Fans and critics were exceptionally unanimous: something gigantic was to be expected from this band’s next record. The singer in particular had reached the peak of his abilities when the recordings for the new album began in London. The man himself was overflowing with enthusiasm, including on February 19, 1980, when he said goodbye to his bandmates for a drinking spree with a pal.
The musicians already knew that – and never expected that their friend would find their shouter dead in the back of his Renault the next morning. Bon Scott had choked on his own vomit. A shock for AC/DC that was so great that the group always refused to talk much about him. But five months later, on July 25, 1980, they presented a masterpiece with “Back in Black” that far exceeded all expectations. After Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, “Back in Black” would become the best-selling pop production of all time.
The brothers Malcolm and Angus Young are primarily responsible for this literally inhuman performance. They not only managed to quickly find a new singer in Brian Johnson. They also threw away all the material they had worked on with Scott. Maybe that explains the magic of compositions like “Back in Black”, “Hells Bells” or “Shoot to Thrill”: They speak of the audible will to find oneself in the hour of the ultimate catastrophe; a quality that Brits in general like to claim for themselves.
The brothers were born in Glasgow, Scotland, in the mid-1950s as the seventh and eighth children, but the family soon emigrated to Australia. There the Youngs made a lot of noise, the big brother George even celebrated modest chart successes with the Easybeats in the 60s. He later helped his younger brothers with the production.
In his own words, Angus was always jealous of Malcolm in his childhood days. “The first thing I mastered was a folk riff. And I couldn’t believe how Malcolm could get started on the guitar,” Angus Young said in a joint interview in the early 1990s. To which Malcolm replied, “Nonsense Angus, you could never play a folk riff.”
Words that expressed the spirit that accompanied the entire band through the first years of their career: the heartfelt honesty, definitely not being virtuosos or intellectuals, which could only help. If the world remains rationally inexplicable anyway, it is only logical not to overdo it with thinking – and rather to make sure that the listeners’ breastbones explode.
Added to this was an unprecedented will to toil away on stage in clubs and pubs. AC/DC played around 250 concerts on three continents at the beginning of each year: “We had the balls for it,” Malcolm Young later explained succinctly. Others were responsible for bombastic performances with long drum solos, AC/DC beat down short rock’n’roll songs. The only show element of those days was Angus Young’s school uniform as a symbol of man’s eternal fear of growing up.
Anyone watching video recordings of performances from the 70s on YouTube today will discover a dervish on guitar, a shirtless singer whose charisma fills the entire hall, and a rhythm section that can take the hardest beating on tracks like “Rocker “ lends something like casual swing; a performance that takes the listener into the middle of a universe beyond discipline, swallowing and lousy pay for a boring job.
It’s probably what keeps the group filling stadiums to this day: their work is so simple that it attracts crowds, but never wears them down. There is always a small rhythmic shift, a play on words in the text – although Scott’s lyrics would certainly be burned at the stake as sexist today – or, as in “Back in Black”, a bass line, which mostly, but not only, consists of the root notes of the chords for the rhythm guitar.
Arguably no other album besides Scott’s latest, Highway to Hell, has all of this in place as much as it does on Back in Black. The number that gave the work its name almost borrows from the emerging rap in terms of the rhythm of its language; “Hells Bells” is a solemn epic that makes you believe you’re invulnerable – why else would champions like Vitali Klitschko join him in the ring? Many guitarists can remember the moment they first played the basic riff of “Rock ‘n’ Roll ain’t Noise Pollution” – and “Shoot to Thrill” was intricately arranged by AC/DC standards.
Before the first concert, Brian confessed that he wet his pants so much that he yelled “Rock ‘n’ Roll ain’t Noise Pollution” with the lyrics of “Hell ain’t a bad place to be” into the mic Johnson outspoken. The Youngs’ reaction was brief: “It can happen, keep going,” was their advice. The band continued, too, but couldn’t repeat the performance of “Back in Black” at first. Most of what the Youngs did in the ’80s just sounds loud and empty today, so it doesn’t matter in concert.
But with the hit “Thunderstruck” at the beginning of the 90s, the group succeeded, at least commercially, in a second spring, which only ended around 2010 due to Malcolm Young’s dementia. In 2017, the man died whose brother said being on stage with him felt like having an entire orchestra behind you. Johnson got hearing problems, for the rest of a live tour Guns’n’Roses singer Axl W. Rose jumped in – and because drummer Phil Rudd had to answer in court in Australia and bassist Cliff Williams was struggling with exhaustion , the music lacked any relaxed pulse.
Just in time, however, when all the critics and envious people wanted to dismiss the band as a freak show, Johnson, Williams and Rudd recovered. Covid delayed the presentation of the new album, which saw Angus Young’s nephew Stevie take over on rhythm guitar. But by the time “Power Up” came out in late 2020, it was really only a contemporaries with no sense of the possibilities and limitations of the homo sapiens sapiens species who wanted to gossip about it.
They are songs of utter clarity that go straight to the torso and save you from possibly overthinking it. There can never be enough of that in this world.
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