The London 2012 logo, or ‘brand’ if you want to believe the ad-speak nonsense from the official website, has apparently cost $800,000 (Australian), taken a year to ‘develop’ and been almost universally condemned by the public, the media, and advertising industry.

All manner of 2012 promoters such as Sebastian Coe and Tony Blair have tried to get behind the logo to justify this appalling waste of money for such an infantile and lazy design, calling the logo ‘inspiring’, ‘innovative, and ‘iconic’. However, rather than their status bolstering this logo’s popularity, just like the grotty neighbours who move into a good street, the  logo simply drags their credibility down, making it hard to believe that they really hold their superlatives to be true. Rather, they seem to be blithely toeing the official line, or blindly regurgitating the pricey copy the ad men provided as part of the heavily padded bill.

It’s worth reading the official explanation from the 2012 website – but don’t forget to pinch yourself and remember that this is not satire – these people actually paid $800,000 for someone to convince them of this:

“We need a powerful brand to help us achieve our ambition.

Our emblem is simple, distinct, bold and buzzing with energy. Its form is inclusive yet consistent and has incredible flexibility to encourage access and participation. It can communicate with anyone from commercial organisations to kids playing sport.

It feels young in spirit. Full of confidence, certainty and opportunity. Not afraid to shake things up, to challenge the accepted. To change things.“

That quote reminds me of the annoyingly cocky contestants you see on The Apprentice TV show, who  spew sugar-coated nonsense interspersed with industry buzz words about their great abilities and their great achievements, even though they’ve only been out of university for three weeks selling insurance door-to-door.

The London 2012 logo is an indistinct, pointless nothing. There has been no attempt to incorporate anything essentially British or London-focussed into the image, and the claim that it is youth-focussed is both incorrect and breathtakingly patronising. If they wanted a youth-focussed logo, they should have asked a young person to design it, and  given them a slice of the $800,000. 

The final kick in the guts from this comes with the release of the Rio 2016 logo, that tells us nice and clearly where the event is, when it is, and that there is a theme of togetherness with clearly stylised people coming together for what looks like like a pretty good time. There is action, colour, symmetry, and professionalism on display. Everything the London logo lacks.

For a committee  whose job it is to convince us to part with some serious cash to go and see a supposedly well organised and carefully considered games, this is a shocking start.  We can only hope that the stadia, security,  and  countless other decisions that need to be made by the same people who approved this logo turn out substantially better.

(Oh, and if you think that the logo seems to depict a cartoon character kneeling to perform an intimate act, you’re not alone.)

Having been to Bali many times and driven past this particular hotel on every taxi ride north of Kuta Square, the lure of the neon-lit guitar finally won me over and it seemed worth a stay just to vary my experience of the central Kuta area

My resulting review of the hotel can be found on Trip Advisor here: Hard Rock Hotel Bali- Lack of no-smoking policy kills this hotel dead – get ready to choke .

There is certainly some cheesiness about the Hard Rock group as a whole, which is of course reflected in the Bali property (both the hotel and the adjacent Cafe). It is also evident in the corporate branding pasted to the walls, and contained in the in-room hotel information books.

Foremost amongst these is the “Love All – Serve All” statement, which is painted in large letters across the wall of the centrestage bar area at the HRH in Bali, and which forms the backbone of their global corporate ‘philanthropy’ message, also viewable on their website here: http://www.hardrock.com/corporate/community/philanthropy.aspx . Take a look at this page and you will see many charities supported by the Hard Rock group – and good on them for doing so.

But I think that if you are going to take a corporate stand on issues, then you need to follow through on them in all aspects of your business, otherwise what is the point? If not followed through on it just becomes a cheap marketing slogan that short-changes customers, and makes the corporation appear greedy and uncaring in just the way it was trying to avoid by having the slogans in the first place!

The Hard Rock Hotel Bali’s big problem is smoking, and the prevalence, tolerance, and outright encouragement of it by the Hard Rock corporation. The photo’s below barely capture the extent of the problem, but they clearly show the ashtrays lined up on the bar under their slogan of “Love All – Serve All”, yet there is no consideration for the health of its patrons, and most disgracefully no attempt to separate children from the passive smoking of up to 30 or 40 consecutive adults smoking around them for some 4 hours at a time. On two of the busier nights in the centrestage area I had to wash my clothes out upon returning to my room, and have a shower to get the choking stench of stale cigarette smoke out of my  shirt, hair, skin, and nose. A couple of other nights I avoided the area totally, as from outside the dozens of mini-chimneys pumping out the smog in the place was nauseating.

I thought hard about whether to be quite so sensitive about this -after all I’m a foreigner in another country with different laws and customs, right?

