Buckcherry / The Treatment / Rocky Kramer - O2 Academy Islington, London (UK) - 05 November 2019

Rocky Kramer has some good songs and a Rock star attitude and can really play the guitar. His single 'Rockstar' is very catchy and although a lot of the crowd must have been hearing it for the first time tonight they totally let him get away with the hubris. So he has the balls, fake it till you make it right! He can sing, but playing the guitar precludes him from doing all the big eighties frontman moves that I was kinda missing with all this swagger.

The Treatment did a blinder of a set and were far better than a number of the festival performances I had seen from them. The new album has some great songs and seems to have set them on a more roots driven Hard Rock 'n' Roll, more traditional AC/DC kinda path, and they seem to have got some of the hunger back that you need for this game. So with plenty of fire in the belly from them I really enjoyed their set.

Josh Todd is very cool and so I always look forward to Buckcherry. Great songs, some LA edge and yes he took his shirt off very early in the performance tonight so we could see all those great tattoos. With every great performer there is something of an enigma about them and Josh exudes this stay the fuck away from the real me onstage, which of course encourages the crowd to want more! But once again you can see that there's a vulnerability under it all that again people, of course, love! At the end of the day he always delivers a great show on his own terms.

It was a show full of classics, such as 'Everything' with the best line "If I had everything would I still want to be alive" which Josh illuminates by saying he used to always be dissatisfied wanting it all. But they have enough great songs to change things about a little, including this time 'Sorry' which they have not played recently at UK shows, at least until now, and is also one of my personal favourites. All the super cool does not mean they are above a little joke or two and a build up from Josh exclaiming it to be one of his favourite songs produces a Hard Rock version of 'Footloose', the movie tune which made Josh laugh at the end visibly out loud. It wasn't not long before the band stopped teasing and gave the crowd 'Crazy Bitch' instead which, of course, went down well. Finishing with 'Say Fuck it' it was an even bigger hit with the crowd than, well, their biggest hit. The combination of catchy song and rebellious flip-the-bird attitude got a massive buy-in from the London crowd and the band went out on a high.

Dawn Osborne