It's a hard rock life

It was the year of our lord nineteen hundred and eighty when the oblong appeared over the earth. It hovered there, angular, geometric, unfathomable. Primitives gathered and gazed at it in wonder and scratched their heads and nethers and struggled to make sense of the anomaly that confounded their eyes.
And lo, this enigma began to emit a noise:
Chit-chit-chit-chit-chit-chit-tick-tick…
The primitives drew closer.
DUNH! DIDIDIT! DIDIDIT!
And the humans did gibber and hoot and cavort, and were driven wild by the noise, and fell upon their fellows and tore each other limb from limb. And from the scrum a stray bone was flung into the sky, whereupon it spun and spun...
...and was transformed, through the majesty of a Kubrickian jump-cut, into a Gibson SG, strapped around the body of 53-year-old man dressed in a schoolboy’s uniform.

AC/DC’s Back In Black, released in July 1980, is arguably the greatest hard rock album of all time, a noise so profoundly ribald it renders the intellect irrelevant. It was all the more remarkable because it was forged under circumstances that might have finished any other band. In February of that year, 33-year-old hard-living singer Ronald Belford ‘Bon’ Scott died of alcohol poisoning, just as the band had made their US Billboard Top 20 breakthrough with Highway To Hell.
AC/DC had already established themselves as headliners in the Europe, making comrades of tractor jockeys and bikers, hormonal schoolkids and grizzled old blues rockers. Here in Ireland, no disco was complete without an airing of the live version of ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’ from If You Want Blood, a ripsnorting hymn of praise to a big-leg mama distinguished by Bon’s lascivious vocal, Malcolm Young’s bloody great stop-start riff and his brother Angus’s blistering solo.
But Scott’s death didn’t slow the band down for long. They recruited Brian Johnson, formerly of Newcastle act Geordie, went right back into the studio with Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, and produced an album that not only trounced its predecessor’s sonic wallop, but also featured their strongest set of songs to date, including ‘Hell’s Bells’, ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, ‘Shoot To Thrill’, ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’, ‘What Do You Do For Money Honey’ and the monumental title tune.
In contrast to Scott’s tattooed love-god persona, Johnson carried himself with a sort of Andy Capp swagger that was more Steptoe and Son than The Song Remains The Same, but his voice – an earsplitting pig-squeal – possessed a vicious edge. The album would go on to sell a staggering 45 million copies worldwide, half that in the States alone.
AC/DC had never pulled their punches in the US. Their first American show in Flint, Michigan in 1978 featured a reformed MC5 in the support slot. The band’s reputation was only enhanced by an incident that occurred a few months later in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, one of three dates they played supporting Thin Lizzy.
Peter C Cavanaugh, manager of Michigan’s WTAC AM 600 radio station and an early champion of the band, recalled in his 2002 book Local DJ – A Rock ‘N’ Roll History that their set at the Royal Oak Music Theater was interrupted by security guards who attempted to shut them down because they’d breached volume restrictions.
“One uniformed enforcer made the tragic mistake of grabbing Bon Scott’s arm,” Cavanaugh wrote. “A violent head-butt sent the uninvited transgressor flying backward, then down and out. Chaos raged. More police poured out on the stage. The group formed an immediate protective circle, rapidly expanding as AC/DC proceeded to kick super-serious ass. Even several members of Thin Lizzy joined the fray in unrestrained rock ‘n’ roll re-enforcement, advancing upon the intruders from behind. Feet flashed. Fists flew. Foreheads filled faces.”
It transpired that the city of Royal Oak had recently passed a local ordinance proclaiming any sound level over 100 decibels as a nuisance. According to the ‘Decibel Deputy’ standing at the soundboard at the back of the theatre, AC/DC were tipping 125db and climbing.
Cavanaugh recounted:“Their sound man, responding to a tap on his shoulder and barely hearing the word ‘LOUD’ screamed into his ear, joyously responded, ‘Ahhhh, yeah man! And we’re just startin’ to cook!’ There was a firm punch for attention delivered to the audio technician’s back. The ‘Decibel Deputy’ was dropped with a heel to the heart. Three security police dragged the offender off the monitor platform and, assisted by several others, effected arrest. This is where the sound mix got screwy. They ordered the performance to stop. That’s when the stage went wild. The audience was now in total uproar. Miraculously, calm heads prevailed. Charges forgotten, technician unfettered, and sound restored, AC/DC finished their set.”
Thirty years later, Thin Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham’s memory of the incident is a little hazy, but he doesn’t doubt that it happened.