The kicker though was not just the Asian guests smoking (and should we really patronise them with ‘oh, but they don’t know any better, do they?’?), but so were many of the Australian, European, and American guests. Seeing this I was on rather more familiar ground, as I know damn well that back in their host countries the laws against indoor bar smoking are much tighter, and none of those people would have got away with what they were inflicting on their fellow guests, staff members, and the many surrounding children – i.e. poisoning them towards a potentially early grave.

The situation becomes more hypocritical as you browse the Hard Rock website, and you notice that several of their U.S hotels are in fact totally non-smoking! How so? Surely if it wants to ‘Love All, Serve All’, the Hard Rock corporation would be as interested in the health and safety of its staff and the adults and children filling it coffers in Asia, as much as it obviously wants to protect the lives of its rich, middle class American customers?

I’m annoyed with myself for not taking another photo, showing cigarette street sponsorship lining the road outside the Hard Rock Hotel & Cafe in Bali, right up to the entrance of both establishments. I don’t know if Hard Rock was behind this, or if they could do anything about it (hard to believe in Bali, where connections & money can achieve most things), but the connection was clear. Smoking and the Hard Rock Hotel were being made to look cool alongside each other.

This is an unacceptable position for a major international entertainment group to maintain. People in Asia deserve the same protections from well known dangers as much as Westerners – be that freedom of safety from terrorism, fire & flood risks due to poor construction, or the half-century of knowledge we now have that direct and passive smoking is a health tsunami, whose deadly waves are forecast to drag ever increasing numbers of Asians to an early death.

Currently Indonesia is experiencing a massive growth in smoking and its related illnesses, placing a terrible burden on one of the least capable health systems in the world to actually deal with the symptoms. This condemns millions of its citizens to extended deaths with little pain relief, and no chance at all of life-saving surgery or cancer/lung disease management drugs. The aftermath is families without breadwinners, children not going to school, and passive smoking injuries to extended families and the staff at smoking venues such as the Hard Rock Hotel, Bali.

At the moment Indonesia & China account for some 1.7 million annual deaths from smoking, with that number expected to grow to a catastrophic near 7 MILLION within 40 years. Unless the Hard Rock group starts to really take it’s claimed mantra of ‘Love All, Serve All’ seriously, then it will have the blood of millions on its hands as a direct result of its in-house policies, its lack of educational programs for staff and visitors, and it’s inability to be a leader in a part of the world that desperately needs one in this area. In short it will look like so many other international coporations, the tobaccoo companies included, whose sole aim is to rape and pillage from a population that can’t fight back, and perhaps most importantly can’t afford the lawyers to sue in the class action they rightly deserve.

Until it can achieve this I will not be returning to the Hard Rock Hotel in Bali and I encourage all non-smokers, or indeed anyone with a social conscience, not to do so and to make your reason why clear by sending a short email to: customer_care@hardrock.com .

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

The Leaning Tower of Pisa has 296 steps to reach the top. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2010. If those were steps, it would have climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa 4 times

In 2010, there were 10 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 39 posts. There were 10 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 387kb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was May 26th with 54 views. The most popular post that day was CeBIT 2010’s Sexist Shame.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were wotnews.com.au, twitter.com, cordless-homephone.info, facebook.com, and homemaketingbusiness.blogspot.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for gopher browser, gopher internet, martin dart, crazy domains cebit, and radiohead house of cards.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

CeBIT 2010’s Sexist Shame May 2010
2 comments

AC/DC Perth Concert Review March 2010

Australia’s shameful Bali ‘visa’ scam January 2009
1 comment

Edge of the Web (EOTW) 2008, Perth – PART 1 November 2008
1 comment

About October 2007

The coincidence with the WikiLeaks Cablegate affair, that has been lavishly lauded by Socialists, Web 2.0 ‘reformists’, anarchist, and other hotch-potch apologists the world over, is both timely and ultimately informative.

Let’s recap: WikiLeaks fan-boys think all diplomatic cables, and just about all other government data (oh wait – unless it relates personally to them) should be open-source and freely available. They think Joe Public has the overarching right (let alone the wit, intelligence, subtlety, and experience) to read and interpret everything all governments say to and about each other, all the time. Career diplomats and politicians are to be universally derided as liars in their book, and the new custodians  of truth and international peace and diplomacy are to be the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker (and after a few months of this Utopian dream the whole world will link arms, sing some John Lennon songs, and the Age of Aquarius will finally dawn).

This is of course some of the most patently dangerous  totalitarian  nonsense that has ever been aired as a political view since either Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot had their  respective ‘reformist’ days.

