don't really care that you're here either.

They close, of course, with 'For Those About To Rock' -
even though people have just finished rocking, so surely that should be 'ForThose Who Have Just Rocked'. The cannons fire and the fireworks explode. And still everybody loves AC/DC, even though AC/DC were really not very good tonight. Thing is though... you just don't say those type of things out loud, now do you?

IAN WINWOOD

Stiff Upper Lip Tour Special