AC/DC TRIVIA
Trivia
AC/DC played Japan for the first time in February 1981. The timeline published by Sony Music Japan records the venues and dates: Osaka Expo Hall on 1 February, the Aichi Kinro Kaikan on the 2nd, and the Nippon Seinenkan on the 4th and 5th. They had come off a sold-out world tour the previous month, and after Japan they went home to Australia for their first tour there in four years. They returned in June 1982 for five shows in four cities: Osaka Festival Hall on 4 June, Osaka Expo Hall on the 6th, Kyoto Kaikan on the 8th, Nagoya Shi Kokaido on the 9th and the Nippon Budokan on the 10th.
After June 1982, AC/DC did not play Japan again for nineteen years. The timeline published by Sony Music Japan records that 1982 was the year the band finally took a rest after more than five years of non-stop touring and recording, and that this visit was their last until 2001. The return came in February 2001: Yokohama Arena on the 19th and 20th, and Osaka-jo Hall on the 22nd.
For their 2001 Japanese visit — their first in nineteen years — AC/DC ran a charity in Japan. As BARKS reported, it was aimed at the primary-school children who had had to leave Miyakejima after the island's volcanic eruption in the summer of 2000. A guitar of the same model Angus Young uses was signed by every member of the band and put up for auction on Rakuten, with the proceeds going, through the Miyake Village board of education, to give a book voucher to every primary-school child from the island. The auction opened on 16 February.
Bon Scott joined AC/DC because of one night of sitting in. According to the band's official site, in September 1974 Scott got up on stage to jam with AC/DC at the Pooraka Hotel in Adelaide, South Australia. He officially joined the band a few days later.
The title track of For Those About To Rock came out of a book. As the band's official site explains it, the inspiration was Those About To Die by Daniel Mannix, a book about the Roman games that Bon Scott had given Angus Young years earlier. The idea of putting cannons on the title track and on the album cover came from somewhere else entirely: the band were watching the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana on television while recording the album in Paris.
There are two accounts of where the name AC/DC came from, and both are on the record. The widely reported version has Malcolm and Angus Young hunting for a catchy name when their sister Margaret spotted the letters AC/DC on either her sewing machine's power adapter or the back of a vacuum cleaner; the brothers reportedly liked it because it had something to do with electricity and so seemed to fit. Dave Evans, the band's first singer, tells it differently. Speaking on a podcast in 2025 he said that, with no name agreed, they had arranged to each bring three suggestions to the next rehearsal and draw one out of a hat — but Malcolm arrived and announced that his brother George's wife had suggested a name, and that name was AC/DC. Evans says he agreed on the spot: alternating current and direct current were printed on the side of any number of household appliances at the time, which made it easy to remember, made it mean power, and amounted to free advertising everywhere. Every hand went up, the decision was unanimous, and he went home and threw his three suggestions away.
Angus Young's schoolboy outfit was not his own idea. In an interview given before his death and published later, Malcolm Young explained that Angus had not yet worked out a stage act, and that the help came from their brother George and their sister. The two of them told Angus he needed a gimmick, on the view that a good act always has something an audience can relate to — and it was their sister who suggested he wear his school uniform, with the shorts. As Malcolm told it, Angus was only in the band by something close to accident in the first place: Malcolm had been putting a group together and meant to bring in a keyboard player, and got his younger brother instead, Angus's own little outfit having just packed up.
The bell that opens Hells Bells is a real one. As Songfacts tells it, the band decided you do not honour Bon Scott's memory with a bell off a sound-effects reel, so they needed a real bell and a big one. A first attempt was made at the Carillon and War Memorial Museum in Leicestershire, England, and proved insufficient, so they commissioned a one-ton bronze bell from a local foundry that they also intended to use on stage. The bell was not ready in time to record, so its makers, John Taylor Bellfounders, arranged for them to record a similar bell at a nearby church. That went badly too: according to engineer Tony Platt, birds were living inside the bell, so ringing it produced the fluttering of wings along with the toll. In the end they used the bell that was still in production, borrowing a mobile recording unit owned by Ronnie Lane and wheeling it into the foundry, where the bell was hung on a block and tackle and struck by the man who had built it.