To have entrusted this last week’s worth of diplomatic activity in the Korean peninsular to the hands of the collectivist public would have been playing nuclear Russian Roulette. It is an absurdist view that anyone other than those intimately aware of the subtleties and history of Korean politics could have resolved this situation without further loss of life. The last thing the world needs now is a nuclear-stakes war in Asia against a million-man army just looking for an excuse to press the button and prove a glorious Communist point.

‘Unofficial’ US Envoy Bill Richardson played a masterful role, and it is inconceivable that he could have completed his important work if he had to first seek general global consensus via a WikiLeaks  readers’ poll before he could make statements to or conclude negotiations with Pyongyang. Thankfully he was in the right place, at the right time, talking to  the right people – as he is paid to do by his constituents.  Of course this is still considered unofficial, but you can bet there were background discussions had with the White house to pre-empt various outcomes (I’m sure there are even some secret cables formatted exactly as we are seeing released now via WikiLeaks on other subjects). The point is ‘so what’? Let him communicate in secret with the White House if that’s what he has to do to ensure future consistency of actions with whatever statements he can extract from either side now that do not aggravate tensions.

The impressive end result is that North Korea has stayed its hand – in fact it went even further and made concessions to allow nuclear inspectors back into the country, after a lengthy absence. Do you think that backroom deals were done? Do you think ego’s were stroked and tales told about the other side? Was the deal contingent upon arms deals, or trade negotiations, or aid money, or a few boxes full of used dollar bills being left on the side of the road at a certain place?

Of course they were. It is an infantile mind that thinks otherwise, as that is the way the world works. North and South  Korea used the whole situation to curry favour with various world powers, and it was the job of our diplomats to assess this and communicate it back to their leaders in a frank and fearless manner – without the interference at a crucial time from an uninformed general public.

If the WikiLeaks dream is ever realised, then a potentially delicate international situation like this could rapidly consume millions of civilian and military lives as a result of the wrong thing being made public at the wrong time. The stakes are high, and often it is only the diplomatic structures we have in place that prevent disaster. If time-sensitive information therefore needs to be withheld from builders, waitresses, or coffee shop gossips,  even for many years to come, then I’d say we are getting off with a pretty cheap bill.

Let’s not be quite so ready to throw away the functional world we have for the poorly defined Orwellian one envisaged by an unqualified man like Julian Assange, or his band of gullible followers.

Now my knowledge of the footballing world is not  encyclopaedic, beyond my somewhat walked-in goal at the far pullover/post  on the Bretton Woods School playground in 1984, and 90 minutes in goal for the Gordon Arms pub where I only had to stop leaning on the goalpost for 3 out of 90 minutes (we won 12-0 I think). But I do know one thing: the game that gave me those lifelong memories, and more on the terraces of lowly Peterborough United and (lowly at the time) Chelsea is dead.

Poor football has been gasping for air for many year now under the sheer tonnage of corporate and media cash thrown at it, and the planet-sized egos of a few superstar players and managers. But with yesterday’s hosting decisions the FIFA  executive put both barrels to the temple of the World Game and pulled the trigger – awarding the 2018 tournament  (after a major internal FIFA anti-corruption purge), to one of the worlds most corrupt countries, and then completing the brain-splattering execution with the second barrel award to the  human-rights backwater of Qatar in 2022.

I can see some shadow of a reason for the Russia decision.  As a kid I recall watching with fascination as English teams played in the snow against Spartak Moscow or Zenit St Petersburg, trying to reconcile the images of these Soviet players, that surprisingly to me looked a lot like ours, with the baby-eating nuclear psychopaths that politicians and newspapers  of the day tried to portray them as.  Russia is also a big country with a big population, and with its fingers in the football pie in several countries (hence why Roman Abramovich was there in Zurich – his resuscitation of Chelsea over the past seven years certainly gives him serious credo in the sport).

I can’t however gather any enthusiasm for the Qatar bid, and something about it doesn’t ring true. Qatar has one of the smallest populations on earth – barely 1.5 million in the whole country, one of the worst climates for playing football at the time of year the World Cup will be staged (up to 50 degrees Celsius), a national team that has made no impact on the football world (they have never even appeared in a World Cup finals before), and a proposal that the tournament will be played in partially disposable stadia.

It’s this last point that seems most at odds with FIFA’s statements of developing the game in new markets – Qatar doesn’t even want to keep the stadia in situ, as they know there is no long-term potential for the game in that country. There is no major league, no grassroots support, and no chance of future football greatness. Their bid, and the decision to award it to them, was the most base financial decision I have seen in many years – and once the cash cow of the World Cup has evaporated post-tournament, there will be not a jot of interest in the game left in that country.

