It began with the Vines, begat Jet, blew up with Wolfmother, but was truly meant to explode off the back of Airbourne – the Aussie rock revival’s sonic boom, as a four-piece from Warnambool stomped all over the world.

 So what went wrong?

Well, this is the music industry, and the business is in convulsions of calamity – Airbourne were signed, amidst a great deal of hype, to the American arm of Capitol, on a multi-album, multi-million dollar deal.

They decamped from their adopted home of Melbourne to Los Angeles for three months of intense pre-production, before heading into the studio with the experienced Bob Marlette, and had their debut album Runnin’ Wild mixed by legendary Nevermind producer Andy Wallace.

“Virgin took over Capitol, and 75% of the bands had to go and we were just one of them,” explains frontman Joel O’Keeffe.  “We’ve come out better as we’ve got the album back,” he confirms, “and we jumped off a sinking ship with the album under our arms so it was great.”

It must’ve been quite the experience – the rock ‘n roll four-piece had the largesse of the label to spend a great deal of money and time making a record…and then got it handed back to them at the end.

“We were pretty stoked,” he grins.  “We’ve been through one major label and we know how the system works and we’re planning on not getting too fucked over again.

“We’re planning on signing next week,” he said, although an announcement has yet to made some three weeks after this interview took place, “and most of them have been talking to us and saying ‘let’s get out there and tour first, then we’ll put it out’.  We just wanna go NOW, but we need to build ourselves up in the US and UK like we’ve done here.”

Well, sort of – the way the majority of people first heard of Airbourne was the first wave of hype that accompanied the band after they’d signed their international deal.

Joel explains that the group only began to understand the meaning of the word when it started being used frequently alongside the name of Airbourne.  “If we’ve gotta put a signature on a bit of paper so we can sign a deal that means we can make an album then cool; our whole thing was to make an album so that we could go out on tour and play.

“At the end of the day it never effected us because we’re just playing rock ‘n roll,” he says in the affably up-front way that has so enamoured the band to their growing legion of devotees.

Airbourne’s Runnin’ Wild is out now, with the band on tour throughout Australia.