Ahead of the 2001 shows Angus Young said he thought they could put on a performance worth the nineteen-year wait. Asked how he keeps up that level of energy on stage, he answered first with a joke and then with the real explanation: playing lifts him, he picks up the lift from the audience, and the energy builds from there — like riding a big wave on a surfboard.
The AC/DC timeline published by Sony Music Japan, the band's Japanese licensee, records their debut as the New Year's Eve concert at Chequers club in Sydney on 31 December 1973. Bon Scott came in as the new lead singer in November 1974, and the first album, High Voltage, was recorded in ten days with Vanda & Young producing.
AC/DC recorded their first single in January 1974 at EMI Studios in Sydney: Can I Sit Next To You Girl, backed with Rockin' In The Parlour, produced by George Young and Harry Vanda. The band's official site marked the fiftieth anniversary of that session in January 2024.
AC/DC's first album, High Voltage, was released in Australia in February 1975 by Albert Productions and EMI. According to the band's official site, they played a special show at the Hard Rock Café in Melbourne on the 19th of that month to promote it. This original High Voltage is a different record from the internationally reworked version that followed in 1976; it came out in Australia only.
The High Voltage that circulated internationally is a different record: it was assembled from the two albums Australia had already had. In April 1976 Atlantic in the UK issued an album of that name compiled from the Australian High Voltage and T.N.T. It reached the United States that October, with the band playing a club tour behind it. The American label decided to concentrate on promoting that one record — and in doing so shelved the US release of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, the band's third album, which had only just appeared in Australia, Britain and Europe.
On 1 March 1976, Albert Productions threw a party for AC/DC at Lazars in Melbourne, where the band collected six gold record awards. As the band's official site explains it, that was three for each of their first two albums, representing total sales of 90,000 units in Australia.
In June 1976 Angus Young appeared on the cover of the influential British music weekly Sounds. The band's official site records it as their first cover feature outside Australia.
It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll) was released as a single in Australia in 1975 by Alberts and EMI, and became the band's first Top 5 hit.
AC/DC recorded their first album, High Voltage, at Alberts Studios in Sydney in November 1974. The band's official site has posted archive audio of Malcolm Young, Bon Scott and Phil Rudd talking about one of its tracks, Love Song — a song that appears only on the original Australian version of the album.
Recording for Let There Be Rock began at Albert Studios in Sydney in January 1977. The band's official site hosts audio of a 2003 interview in which Malcolm and Angus explain the approach they took to the album.
Powerage was finished at Albert Studios in Sydney. In March 2024 the band's official site marked forty-six years since the album was wrapped up by posting audio of Malcolm and Angus discussing the making of it, recorded in 2003.
The band's official site hosts audio of Malcolm and Angus talking about where Bon Scott got the idea for Sin City, from Powerage — an album released in May 1978.
Highway To Hell was recorded in April 1979 at Roundhouse Studios in London. According to the band's official site the process had started back in Australia, and it hosts audio of Angus recalling how it went. In January of the same year, at Albert Studios in Sydney, they had cut a demo of If You Want Blood.
AC/DC played Bill Graham's Day On The Green at Oakland Stadium three times: in July 1978, September 1978 and July 1979. The band's official site hosts footage of Bon Scott being interviewed on the day of that 1979 appearance.
The band's official site hosts an interview in which Malcolm Young looks back on how AC/DC began. The line the site puts at the top of the page is his own: that if they could just have worked in clubs for the rest of their lives, that would have been enough. Coming from a member of one of the biggest bands in the world, it is a useful marker of where they started.
Brian Johnson auditioned for AC/DC in March 1980 at Vanilla Studios in London. The band's official site hosts footage of a 1983 interview in which he talks about joining.
In May 1983, during recording sessions in Nassau, drummer Phil Rudd left the band. His replacement was Simon Wright, a twenty-year-old from Manchester. The tenth album, Flick Of The Switch, came out that year produced by Malcolm and Angus Young themselves — AC/DC's first self-produced record. It was their first new album in twenty-one months, and reached number four in the UK and number fifteen in the US.