After witnessing what the money men have already done to the game I once loved, it leaves a very sick taste to see the global showpiece of the sport so clearly being sold down the same filthy river – the World Cup of Football is increasingly something not to look forward to for many, many years to come.

• What they are doing is not exposing corruption or wrongdoing of either individuals of departments. They are instead  just simply vomiting information over the public, the origin and purpose of which is not explained or justified (irony-alert – why doesn’t Wikileaks tell us how it gets the information – are some things (i.e. their things) to be kept secret after all?).

• The information is used as nothing more than a news sound bite or the subject of water-cooler chatter by 99.9% of the population, so it’s in effect just gossip mongering. But for the 0.1% of visitors whose minds are set on undermining any government for whatever reason, it is a valuable mine of open-source intelligence. This is a classic case: if the ‘squeaky wheel’ groups actually get what they say they want (and is that really everything in government being released via Wikileaks?), they will be the first to suffer for it; an irony usually applicable to racists/fascists/extremists the world over (thanks to Attila The Stockbroker for pointing that one out to me many years ago!).

My fear is that this arrogant ‘we have the right to publish anything’ attitude could next extend to exposing banking (why not publish credit card application details to show how arbitrary the banks are in their assessment of credit risk); health (publish the hospital records of surgery patients to expose the effectiveness of surgeons, and the mistakes they make); employment (publish the records of staff who have sought counselling – is there a potential psychopath checking your bags in at the airport?); or education (publish the banking/health/police checks on all teachers, so the public can asses their suitability to teach your kid). No? Sounds a bit extreme, or ‘that could never happen here?’ Wikileaks puts me in mind of the saying: “all that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”. I think the evil-doers of the world rejoice in Wikileaks being in the news as it increases public paranoia of governments, encourages staff working with confidential information to divulge it (and they should certainly know better – but that’s another topic), and provides a source of free information on the contemporary workings of government that otherwise would not be available to them.

Now most people don’t care about this. They think it is all good for a laugh, or that politicians and governments probably deserve to suffer a bit of public embarrassment because they must be up to no good. This is a juvenile attitude of the worst ilk – akin to the morons who smash windows or graffiti walls just to build some kind of a reputation for themselves within their minority counter-culture, but for which the rest of us have to pay in terms of a degraded environment, increased surveillance and loss of privacy, and  increased costs.To summarise then: Wikileaks did not source this information effectively, it’s release serves no purpose,  the information has no context, and to continue down this path threatens individuals within government, and general civil liberty, for no good reason.

• Government (incorporating war/diplomacy/economics/justice, and many, many other areas covered by Wikileaks to date) is not a parlour game, nor an amateur sport. For as much as people like to belittle politicians – often justifiably – most of the actual business of government is undertaken by professional public servants and military staff who have years of experience in specialist fields, which contribute to the overall process of ‘government’. 1,000  office workers in a field with a pile of bricks couldn’t deliver informed comment on the style of house those bricks will make, and they will never be able to build the house themselves. But put just 1 skilled builder in the same field, and you would get something everyone agrees looks, feels, and acts like a house should. In other words: let governments govern – the Wikileaks alternative is mob rule!

• The process Wikileaks is aggravating at the moment is only likely to cause individual harm to legitimate campaigners for open government either in the form of more distant and suspicious official interaction (or even total withdrawal from such processes), and increased suspicion of public servants at a time when we were just beginning to see official government support for online engagement and much improved information sharing. There are many good processes already in existence for dealing with inappropriate government actions and use of information including freedom of information acts, professional whistleblowing practices and organisations, state and federal police agencies, and investigative reporting via the official press.

Overall the purpose of Wikileaks at any level is unclear or inconsistent. I can’t imagine that the release of diplomatic cables is actually intended to make the world of international diplomacy Open Source – the idea is just too preposterous, and damages any claim to legitimacy that Wikileaks or its apologists claim to hold. I’m personally not that surprised that Saudi Arabia tried to encourage the removal of Iran as a regional nuclear threat, but what does releasing that information actually achieve? States and individuals will always be vying for influence or power – that is why we have government and politics in the first place, to avoid having to fight wars every time to achieve this. If anything Cablegate shows that the diplomatic process works – the Saudi urge to ‘cut the head off the snake’ was channelled through professional analysts who gave the comments context, and provided analysis before passing it up to elected heads. This is the way the system should work – there would be nothing more anarchic than those comments immediately being made public and published in newspapers the world over, leaving politicians to try and form policy off the back of  badly-informed public opinion across multiple jurisdictions.

