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Interviews
ANGELS
SURVIVE TO FLY AGAIN
What’s the worst thing that can happen on tour? Taliban ground-to-air missiles, The Angels’ Doc Neeson tells Bernadette Ashley.
Just prior to the reformation of Oz rockers The Angels for their 30th anniversary Face to Face concerts last year, frontman Neeson and his own band were on a different tour of duty.
Descending into Taren Kowt, where Australian troops were based in Afghanistan, a missile locked onto the heat signature from exhaust fumes of the C130 Hercules he was travelling in. The pilot warned Neeson and his band members, and the SAS soldiers and Sydney Army Band also on board, to make sure their seatbelts were fastened tightly, as he commenced defensive manoeuvres. Flares were released to try to ‘distract’ the missile, but this tactic was unsuccessful. Just when the situation was looking very, very bad and Neeson was thinking, ‘…so this is how I’m going to die…’, the pilot “put the plane up on one wing and the rocket passed less than a metre underneath us.”
They went on to (gratefully!) perform for troops stationed in Afghanistan, Iran and Kuwait; “Aussies, Brits, Americans, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese - with an average age of about 22,” says Neeson. He was surprised to find how many young Aussie soldiers knew the words to The Angels’ standards, and how fast the other nationalities caught on.
By Bernadette Ashley
(TO READ THE FULL INTERVIEW PICK UP THE MARCH ISSUE OF THE PLACE STREET PRESS)