In the summer of 1984 AC/DC played the Monsters Of Rock festivals across Europe alongside Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen and Mötley Crüe. The climax at Castle Donington drew a record crowd of 65,000. In August 1991 they returned to the same site as headliners for a third time — the first act ever to do so — on a bill that also included Metallica, Mötley Crüe and the Black Crowes, setting a new record of 72,500.
The five-track EP '74 Jailbreak, released in October 1984, marked AC/DC's tenth anniversary. It collected Bon Scott-era material from 1975 and 1976 — tracks from the original Australian versions of High Voltage and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap that had never been released in America.
Who Made Who, from 1986, was released as the soundtrack to Maximum Overdrive, the film Stephen King directed — and according to the timeline published by Sony Music Japan, King was a great AC/DC fan. The record pairs six of the band's older songs with three new ones produced by Vanda & Young. New music videos, directed by David Mallet, were shot for the title track and for You Shook Me All Night Long from 1980. The album reached number eleven in the UK and thirty-three in the US, and stayed on the chart for forty-two weeks.
The six-month North American tour that opened on 3 May 1988 sold out, with Cinderella, L.A. Guns and White Lion supporting. During it Malcolm Young stepped away from the band temporarily and his nephew Stevie Young took his place on the road. In November 1989 Simon Wright left after six and a half years to join Dio, and was replaced by Chris Slade, formerly of Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Uriah Heep and The Firm.
The band's official site hosts a 2003 interview in which Malcolm and Angus discuss The Razors Edge. Of the 1990 album itself, the site says it was full of arena-filling anthems — Thunderstruck, Are You Ready, Moneytalks — and became an instant pillar of the band's discography on release.
On 28 September 1991 AC/DC headlined a free concert at Tushino airfield in Moscow. According to the timeline published by Sony Music Japan the crowd was put at somewhere between half a million and a million people, and the concert came close to being cancelled because the Russian military's security operation was so heavy-handed. The whole thing was released as a full-length video the following year.
Big Gun was recorded in Los Angeles in 1993, a session the band's official site logs by the month. According to Songfacts the track was cut for the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Last Action Hero and is heard at the start of the end credits. Rick Rubin produced it, and — according to the timeline published by Sony Music Japan — David Mallet directed the video in a hangar at Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles, featuring Schwarzenegger himself.
In the summer of 1994 Phil Rudd returned to AC/DC after eleven years away, and sessions for a new album began. The result was Ballbreaker, the sixteenth album, released on 22 September 1995 and produced by Rick Rubin. It reached number four in the United States and stayed on the chart for thirty-three weeks.
On 16 March 1999 the RIAA gave Back In Black a Diamond award, the certification for an album that has sold more than ten million copies in the United States. Brian Johnson and Cliff Williams attended the ceremony in New York. On 22 January 2001 the same album was certified nineteen times platinum — nineteen million copies.
By January 2001, AC/DC's album sales in the United States had reached 63 million. According to the timeline published by Sony Music Japan, the certification that week was their fifteenth, and it placed them fifth among bands by American sales, behind the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Eagles. BARKS reported the same figure when the band toured Japan in February 2001.
On 15 September 2000 AC/DC were inducted into Hollywood's RockWalk and left their handprints at the Guitar Center on Hollywood Boulevard. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame took longer: according to the timeline published by Sony Music Japan they were voted in at the third time of asking on 8 November 2002, and the induction itself took place on 10 March 2003 at the eighteenth annual dinner, held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The same year's inductees included The Clash, Elvis Costello and the Attractions, The Police and the Righteous Brothers.
In 2000 a street in Leganés, on the edge of Madrid, was named Calle de AC/DC. According to the band's official site, Angus and Malcolm Young attended the unveiling.
Stiff Upper Lip, the seventeenth album, appeared in February 2000 with George Young producing. According to the timeline published by Sony Music Japan it reached number seven in the United States and number one in Argentina, Austria, Germany, Finland and Sweden, number two in France, Switzerland and Spain, and number three in Australia. On 6 December 2002 AC/DC announced a worldwide deal with Epic Records, part of Sony Music.