Julian Assange may believe that altruism is in the eye of the beholder, but Wikileaks is proving to be nothing more than underground info-porn. Its aim is short-term titillation for the masses, disregarding of the long-term damage that might be done to those whose usually-hidden parts are being exposed, prodded, giggled over, or sneered at.  Like most pornographers he, and many of this supporters, needs to grow up and take responsibility for the industry they are supporting.

I think it’s an interesting and important question as it challenges assumptions, and 10 years ago assumptions said that self-check in at airports would be impractical and insecure, 20 years ago that encryption should never be publicly available, or 30 years ago that public cash point machines could never be securely deployed.

Now each of those processes can still be insecure in a minority of cases, but the overarching benefits outweigh the problems, and these are now services we would be loath to live without.

I setup a network years ago in a uni lab that had a stability/hacking problem, using a PXE boot and a pre-staged ‘fresh’ Windows 98  copy loaded from a hidden partition (periodically refreshed from a server as newly patched OS versions were released). In this scenario I didn’t have to care what went on in each session of Windows (or try to fix things as they broke), as I knew the next person on that PC was always going to get a fresh copy. So the first user could re-write the video driver so it became unstable, deploy malware on the hard disk, or uninstall required software (and they did each of these) – as soon as logoff happened (or a forced power cycle), everything was re-written/cycled, and we were back to a  Known Good  state. The network was 99% reliable from that stage onwards.

I’m interested if this model can be extended to any hardware regardless of origin (I’m thinking what’s the possibility of pushing  Knoppix or Damn Small Linux onto BYO devices – after all, most admin staff need tiny amounts of memory/processor power to complete their work?).

The security concerns mentioned against BYO apply if you allow ANY personal use such as social networking, webmail, personal mobiles of any flavour… in other words, if the whole work day is not explicitly ‘whitelisted’ from start to finish, then you can’t trust the workday at all (regardless of who owns the hardware). And this includes landline desk phones, post it notes/pens, and the conversations each worker has with their friends/families at home – each is a means to leak information out of the workplace.

I’ll be interested to see if BYO grows legs as I don’t think it is just a matter of trendiness, it is much more serious than that – its about budget. It is such a powerfully attractive notion to transfer the cost of hardware purchasing onto users, that I am sure many sectors and even government niches will find a way to make it work – it may take some time and need a few good innovations to plug into it, but I think the Dollar may well win the day on this.  

But this election is different in that, for once, we have a party leader who has been able to extol some personal attributes that transcend the policy squabble, giving us an insight into their nature, and the way in which they think. In modern professional politics in any nation this is a rarity, more so when the subject matter is considered; an area which is all too often the reserve of conservative pandering to a perceived  powerful electoral group, or abject deceit and misrepresentation in an attempt to satisfy a few extra people into putting a tick in the required box.

I’m talking of course about religion or more vitally the lack of region, or religious faith, as professed by the current Prime Minister and leader of the Australian Labor Party, Julia Gillard. Despite some pretty ill-informed and feeble attacks from Christians (such as a question on TV this week: “doesn’t it make you a hypocrite to swear on the bible when taking on the office of Prime Minister” – even though it was widely reported that Gillard took a civil oath), she has stood her ground, and explained herself with considerable clarity, honesty, and dignity.

Even though religion is not an official policy issue in this election, as an indicator as to the character of Julia Gillard it is a vital clue that voters should not overlook on the path to the ballot box. Here we have someone in the full glare of the public eye telling us that she has thought an issue through, weighed up the evidence, gone against the grain of her family and social upbringing, and refuses to curtail to a fictitious belief that others around her will not let go of.

Forget immigration, or climate change, or the National Broadband Network – those are party policies adopted via a formula of perceived popularity and vote-grabbing potential. Julia’s atheism is none of those, and most politicians wouldn’t have the guts to put it out there and admit to such a conviction even if they truly possessed it. Instead we are much more familiar with the kind of  religious pandering that Tony Blair went through, as he tried to convince the world he was a good all round religiously committed leader, all while he was engaging in an illegal war and bringing death to thousands of civilians.

More so than any other ideal or attribute, Gillard’s atheism hints at an independence of thought and a logical mind that might be just about the best attribute any PM could hope to posses. Maybe its not the ‘right’ way to choose the leader of my country, but it feels sensible, certainly next to the policy nonsense Tony Abbott came out with at about the same time, along the lines of: “I’m not expert on this ICT stuff, but just trust me to cancel a few billion dollars of broadband investment anyway, and do something else that should work just as well.” That worries me just as much as him being a PM who at any time might disappear into a one-on-one meeting with a priest to talk about their perception of the desires and intentions of a non-existent sky-fairy which, if fully believed in, must override those of the mortal electorate.