“Y’know something, I really wouldn’t put it past us!” he chuckles. “Especially both our road crews, they really looked after all of us in all aspects. I think what happened was nobody really informed us that this noise reduction act came in, so I think it caught everybody with their pants down, and we thought it was just some fuckin’ jobsworth saying, ‘Turn it down!’ And of course we were all going, ‘Yeah, well fuck you’, and it all just kind of kicked off. That’s what I can imagine happened.”
Scott, who will play at AC/DC’s forthcoming Punchestown show with the reformed Lizzy, still has fond memories of the three Mid-western dates he played with the Aussie crew.
“It was a really cool package, two hard rock bands trying to work their way up the pole,” he says. “At that point there were no issues about who was gonna headline and who was gonna support. Everybody got soundchecks, everybody got all the PA and all the lights, everybody was into just making it a really cool show. We did three shows in that whole Michigan/Chicago area. Both bands were foreign bands, it wasn’t like a US band having some Australian or Irish band in support. Except for me, we were all these foreigners cruising around that part of America, just trying to make some headway there.
“It was nice to be able to walk onto the side of the stage before we went on and check out these new guys. And you know something, even back then you could see they were really good players. Obviously they didn’t have all their songs together at that point, but what they did have, they played the shit out of them. It seemed like there was always a hell of a lot of energy going on onstage, although I had no idea they were gonna take off the way they did.”
Gorham’s memory of Bon Scott corroborates the testimonies of just about every other musician who met him on the road. He was, by all accounts, a singularly unpretentious character.
“There were no airs about him at all,” he says. “He loved to come into the dressing room with the bottle of whiskey in his hand, and he’d be sharing that thing around, he was a real talkative, approachable guy. There was no superstar lead singer crap going on with him at all. He was just a regular guy diggin’ the shit out of being out on the road and playing in a really cool rock band, which I always thought was a really great attitude.”

Back in the UK, AC/DC were already regarded as big brother figures by the young pups who came to prominence on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
“I became a big fan when I discovered the Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap album,” says Saxon singer Biff Byford, “and I turned the rest of the band on to this simplistic style of rock music, with basically one great riff and a drumbeat and a great melody. We took a lot of inspiration from them. ‘Wheels of Steel’, our first hit, was really a very AC/DC-style song. There wouldn’t be ‘Wheels Of Steel’ if not for AC/DC.”
Def Leppard singer Joe Elliot had a similar epiphany.
“Lizzy released Jailbreak,” he recalls, “and within a few weeks of it, I saw an advert in Sounds for an AC/DC song called ‘Jailbreak’. The first album of theirs I bought was Let There Be Rock, and then I backtracked on things like T.N.T. and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. When we first got together as a bunch of kids in Sheffield, we used to do ‘Problem Child’ and ‘Whole Lotta Rosie’. Before we ever supported them, I saw them at the Sheffield Top Rank in 1976, and as a band we all went to see them play Sheffield Polytechnic in ‘78. We opened for AC/DC on the Highway To Hell tour of Britain, which included four nights at Hammersmith Odeon, the second night being Rick Allen’s 16th birthday.”
What were they like to hang out with?
“They weren’t the easiest band to socialise with. They weren’t standoffish, they were just really shy and they’d keep to themselves. But Bon was brilliant. I still owe him a tenner, bless him. We were in the bar and we didn’t have any money, and he just pulled out this big wad of notes, and he said, ‘You boys alright for a drink? Here, have one on me.’ He threw a tenner down, so I grabbed it and bought us a round. Angus came into our dressing-room a couple of times just to pick up a guitar and play a bit and wish us luck. Over the years, we’ve bumped into them a few times, but it’s normally been Johnner (Brian Johnson) and Cliff (Williams, bass-player) that we’ve hung out with.
“Of all the times I’ve seen them perform, probably the best show they did was at the Glasgow Apollo, which was a gig where we supported them. They opened up with ‘Livewire’, and I went through the corridors and up into the balcony, which notoriously did move. I swear the thing was moving two feet – I was actually scared it was going to collapse. It was insane. It wasn’t just the band, it was the whole experience. The Glaswegians were absolutely rabid that night.”
Def Leppard went on to share management with AC/DC, and also enlisted the services of Mutt Lange, who perfected the highly processed sounds of Pyromania and Hysteria, records that defined 80s pop-metal.
 “Truth be known, we wanted to work with Mutt before he worked with AC/DC, because we were fans of The Boomtown Rats’ stuff,” Joe recalls. “He’d also worked with The Motors, Supercharger and Graham Parker, so we were well aware of his ability. We really wanted to work with him, but he wasn’t available for our first album. However, we did manage to snag him for the second onwards. The stuff he’d done with AC/DC wasn’t initially one of the reasons we wanted to work with him, but it did absolutely become a factor.”
