We salute you!

Joe Elliot of Def Leppard
“For me, their best album is Powerage. It stars off with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Damnation’, and it’s got things like ‘Riff Raff’ on it. ‘What’s Next To The Moon’ is a fantastic song, and ‘Down Payment Blues’ is quite possibly my favourite AC/DC song right now. We all love ‘Back In Black’ and ‘Hell’s Bells’ but if you listen to ‘Down Payment Blues’, it’s just stonking.
“In terms of comparing the Bon Scott and Brian Johnson eras, it’s a difficult one. Shame as it is for Bon, they became popular on a global level after he died. They came out of nowhere with a new singer. It wasn’t like when Sammy Hagar joined Van Halen, there wasn’t this big comparison thing going on, where a band sells millions of records and then they change singers. Basically, for every one person who’d bought Highway To Hell, 15 bought Back In Black. There were a lot of people coming in thinking this was the way it had always been. It was probably a bigger deal over this side of the water, because they were already established.
“I kind of like both eras. I think Brian Johnson does a sterling job, and he’s a lovely guy. After they played the O2 in Dublin, they had a few days off in Ireland. Brian came up to my place and we hung out on the balcony, drinking wine and eating salads. It was a beautiful day in April, and he had his shorts on, and we were just talking crap for seven hours. I’ve known him for a while, and we just had a really good time. He does a great job.
“I think it would be fair to say that Bon Scott had probably the more soulful voice. I don’t mean that in an Otis Redding way, but he was more of a natural singer, and he sang in a lower register. He had this kind of Lord Fauntleroy element at times – when he sang things like ‘Big Balls’, you could hear the humour in his delivery. That aspect probably came across more when Bon did that song, as opposed to Brian doing it. But I heard Brian singing comic stuff in Geordie, and he can do it too. So you’re really trying to compare chalk and cheese. I wouldn’t want to put one above the other.” 

Dolores O'Riordan
“My husband was an AC/DC fanatic, and his step-mum – rest her soul, she died of cancer – she was mad into AC/DC, and every time I went to my husband’s house AC/DC were rockin’ in the background. She’d be headbangin’ away, she knew all the lyrics. So anyways, in 2003 we got the offer to go and open up for them and the Stones were the headline, and then AC/DC, and I thought, ‘I can’t believe this.’ The mother-in-law was sick and we knew she was going to die, so we flew her over. She came with us in a wheelchair, and she just loved the gig.
“That was the last few gigs The Cranberries did together so it was nice to end on a high note. It was in Oberhausen or Hamburg, one or the other. I remember we were going downstairs for something to eat in the hotel, and there was a guy in the elevator and it was Brian Johnson, but he had a baseball cap on, and he said to me something like, ‘Who are you with?’ And I kind of hesitated because I didn’t know who it was, and I was like, ‘Eh, who are you with?’ kind of rhetorically. Next thing I got this unmerciful kick in my leg from my husband’s brother, and he was like, ‘Jesus, Dolores! That’s Brian Johnson!’
“We chatted away and we had a great ol’ night, several mojitos or whatever it was we were on. And he was just a dote. He was so lovely. And the mother-in-law was with us so she was delighted. He sat next to her and just made the world of her. He was like, ‘Oh you’re a darling.’ And she was singing songs with him, the whole lot. We were both fairly twisted, and he was saying, ‘We have to do a musical.’ And I was like, ‘I love it, man!’ And he was telling me he had Helen Of Troy all conceived in his head, and he was saying, ‘I think you would be a good Helen.’
“As I got to know their music I kind of had this thing in my head that they are probably pure tough altogether. And it ended up he was just a real gentleman, a really sensitive great person. But they are sound as well, and down-to-earth. That’s why they’re still going.”

Glen Hansard
“My intro to AC/DC band was really interesting: it was down to a badge. My best friend in school handed me the choice of two pins, one with the classic image from the cover of If You Want Blood, and the other was the cover of Never Mind The Bollocks by the Sex Pistols. And I picked the AC/DC one, it’s that arbitrary. I often wonder how my life would’ve panned out had he handed me the other pin!
“One of the interesting things about where I grew up was all the junkies had great musical taste. A lot of people give the junkies a hard time, but in Ballymun a lot of these heads had the coolest taste in music. One of my brother’s mates saw the AC/DC badge on me and gave me a tape of the live record, If You Want Blood, and Jesus did I love it. I must have been kind of young, ‘cos I took Angus as my Confirmation name. You know how you go up to the Bishop and explain why you chose your name? Very innocently my mother said, ‘Oh it’s the guy with the horns on the cover of Highway To Hell.’ The Bishop just laughed!
“But I became very serious about AC/DC, I mean, Angus Young was my first idol. Even though I couldn’t stand the idea, I actually joined the cubs because they had a hat like Angus’s. I’ve got this photograph of me in my bedroom when I was about 11, and I’m actually kinda proud of this photograph ‘cos I was obviously pretty artistic – my whole wall is covered in pictures of Angus.
“I went to see them in ‘82 in the RDS, the For Those About To Rock tour, I was sooooo blown away, I remember Y&T opened up for them. Me and me mates bought a few cans of Harp and we had to get back to the northside to get the Ballymun bus back home, so we were kind of in a rush to get out of there, we had to leave before the encore. And as we left we grabbed our cans from where we’d hid them in a bush, and somebody else had hid their beer on top of ours, we found 24 cans of Bulmers and got fucking locked and missed the bus.
“There is no more authentic proper rock band than AC/DC. They’re what every rock band aspires to: get a sound, stick to it and stay with it forever. My favourite AC/DC album is Powerage, just where they hit it out of the park. AC/DC were never about being cool. They were beyond all that, stuck two fingers up to it all.”