There is nothing worse than the modern breed of say-anything-to-be-popular politician, of which Julia Gillard is of course one of many, but when push comes to shove – if there was a real life or death situation to be considered, then I would like to think that in her that spark of reasoned, logical, atheist thinking might come to the fore, and she would again express the true courage of her convictions.

Here’s hoping, but I think it is well worth the chance as the positive results might be spectacularly effective – let’s vote in a Gillard-led government next weekend.

Playing right into the hands of the idiots who run that company CeBIT has permitted the exploitation of pornographic imagery and the ongoing offence of female  ICT professionals in attendance, by granting Crazy Domains a massive central booth booming out dance music, with a 2 metre high video wall showing near-naked women soaping themselves up, and a  gaggle of 10 lycra hot-pant clad girls, giving out vouchers for a ‘free domain name’ to each delegate. And that’s it! No technical description of the service, no manager in attendance who you can talk actual business needs with; just a soft-porn video and slightly bored and lost-looking girls selling themselves for $20 an hour, as if they were in a  seedy strip club.

This is supposed to be “this country’s most important business event” according to the CeBIT website blurb, but for the second year in a row (it was NetRegistry last year) they have allowed the event to be sullied by a gutter company with no imagination in either the promotion or product sphere.

If you were a business trying to have a meaningful conversation with clients, and were placed within sight or sound of this mob, you should make an in-writing complaint to the CeBIT organisers, as you were robbed of customers. As the above pictures show, people avoided this stand like the plague and the booth’s nearest the door did a much brisker and more meaningful trade. Needless to say if you are an ICT professional with an ounce of respect for women, make sure that not 1 dollar ever finds it’s way into funding this Neanderthal company who are quite so willing to assume we are all no more than mono-browed bogan idiots, who would actually buy into this lame imagery.

This year numbers were down at the show, and it’s a telling sign if the biggest, loudest thing on display is not tech, or business, or innovation, but cellulite and lycra. CeBIT is in a terminal decline, and this is the reason why. I for one, will not be returning – shame on you CeBIT.

So in no particular order, I present the evidence as follows (and any other wanabee Rock Gods take note – this is a ‘How To’ of hard rock live spectacle):

Great Support Act:
Wolfmother were a superb choice of support. The right genre of music, a known quantity for the crowd, familiar songs, and a dedication to the performance & music that was infectious, even while the beer-addled lunatics in the crowd were absent in a queue for yet more drinks or the toilet (why do people do this – it’s $150 to see the band, not drink half-strength booze, which you can do any night of your life for a lot less cash).

Great entrance:
The opening runaway animated train sketch was funny, rude, and the thunderous chugging got your internal organs vibrating at just the right frequency to prepare you for the onslaught to come. The penultimate smashing of a life-sized steam engine through the back of the stage in a blaze of smoke and flame, heralding the arrival of the band, was rock theatre at its best (I’d seen pictures of the set previously and thought it looked pretty average – but in its live entirety it works very well).

Great band performance:
I don’t think I’m alone in considering the Black Ice album as… well, adequate, not great, but the opening of the show with Runaway Train was infectious because the whole band projected belief in it from the first note. With Angus power-chording for his life from the outset, Brian Johnson gargling & growling each line, and backing vocals from Malcolm & Cliff, they were not backwards in coming forward, and you can’t help but get sucked into all that energy. They gave it their all from the start.

Get an anthem in early:
Back In Black was only the third song in the setlist. They could easily have held this over for a raucous encore later in the show (although I guess they are blessed with an embarrassment of riches in the anthem area), but BIB is THE song that made the band what it is today, and for them to have the brass tacks to chuck it out there early was a good move. No living human can sit on their arse and tut at how old the band are or how expensive/tacky/bogan the whole thing is. BIB is one of history’s few songs that can make ANYONE tap a foot, nod their head in time, or punch the air and scream with the primal hypnotism of the back beat – without even realising they are doing it. So as a means to get 50,000 people on your side in a hurry, some of whom are the best part of a quarter of a kilometre way in the back of the stands, it’s the way to go.

Lights, camera, action:
In massive stadium shows, it’s hard to feel involved in the crowd, and easy to lose track of what’s happening with the tiny stick-figures on the stage (made worse by the strange perspective offered by this massive stage, and the tiny stature of everyone in the band). AC/DC’s superb stage production surmounts this obstacle with ease, combining a 3 dimensional lighting rig, triple (massive) screens (the 2 outside ones angled to give the crowd at the sides a better view), pyro & flames galore, (including the biggest & most frightening fireworks barrage at the end I’ve ever seen, which left a few of us thinking ‘was that planned, or did they accidentally just blow the lot up’?), plus of course that full-size steam engine, ably straddled by an inflatable Rosie during her song complete with red heels big enough to be seen from a mile away tapping in time to the music. Then there was the 50-metre runway to the centre of the stadium containing a hidden hydraulic platform (more of that later), and those compulsory, glorious, orgasmic, ear-splitting canons. No production stone was left unturned, and they all dovetailed together into a rollercoaster of stimulation that weaved elegantly into the blues n’ rock backbeat of each song, never overwhelming it. 