Another NWOBHM band that showed up for support duties on the Highway To Hell tour was Stourbridge’s Diamond Head.
“Def Leppard couldn’t do the last few dates,” remembers guitarist Brian Tatler, “so the management called our manager and said, ‘Can Diamond Head do them?’ And in fact Peter Mensch, their manager, who was working with Leber/Krebs, came into our dressing-room at Newcastle Mayfair and had a good chat to us and told us all about the business for about half an hour.
“As people the band were really friendly, no egos. They didn’t soundcheck, the roadies soundchecked, and in fact helped us. Our drummer couldn’t get his toms in tune, so the sound engineer said, ‘I’ll tell you what: leave it, go get a drink and we’ll sort that out!’ Phil Rudd’s drum tech came on and tuned up Duncan Scott’s drum kit for him.
“I remember when we came offstage Bon Scott gave our drummer his bottle of Jack and said, ‘Good on ya guys’ and said he was having a party at his flat in Maida Vaile or wherever it was, and to come along. I think he gave the address to John our driver and tour manager and we literally drove around London looking for this place until one or two o’clock in the morning and had to give up and then drove all the way back up the M1 to Birmingham and home to bed. This was the end of the Highway To Hell tour, and it was the last couple of live dates that Bon Scott actually performed. We played on something like the 27th or 29th of January 1980. A couple of weeks after that he died.”
AC/DC didn’t just bond with their metal brethren. Their bawdy humour and streetwise edge meant they were one of three hard rock bands (the other two being Motorhead and Thin Lizzy) given a free pass by the punks.
“It might have been the honesty, the lack of pretension, and just the raw power,” says Brian. “They wouldn’t have taken to Rush in the same way.”
Dublin new wavers DC Nien supported AC/DC at their 1979 shows in the Olympic Ballroom. Guitarist Paul McGuiness, now a member of The Popes, recounts how the punksters met the rockers downtown.
“When we got the support we thought, ‘No fans of AC/DC are gonna like us,’ he says. “When we went out onstage everyone was screaming, ‘AC/DC’ and I thought, ‘We’re fucked here.’ So we just started blasting, and very quickly the audience started getting into it, and we were really knocked out at the reception, and I remember playing the last song and thinking, ‘We’re gonna get a big encore here,’ and we played the last note and walked offstage and then it started again: ‘Angus! Angus!’ But we did manage to crack it. In fact our gigs for the next year were jammed full of AC/DC fans.
“I never got to meet Angus or his brother, but Bon came backstage and had a little talk with us while Angus was doing some guitar solo. He was very cool, very jovial. One of our mates at the time happened to have some cocaine, and there wasn’t a lot of it around at the time, and he offered Bon a toot and he quickly hovered it up and then he was straight back out on top of someone’s shoulders and all round the hall. We were all wet behind the ears and absolutely blown away by this band who were about to become mega.”
Mega was the word. A year later AC/DC were one of the biggest bands on the planet.
“Nobody knew when Bon died what would happen,” says Biff Byford, “they could have chosen some good-looking Swedish dude, like a few bands did, but they went for Johnner from Geordie-land. We did a tour of America with them, about 15 or 16 shows on the Back In Black tour, it was just starting to go ballistic in America for them. We were like the new kids on the block, they said at the time they only invited us on so they could hear ‘747’!
“They had a bar backstage, with the things for pulling pints. The road crew had bought it and used to set it up every day. And it was the first time they’d got that huge bell onstage. We were a little bit in awe of them. They never soundchecked, they walked into the building from some curry house thirty minutes before they went on and they played the gig. There was no superstardom thing about them at all.”
Nevertheless, they now had dozens of imitators, some worthy (Rose Tattoo), some not so much (Accept, Krokus). But after 1981’s For Those About To Rock, their only US number one album until last year’s Black Ice, and a headline slot at Castle Donington, the band seemed to lose potency. Drummer Phil Rudd took a decade-long hiatus from the band in order to sort out mounting drug and alcohol problems, and Malcolm Young had a similar drying-out sabbatical in 1988. They split with both management and producer, and 80s albums like Flick Of The Switch, Fly On The Wall and Who Made Who sounded like Xeroxes of the band’s earlier glories, even as Rick Rubin drew heavily on the band’s monolithic riffs and big beat for the Beastie Boys License To Ill and helped The Cult to defect from the goth graveyard to the metal arenas with Electric.