AC/DC finished recording Black Ice at the Warehouse Studios in Vancouver, Canada, in 2008. The band's official site marks the day.
According to the profile published by Sony Music Japan, Back In Black has sold an estimated fifty million copies worldwide, a figure described there as second only to Michael Jackson's Thriller among individual studio albums. It reached number one in the UK and number four in the US, where it then held a place in the top ten for five months. The same profile records that every one of AC/DC's studio albums, including those made before they broke through, has passed two million copies, and puts their cumulative album sales at over 75 million in the United States and an estimated 200 million worldwide.
Partway through the 2016 world tour, Brian Johnson left the road for treatment of a hearing condition. According to the profile published by Sony Music Japan, Guns N' Roses' Axl Rose volunteered himself as a stand-in, which drew a great deal of attention. In November 2017 Malcolm Young died; the cornerstone of the AC/DC sound, he had left the band in 2014 for treatment of dementia.
On 6 April 2026 the Artemis II astronauts flew around the Moon and saw parts of it no human eyes had seen before. They recorded what they saw in words and photographs — and used Back In Black. AC/DC's official site shared NASA's post about it that month.
The band's official site hosts audio of Malcolm Young looking back on 1983's Flick Of The Switch in a 2003 interview. That album was the first the brothers produced themselves.
On 7 December 1977 AC/DC made a live album, Live At Atlantic Studios, recorded in New York in front of a small audience. It was distributed purely as a radio promo and never sold. The timeline published by Sony Music Japan notes that it went on to become one of the most coveted promotional items in rock history among collectors.
In September 1995 Warner Music International, which handled AC/DC outside Australia and New Zealand, honoured the band for worldwide album sales of more than 80 million. The event is recorded in the timeline published by Sony Music Japan.
In June 1985 AC/DC shot five promotional videos for songs from their new album at a venue called World's End on New York's Lower East Side. According to the timeline published by Sony Music Japan the films combined animation, actors and live performance, and amounted to the band's first long-form concept video.
AC/DC played their first show on New Year's Eve, 31 December 1973, at Chequers nightclub in Sydney — the number one nightclub in Australia, according to the band's first singer, Dave Evans. A man named Alan Kissack, who wanted to manage them, had landed the booking a few weeks in advance, which is why a band that still had no name suddenly had to find one in a hurry. A midnight slot on New Year's Eve, in Evans's description, was the best gig going in Australia at the time.
Dave Evans sang on AC/DC's first two singles, Can I Sit Next To You Girl and Baby, Please Don't Go, and was out of the band by October 1974, less than a year after their first gig. The reason he gives, repeatedly, is money. They were selling out the biggest venues in Australia and touring with Lou Reed, and no payment was reaching them. Malcolm and Angus were living at home with their parents; Evans had a flat in Sydney and a car to pay off, so the situation did not weigh on them the way it weighed on him. After a confrontation with the manager one night, and with nothing resolved by the end of the tour, he left.
What takes the place of a guitar solo in It's A Long Way To The Top is a set of bagpipes. As Songfacts explains, the song is built around an exchange between Angus Young's lead and Bon Scott's pipes, which makes it unusual for its kind — there is no extended solo. The pipes are there because of where Scott came from. He was born in Scotland, as were the Young brothers; being older, he had arrived in Australia with his family some eleven years before they did, and had learned recorder and drums and become a proficient piper. The song itself is autobiographical, describing a band grinding its way upward by delivering a top-notch live show night after night, and at five minutes fifteen it is a long single.
The promotional film for It's A Long Way To The Top was shot on 23 February 1976, with the band riding through the centre of Melbourne on an open-topped truck accompanied by three members of the Rats of Tobruk Pipe Band. What Songfacts singles out about the footage is how plainly Bon Scott is enjoying himself.
The title Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap comes off a cartoon villain's business card. As Songfacts tells it, Angus Young took it from Beany and Cecil, the American animated series of 1962, and specifically from the card carried by its chief villain, Dishonest John: "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. Holidays, Sundays, and Special Rates."