Dedication:
It sounds cheesy I know, but that core trio of Malcolm-Angus-Brian looks so bloody dedicated and occasionally intimidating, that you can’t doubt that these are serious, professional muso’s at the height of their powers, and they are still deadly serious about their band.

Brian struts (and occasionally, well, prances!), and squeezes each lyric out with an expression like he’s singing through a fresh bullet wound in his abdomen. Malcolm  has the intimidating 1,000-yard stare only a 57 year old ex-alcoholic whose spent most of his life 3 feet away from 42 decibels every night can have – I swear the man didn’t blink all night long, but neither did he miss a chord or a harmony in providing the smooth, purring rhythm backbeat that gives Angus enough runway to partake of his aural acrobatics. Cliff and Phil inevitably have to hang back on the stage as Brian and Angus represent a serious workplace hazard few of us can appreciate, but their place in the band and on the stage just looks, feels, and sounds right. They deliver perhaps the tightest rhythm sections in rock history – a miracle given the impromptu nature of much of little Angus’ wild stage antics.

The overall package is devastating in its effectiveness, the perfect line up – one of the greatest rock voices ever trading off against one of its greatest guitar virtuosos, on some of its greatest ever songs.

Brains’ supreme achievement, which really comes across in shows like this (which is why you must see them live for yourself), is the line he straddles between camp comedy (as in You Shook Me All Night Long when he improvs; ‘knocking me out with those Australian thighs…” with a cheeky grin and increase in pitch, or Dirty Deeds and TNT, where he pulls off a great Bon Scott-esque combination performance of mock toughness backed with camp shimmies and schoolboy suggestiveness – just what the crowd has come to expect from the back catalogue of both singers), and then in a heartbeat he can transform into the iconic hard man of rock, and it’s an awe-struck crowd that witnesses his 30 metre run-up and leap onto the rope of the descending Hell’s Bell to get the first chilling gonnnnnng note that heralds the start of that song (which was phenomenal – just huge in its sound, presence, and delivery… my favourite song of the show). Brian’s transformation is then complete, and later in that song you have to hold your  breath and just savour the sight and sound of his prophetic growl of the line;  “white lightning’s flashin’ across the sky, you’re only young but your’re gonna die…”. The same is true at various stages of the show – you can’t fail to take him deadly serious during For Those About To Rock (We Salute You) – there is nothing camp about that canon fire or Brian’s clenched-fist salute to the crowd – and the serious and respectful Bon Scott tribute of High Voltage, which Brian finished of with a comment of “what a great guy” as he walked back down the runway towards three stage-high pictures of Bon cheekily winking back at the crowd as the photo transformed into a video clip of the late singer on stage.

And then there’s Angus. It’s all been written before, and no doubt you’re fully aware of his reputation, but what I hope I can bring to the party is the revelation that he still lives up to that reputation 110%, with big shiny bells on, and then some. It’s nothing short of a sensational performance from him, and he incorporates everything you expect and more. There’s the nearly-full strip during The Jack (after dozens of women in the crowd had just consented to bear their boobs on camera, it only seemed the fair thing to do), the duckwalk across a perspex section of the stage broadcast to the screens, playing the guitar between Brian’s legs, playing with the guitar on his head, the left-hand only solo’s as he salutes the crowd with his right hand, and then there’s Let There Be Rock. Take a picnic blanket and a flask for this one – you’re in it for the long haul! Stripped to the waist and sweating royally by this time, Angus plays most of the song as per normal, and as the final crescendo builds he takes it off into an improvised solo and scales lesson that goes on…

And on…

And on.

For about the next 20 minutes the rest of the band pop off for a cup of tea, and it is just Angus and the crowd. During this time he walks the length of the runway into the centre of the stadium, playing all the way, and mounts a hydraulic lift that elevates him 3 metres, to a point in space bathed in spotlights. The rest of the set fades to black and you are left with perfect simplicity – one man flaying his fingers in a blur up and down the fret board, worshipped by 50,000 screaming, clapping, jumping followers. With the bright white lights and inability for conscious thought, it borders on a religious experience. While still on the platform he then drops to his knees, building the speed of the solo until it seems he can take it no more and the demons take hold, throwing him onto his back where he writhes and spins in circles, taking the note count to impossible new highs, as the platform around him explodes in a spray of sky-bound dry ice and plumes of white confetti.