Throughout this period AC/DC remained a bankable live act, but their grimy electric blues riffs were at odds with the slick production of the hairspray metal bands, while the grungers preferred to namecheck Sabbath and Kiss. The quintet was well capable of pulling out a monster tune every couple of years – ‘Thunderstruck’ and ‘Heatseeker’ to name a couple – but just as often came close to self-parody. By the turn of the millennium, it seemed as though AC/DC’s best days were behind them.
“They had a period in the ’80s where they weren’t quite at the same level,” says Joe Elliot. “After For Those About To Rock, they stopped working with Mutt, split with the management and went off and did their own thing. With the late ’80s albums, you had two or three decent tracks, but there was something missing. It was obviously Mutt. They worked their way back a bit with The Razors Edge, with songs like ‘Thunderstruck’ and ‘Moneytalks’, but it wasn’t much deeper than those tracks. We’d got used to really strong records from AC/DC. There isn’t a duff track on any of their classics.”

Promulgators of marketing unspeak will tell you the best thing you can do for a waning brand is retire it for a few years. Eight years elapsed between Stiff Upper Lip and Black Ice, and the break did AC/DC no harm at all. High profile shows with the Rolling Stones kept their live stock afloat, they signed a new deal with Sony (who released a series of remastered albums and a mammoth career-spanning box set Plug Me In), were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Steven Tyler in 2003, and had a Melbourne street named after them. The band logo, along with that of the Ramones and the Stones, became the epitome of retro rock fashionista chic. Their songs were covered by everyone from Shakira to Lucinda Williams to Celine Dion.
When Black Ice, produced by Brendan O’Brien (who’d previously lent his sonic skills and arranging talents to acts as disparate as Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen) was released last autumn, AC/DC sounded lean, stripped down and revitalised. Tunes like ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Train’, ‘Money Made’ and ‘Anything Goes’ were as good as anything they’d done in the previous 20 years; the record went to number one in 29 countries, and when a marathon world tour was announced, dates sold out in a matter of hours.
“What people have to remember is that while that last tour was successful, it wasn’t exactly a world beating tour,” says promoter Dennis Desmond, a longtime AC/DC fan who first saw them in the late ’70s at the Marquee in London. “They were doing a healthy level of business, 80 or 85% rather than 100% sold out six months in advance, which is what you have on this tour. What has happened is a whole new generation of people have discovered the band. You can’t download the songs, you can only buy them in record stores as such, and you won’t find an AC/DC album in the cheap bins, there is no reduced price AC/DC album out there.
“The other thing is the band have stayed away long enough, so they’ve built up the expectation that people want to see them again. They haven’t been touring every year or second year, so that’s why there’s a huge interest. The O2 show in April was unbelievable from a spectacle point of view, every song was a hit, two hours of rock ‘n’ roll, the energy of the whole band, right down to Phil Rudd, who is just an amazing drummer. It’s simple but it’s in your face and it’s great.”
“Obviously they’ve come back now with phenomenal success,” adds Joe Elliot, “but it’s not just down to the music I’m afraid. Black Ice is probably their best album since For Those About To Rock, but it was also their first in eight years, and like chocolate, when you’ve not had it for a while, you really want a piece. Also, the album was marketed in a very clever way. In America, it was only available through Walmart, who didn’t just put it up – they turned 160 stores across the country into AC/DC stores, and it just caught people’s imagination.
“And there are other factors as well. For instance, their logo has become chic. Whether it be Britney or Paris Hilton, everybody wears an AC/DC shirt. There’s also the fact that ‘Back In Black’ features very heavily in the beginning of Iron Man, one of the biggest movies of the past few years. So you combine all those factors with a fantastic marketing plan, a pretty damn good record, and the fact that they’ve been away since 2001, and it’s a recipe for success. Not that I’m here to remind people of the bad times, but it’s a fact that when they last played the Point, they could barely sell 5,000 tickets. They sold out the new O2 Arena – which holds 12,000 – in three minutes, and I believe they sold-out Punchestown in a few hours.
 “Angus is 53 now, and he’s still twirling himself around. And God bless him, Johnner can still just about get to those notes. There’s no doubt about it: now that they’ve got Phil Rudd back in the band, it’s them again. With all due respect to Simon Wright and Chris Slade, they just weren’t right. To hear Phil Rudd playing ‘Thunderstruck’, which he didn’t play on the record, all of a sudden the song just takes another twist. Between Rudd, Cliff on bass and Malcolm on guitar, it’s the best rhythm section in rock n roll. There’s absolutely no one who can touch them.”

AC/DC play Punchestown on June 28 with Thin Lizzy and The Answer. Black Ice is out now on Sony.

To see what Joe Elliot, Dolores O'Riordan and Glen Hansard have to say about AC/DC, click here