Jailbreak is built on a real prisoner. According to Songfacts, Bon Scott read a newspaper account of Mark Brandon Reid — known as "Chopper" — and started writing lyrics from it. Reid had been jailed for sixteen years for killing a gang leader; three years in he had had enough of prison life, and his friend Jimmy Loughnan planned an escape that failed because of Loughnan's fear of confined spaces, earning them both a fortnight in solitary. Everyone in AC/DC liked the idea of a song built on a criminal, and they finished it in about a week.
Songfacts takes a consistent line on AC/DC's lyrics: the band is entirely serious about the music and much less so about the words, often rattling off comic lines precisely so as not to be taken too seriously. Big Balls is the clearest case — a lyric about a society ball whose title carries an obvious second meaning. The influence Songfacts names for that habit is Chuck Berry, who wrote a great many suggestive songs and presented them comically enough that they did not come across as offensive.
Asked which album he would put in front of someone who did not know AC/DC, Angus Young did not name Back In Black, their biggest seller, but Let There Be Rock, the fourth album, from 1977. Speaking to Swiss radio station SRF 3, he explained that his brother George, who produced it, had begun by asking the two of them what kind of album they wanted to make this time, and that Malcolm answered: a pure hard rock guitar album. That was a choice made while the rest of the music world was heading towards punk, new wave and other things entirely, and to Angus's eye it was the record that made clear what AC/DC actually was.
Much of early AC/DC was shaped by a third brother. George Young produced the first five albums — High Voltage, T.N.T., Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Let There Be Rock and Powerage — and came back for Blow Up Your Video in 1988 and Stiff Upper Lip in 2000. When George died in 2017 the band issued a statement saying that without his help and guidance there would have been no AC/DC, and that as a musician, songwriter, producer and adviser they could not have asked for anyone more dedicated.
Let There Be Rock looks like a straightforward rock anthem and is in fact an account of how rock'n'roll was born. As Songfacts reads it, the opening reference to 1955, with the white man having the schmaltz and the black man the blues, points at that moment precisely: 1955 was the year of Bill Haley's Rock Around The Clock and Chuck Berry's Maybellene. The song was written by the Young brothers with Bon Scott on lyrics, runs a shade over six minutes, and was produced by Harry Vanda and George Young. It was also released as a single in October 1977, backed with Problem Child.
The "jack" in The Jack is Australian slang for a venereal disease. In a 1976 Sounds interview quoted by Songfacts, Bon Scott explained that the band had been living in a house full of very friendly women and that everyone in the band had caught it — so they wrote the song, and the first time they played it on stage those same women were in the front row with no idea what was coming. On the line about her having the jack, Scott pointed at them one after another. In the same piece Angus Young added that from then on, wherever they played the song, the women in the audience would head for the back of the hall.
Where The Jack has been played is a story in itself. According to Songfacts, AC/DC performed it in front of half a million people in Toronto in 2003, at a benefit for a city whose tourism had collapsed during the SARS outbreak, on a bill that also included the Rolling Stones and Rush. Songfacts' own observation is that neither the band nor the audience had any difficulty with a song about one disease at a benefit concerning another.
Whole Lotta Rosie has a real subject. In the 1976 Sounds interview quoted by Songfacts, Malcolm Young prodded Bon Scott into telling the story: backstage at a show in Australia, a large woman the band called "Big Bertha" stepped forward. Afterwards she turned to her friend and said that was the thirty-seventh this month, and produced a black book in which she kept a record of her conquests. Scott turned the episode into a song and changed the woman's name to Rosie. Songfacts adds that Ruby Lips, who turns up in Go Down on the same album, was also a real person — something confirmed by the Let There Be Rock liner notes.
The music of Whole Lotta Rosie, Songfacts notes, is based on Chuck Berry's No Money Down. The same site names Berry as the influence behind AC/DC's lyrical habits on more than one song page — so the same figure turns up on the musical side of the ledger as well.