And then he really gets going. From the lowered platform he plays and struts his way back to the stage, getting to a high point behind the drum riser, where he toys with the crowd, playing a series of notes and scales that he encourages the crowd to sing/chant back at him. The gag after a few rounds is that he then bends the notes so high and so fast that no mere mortal out of the 50,000 assembled souls can keep pace, and he’s off again, launching into a barrage of blues-based scales and solos. For the next several minutes the stage is again dark, and the giant screens zoom in on the soloing hands in isolation, mesmerising the crowd with the audacious speed and dexterity of the playing. Just watching this is jaw-dropping and not without physical danger as your eyes and brain struggle to keep up with what you are seeing Angus’s fingers do. All around people grimace, gasp, smile, clap, cheer, or just gawp. All throughout little snippets of the song that gave rise to the solo (oh yeah – Let There Be Rock) emerge, and are again swamped by the deluge of competing notes, to pop up again minutes later. After some 20 minutes of this the rest of the band reappear and the end of the song is replayed, this time coming to the thunderous and expected thrashed climax from all instruments. The post LTBR emotion is total musical satisfaction. You just know no one will ever do THAT again, that well, in front of so many people who care or appreciate it so much. It is a moment in music history, one of the many singular, iconic moments that the show throws up that makes it so satisfying and relevant.                

Track selection:
The songs were nicely separated by time and album that you didn’t quite  know what to expect next, although they trended towards 3 camps – last album, Back In Black album, and all sorts of classic Bon-Scott era stuff. I certainly had misgivings about the potential of the latest album to hold up when played live, but worry ye not – they stand up very well as the band delivered on their promise when making it (and why it took so long) – that only songs that sounded good would get on the record. So 5 inclusions were made – Runaway Train, Big Jack, War Machine, Anything Goes, and Black Ice itself. If I had to pick a ‘worst’ song of the night it would probably be Big Jack – the story and lyrics just don’t catch hold, but my revelation of the night was War Machine – a heavy riff and ranting chorus chant from the band gets nicely under your skin. While the reception for the newer material was marginally cooler than the  rest of the set I think this was inevitable – it was up against decades-old classic anthems that represent the soundtrack to much of the audiences’ lives. The decision to include so many new tracks was a brave one, as nothing would have been easier than a ‘best of’ compilation to keep the punters happy, but I think this comes back to the earlier point of these being deadly serious, professional performers. It also bodes well for the future – if they are still this keen to pursue new avenues even as middle age recedes in their rear view mirror, there is the potential of yet more original material to come, which will hopefully result in subsequent tours.

CONCLUSION:
While I went fully expecting a respectable if not subdued swan-song from one of the biggest selling artists of all time, and a thoroughly deserved one at that, what was delivered instead was a shock of raw power and an inspirational performance that has reignited my appreciation of just what this band has done over the last 35 years, and what it is capable of doing in the future.

They didn’t look old, they didn’t look bald, and they didn’t look fat – AC/DC rock, don’t doubt it for a second, and you should do whatever it takes to get yourself into one of their shows on the remainder of this tour to appreciate that (on that note don’t give up hope if you miss out on initial ticket sales – I got my ticket at 3:30pm from the official web seller on the day of the show after missing out on the initial fan-club ticket screw up months previously. You have to factor in last minute returns, cancellations, and additional stadium seating being released once the stage has been fully configured).

Can any other band deliver what AC/DC do? I don’t think so. Just look at the current tour – sold out everywhere (and in record time – 100,000 Perth tickets (600,000 across Australia) gone in just  minutes), continuing sales of old and new material to staggering new heights (Back In Black now being the 2nd highest selling album in history), and songs that, performed  live or recorded, sound like they were written yesterday. I think this surpasses any band who might be considered reasonable contenders for the crown of Greatest Rock Band Ever, bands like The Who, The Rolling Stones, Iron Maiden, Guns N’ Roses, Meatloaf, Cold Chisel/Jimmy Barnes, Def Leppard, Motorhead, or Kiss. AC/DC outplay them all.

AC/DC – I Salute You!

Full set list:

1. Rock ‘N Roll Train
2. Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be
3. Back in Black
4. Big Jack
5. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
6. Shot Down in Flames
7. Thunderstruck
8. Black Ice
9. The Jack
10. Hells Bells
11. Shoot to Thrill
12. War Machine
13. High Voltage
14. Anything Goes
15. You Shook Me All Night Long
16. T.N.T.
17. Whole Lotta Rosie
18. Let There Be Rock

Encore:

1. Highway to Hell
2. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)