You’d be excused for assuming that Air Supply concerts are as lightweight as their many romantic soft-rock ’80s hits—but you’d be wrong. At the half-dozen live shows I’ve caught over the past decade, they breathed fire into those songs and got louder and heavier than most anyone would expect.

“I love heavier bands,” says Graham Russell, the British singer-songwriter who, along with Australian vocalist Russell Hitchcock, formed Air Supply in 1975. “I like heavy strings, so it was the obvious place to go over the last 20, 30 years. But live, we’ve always been much heavier...The records, especially the ones in the ’80s were pop records, let’s face it. So they weren’t very heavy.”

He’s in no way apologizing for Air Supply’s success. With more than 5,500 shows under their belts—soon to includ

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