Songfacts sets out two explanations for the title Highway To Hell. One is a literal road: Canning Highway in Australia ran from Fremantle, where Bon Scott lived, down to a pub called The Raffles, a serious rock'n'roll drinking spot in the 1970s. Approaching the pub the road drops into a steep decline, and so many people were killed driving fast over the intersection at the top of the hill that it acquired the nickname. The other comes from Brian Johnson, speaking to The Metro in October 2009: the song, he said, was about the bus journey across the Nullarbor Plain, the endless run from Melbourne or Sydney to Perth with the sun setting in the west like a fireball and nothing whatsoever to do — and that is where Scott found the lyric. The song was also the first AC/DC track to chart in the United States, and the album of the same name has sold more than seven million copies there.
Night Prowler, the six-and-a-half-minute track that closes Highway To Hell, is an unusually blues-leaning song for AC/DC. According to Songfacts it was also among the last things Bon Scott recorded — his very last was a cover of an older AC/DC song, Ride On, cut with the French band Trust on 10 February 1980 — and it sits as the final song on his final album. The line he delivers at the end of it is the catchphrase Robin Williams, of whom Scott was a fan, used to sign off transmissions to his home planet in Mork & Mindy.
Night Prowler once got attached to a crime that had nothing to do with the band. As Songfacts explains, the Californian serial killer Richard Ramirez was an AC/DC fan who named Highway To Hell as his favourite album, and the press duly linked the song to the case — a link the site describes as mostly a media creation, with no evidence that the song influenced anything. The band was horrified by the association and explained that the song is about a man sneaking into his girlfriend's bedroom; Malcolm Young said it was about creeping around at night on a couple of old girlfriends. Songfacts adds that rumours also circulated that the band's name stood for "Anti-Christ Devil's Children", when in fact it was taken from lettering seen on the back of a sewing machine.
Bon Scott knew, in his last days, that AC/DC were on to something. Highway To Hell, in 1979, had been the band's first million-seller, and when work on new songs began in London in the first days of 1980 he was buzzing. The demos at that stage were cut by Angus and Malcolm with Scott on drums — the instrument he had played in his first groups back in Australia. He rang his mother, Isa, in Australia to tell her the next one was going to be even bigger than Highway To Hell: this, he said, was going to be it.
Bon Scott died on 19 February 1980 in East Dulwich, London, having been out drinking with friends the night before. The official inquest recorded death by misadventure. He was thirty-three. What kept the band going was said at his funeral in Fremantle, Western Australia, where his father Chick urged Malcolm and Angus to carry on. On 1 April that year, Brian Johnson — then thirty-two, formerly of the glam rock band Geordie — was announced as AC/DC's new singer.
The first time AC/DC appeared in public with Brian Johnson was on 29 June 1980, at the Palais des Expositions in Namur, Belgium. Backstage Angus Young went through his usual routine, changing out of jeans and a T-shirt into the schoolboy uniform — but this was no ordinary gig, and in the last minutes before they went on he could see the tension in Johnson's face. Johnson was worrying about how the audience would take him, and especially about singing Bon's old words. What settled him was the crowd itself: walking out and looking into the hall he saw a banner held aloft reading "R.I.P. Bon Scott. Good Luck Brian." That, he said afterwards, lifted him.
On that first night in Namur, Johnson's nerves got the better of him halfway through the set and he sang the same lyrics to two different songs, which earned him an immediate and unambiguous word from Malcolm Young. AC/DC played seven songs from Back In Black that night, opening with the album's own opener, Hells Bells. The set closed with Let There Be Rock — the last song Bon Scott had ever sung on stage, five months earlier, at Southampton Gaumont on 27 January 1980.
Back In Black was made in Nassau, on the island of New Providence in the Bahamas — a long way from the cold and grey of London and from the atmosphere around Bon's death. What drew them there was Compass Point Studios, a world-class facility built by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. Tony Platt, the engineer working alongside producer Robert "Mutt" Lange, reckoned the remoteness itself did the record good, away from the distractions of London or Sydney: it helped, he said, to bring everyone together. Brian Johnson told Record Mirror the opposite, with his tongue in his cheek — recording in the Bahamas is actually difficult, since all you want to do is lie on the beach and you cannot get a decent pint of beer.
