On September 19, 1981, nearly a decade after the breakup, 400,000 people crammed into New York's Central Park to celebrate the reunification of the two legendary musicians. When in mid-concert, the spotlights blinked out to fit the mood of a show and beautiful melody, thousands in the audience lit lighters in the gloom. It was a spectacular tribute.
It was in the same mood here, a few years later, at Air Supply's second Taiwan concert, that the audience did the same thing—lighting up the auditorium with thousands of tiny flames, in a universal language...
At 7 p.m., on May 23, 1984, a flood of teenagers, most in school uniforms, converged from various directions on the China Sports & Cultural Center to see the internationally recognized singing group whose hits, like "All-Out in Love," "The One That You Love," "Here I Am," and "Sweet Dream," have logged so many weeks in Billboard's "Hot 100."
Before the concert, as the lights began to go off, a smoky-green glitter began rising from the rear edge of the stage. Reflecting the ambient night light floating around in mystic prelude for the night's concert, the domed-auditorium became a spaceship, prepared to drop off a full cargo of ETs. Simultaneously, the excited young audience emitted a mixture of shout, scream, and pure bristling whistle to welcome Russell Hitchcock, Air Supply's solo vocalist, on stage. He opened the concert with the group's latest, "Take Me Home."
The Australian superstar has a very humble past. His family was poor; their house was on a block with a brickworks on one side of the street and an iron foundry on the other. His father put in time as a milkman, and his mother was a cook in a pub. He was out working fulltime at age 15. Five years later, to get away from factory life, he moved to Sydney, where he first found a job in a department store and later at a computer parts company. Another five years later, he saw a fateful ad for auditions for "Jesus Christ Superstar," and competing with 300 other people, won a part in the chorus. It was 1976.
For performers everywhere, the coffee break is always a performance highlight
Graham Russell, Air Supply's chief songwriter, was also in the play. The two started singing and performing together, then finally left "Superstar" and made an album that garnered them an Australian gold LP in just six weeks. And by the end of 1976, Air Supply was one of Australia's biggest groups.
Charisma is the key to an audience, and during the concert, the island's eager young audience was clearly moved by Hitchcock's dynamic-pleasant performance. He sang, danced, and continuously communicated with the audience. He walked around and smiled at people in different seating locations. Whenever his magic finger pointed at an auditorium section, the audience there responded with excitement.
Air Supply had its debut on Taiwan a year ago. It could be easily discerned at that time that Hitchcock's was the only leading role on an Air Supply stage, though Russell joined him occasionally. Then, in their second concert on Taiwan, it was not a one-man show anymore. Russell sang a few solo songs. And when Hitchcock was singing to the audience at stage-front, Russell was greeting the audience at stage-rear.
In a pre-concert press conference, Air Supply announced that there would be several new songs and showed quite some confidence in them. However, during the concert, the audience did not respond the way the group expected to the new songs. Apparently, they did want to hear Air Supply's old hits, and two keys from the guitarist were a sufficient hint to set them screaming before the vocalist intoned the lyric.
In the wake of punk music and hot rock, now dominating the music world, Air Supply's early music tends to sound particularly pure and innocent, explaining much about the group's instant acceptability to diverse world audiences. However, the group has also been the subject of criticism for being "meaningless to social reality." Hitchcock's rejoinder, "If our songs are simple, that is what we like to do—to please simple people." Russell put in, "Our million sold copies prove that our songs are meaningful to a great audience. Only those groups who sell very few copies of their albums criticize us that way."
Whether popular music should carry a meaningful social message is an arguable question, but whether a performing group is popular or not is not in doubt. Still, in its second appearance on Taiwan, Air Supply certainly failed to conquer the audience here as they had done previously. The auditorium was still as packed this time out, yet this year's thousands of fans responded with notably less affection and excitement. The young girls still presented flowers to Hitchcock, and grabbed at him, but for his personal charisma, not the group's performance.
Some left before the concert was finished. They clearly did not enjoy Air Supply's new songs—slow but not mellow, and the old hits were no longer fresh.
New songs come and go, also the singers and bands. But some always last longer than others. Hopefully, Air Supply will find a new key and not fade out so soon.