Myles Kennedy in the Year of the Tiger at a Rain-Soaked Castello di Udine (2018)

Arhiv Arhiv Last updated 11 June 2026

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik

Location: Udine / Castello di Udine / Italy
Concert date: 21.07.2018
Attendance: 800

Summer is vacation season, and it’s also when the offer of open-air gigs really blossoms. Unfortunately, this July in Italy’s Friuli region has been pretty wet and moody. Sudden downpours, longer stretches of rain, even storms. That’s just how it goes. Some years are like that. Years like 2018. If we already got drenched in Udine on July 10 during the Simple Minds show, the story repeated itself at the open-air stage of Udine castle, where Myles Kennedy was announced eleven days later. The famous Alter Bridge vocalist (and rhythm guitarist) and frontman of Slash feat. Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators is also considered a very good songwriter and poet, and he’s an incredibly good guitarist too. It took him a full nine years to write his first studio album »Year of the Tiger«, which finally saw the light of day this March. Myles Kennedy is a huge perfectionist. He polished his album for an extremely long time, and it carries a story exploring a period of Kennedy’s childhood, when his father died. His dad passed away in 1974, when little Myles wasn’t even five yet, and according to the Chinese calendar it was the Year of the Tiger (hence the album’s title). Myles Kennedy is a huge perfectionist. He worked on his solo studio debut for more than nine years, and the chosen story, or concept, was in itself not just a unique challenge for the musician but to a certain extent a burden too (if only out of respect for his lost father). So the long wait for the album paid off. »Year of the Tiger« is an exceptionally polished singer-songwriter achievement. A confessional record that’s rich in ideas and layered in genre terms.

At 8:00 PM the opening slot was supposed to go to French guitarist Dorian Sorriaux, who put out his EP »Hungry Ghost« this year, at the end of June to be precise, and so stepped into singer-songwriter waters himself. But Sorriaux, who is the lead guitarist of the increasingly popular Blues Pills, never made it onto the stage. People kept streaming onto the soggy grounds in the meantime, some looking for shelter from the rain under a nearby roof, others sitting on chairs in front of the stage. It didn’t rain any harder than before and during the Simple Minds show, but apparently it all comes down to the band’s management. The rain stopped at 8:45 PM, but the crew needed a whole half hour to get everything ready for the show, even though everything was already set up on stage. Still, we could breathe a sigh of relief. The show wasn’t cancelled, and at quarter past nine Myles Kennedy himself walked out with his band. Besides Myles, the lineup features his longtime buddy and drummer Zia Uddin and bassist Tim Tournier. Both played on Kennedy’s current solo effort, while the collaboration between Uddin and Kennedy goes all the way back to their high school days and the band The Mayfield Four.

So the show we’d been sweating over for more than an hour, wondering whether it would be called off, finally got going. Myles Kennedy won everyone over from the opening moments with his incredible, wide-ranging stage charisma and an outstanding, soulful voice, full of softness and simmering passion. He opened the night with the most rock’n’roll track from his solo record, Devil on the Wall. Kennedy swapped guitars for almost every song, and the show rang out now acoustic, now electric. Among other things, the man also tried his hand at a National Steel guitar, and on top of that remarkable vocal character he showed he’s an excellent guitarist too, one who knows his way around the key moments of a song where a signature guitar solo is needed, as well as a vivid sequence of chord progressions.

During the fourth song, Haunted by Design, the crowd left their seats and headed together right up to the front of the stage, where the barrier stopped them, and they enjoyed and watched the show on their feet. The place thundered with applause for the first time when Kennedy tackled Slash’s Starlight, from Slash’s self-titled solo debut, and Kennedy took that moment to an even higher atmospheric level right afterwards when he launched into the Alter Bridge hit Addicted to Pain.

»Year of the Tiger« is an exceptionally vivid and polished album and Kennedy knows it, so the repertoire was generously stocked with it. He played most of its tracks. Still, a good half of the show went to covers of other artists. There’s no need to name them all, but one that really surprised was the rearranged, fully acoustic take on the Iron Maiden classic The Trooper, which Kennedy sang in a mid-to-low register. It worked beautifully in its new, acoustic outfit. This excellent musician and his crew crowned the multilayered polish by including Robert Johnson’s Travelling Riverside Blues, while plenty of Alter Bridge fans got their fix in the second half of the show, when the man tackled Watch Over You and All Ends Well.

The hour-and-three-quarters-long show was bursting with vivid emotion and passion the whole way through, with the outstanding skills of a trio who carried the show from start to finish on a massive wall of sound built on a finely calibrated rhythmic backbone. The songs from »Year of the Tiger« embody a distinctive blend of American folk, southern rock, blues, and even hints of alternative rock, which, thanks to Myles Kennedy’s outstanding and hard-to-pin-down vocal performance, glow at full blast and deliver a sense of unique, confessional character. This evening, Myles Kennedy presented himself to the audience not only as an exceptional vocal chameleon but also as an incredibly insightful singer-songwriter and composer who is at the same time a great master of the guitar. Let’s hope he stays in the singer-songwriter sphere in the future too, building on and continuing to nurture the already insightful spirit of authorial musical expression of his studio debut. The show unfolded in unstable weather and with constantly threatening lightning flashing from the surrounding clouds, yet with its penetrating intensity it left a strong impression and drew out feelings from the audience that kept washing over them long after the show was over. And that’s what counts. At every single gig. And Kennedy and his crew proved that he’s an expressively powerful artist, incredibly experienced in leading a show and confidently, masterfully shaped.