Bells are hard to record, because of the harmonics. According to Songfacts, engineer Tony Platt set up around fifteen microphones of different characteristics at various points around the foundry to capture the sound. Once it was on tape he took the recordings to Electric Lady Studios in New York, where he and producer Mutt Lange picked the right combination, put a mix together and slowed it to half speed — so that a one-ton bell would sound like a more ominous two-ton one. Listeners with sharp ears will notice that the bell rung live is an octave higher than the one on the record.
Hells Bells is the first track on Back In Black. In tribute to Bon Scott, Songfacts notes, it opens with the bell tolling four times before the guitar riff arrives, and the bell rings another nine times after that, gradually fading. Played live, it was Brian Johnson himself who struck it. The album's producer, John "Mutt" Lange, had also helmed Highway To Hell, and went on from Back In Black to produce Foreigner's 4 in 1981 and Def Leppard's High 'N' Dry in 1981 and Pyromania in 1983.
The all-black sleeve of Back In Black got made over the label's objections. The album was finished in six weeks and both the band and Atlantic Records knew what they had; the one problem, as the label saw it, was the cover — entirely black, with nothing on it but the AC/DC logo and the album title. Atlantic suggested that would not be good for business. The band would not yield. As Angus Young explained it, the whole of Back In Black was their dedication to Bon: that is why the cover was pure black, and why the record opens with a bell ringing, something sombre and unlike anything they had done before.
The title track of Back In Black appeared five months after Bon Scott died. Songfacts reads it as a tribute to him, taking the line about forgetting the hearse because he never dies as an implication that he lives on through his music. With Brian Johnson out front, the album proved that AC/DC could indeed carry on without Scott.
You Shook Me All Night Long was the first AC/DC single with Brian Johnson out front. Songfacts says he arrived at the opening line after realising that cars and women are much alike — they go fast, they let you down, and then the new model makes you happy again. Johnson has also said the song's inspiration came from seeing images of American girls while the band was in the Bahamas recording Back In Black. The Young brothers' guitar work on the track has drawn particular praise, and it has turned up on a great many lists of the best rock guitar solos.
The last song recorded for Back In Black was Rock And Roll Ain't Noise Pollution, written on the spot in about fifteen minutes. As Louder describes it, the intro has Brian Johnson doing what he called a Southern preacher thing — talking off the top of his head and hailing the life-affirming power of rock'n'roll with missionary fervour. Angus confirmed in a 1991 interview that some lyrics written by Bon were used in the album's new songs.
Back In Black was released on 25 July 1980, while the band were in Canada in the first week of a North American tour. In February 1981 that tour reached Australia for seven shows, and on the third of them, in Sydney on 23 February, something happened that Brian Johnson would remember for the rest of his life: Bon's mother Isa was in the audience, and afterwards she told him that her Bon would have been proud of him. The tour finished with two nights at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne on 27 and 28 February — the last of them falling a year and a day after the final gig with Bon. By that point Back In Black had sold more than three million copies in the United States alone.
On 1 August 1980, at the Palladium in New York City, AC/DC's support act for one night only was Def Leppard, whose singer Joe Elliott was turning twenty-one that day. The young British band, then out with their debut album, had opened for AC/DC a year earlier on the Highway To Hell tour, and because they shared a manager in Peter Mensch they had been among the first people outside AC/DC's inner circle to hear Back In Black. Elliott recalls Mensch coming onto their tour bus with a cassette of it, and the whole band being stopped in their tracks when Hells Bells came on.
Brian Johnson's flat cap predates AC/DC: it started in his Geordie days. Speaking to Planet Rock, he recalled playing the working men's clubs of north-east England and sitting with his brother Maurice between sets, when Maurice noticed how red his eyes had gone from the sweat and handed him the cap he had just bought to go with his new sports car. Everybody in the north of England wore caps after the war, Johnson notes — a kind of uniform for Geordies and Yorkshiremen. He wore it for the second half of the set, found it worked, and said he would buy one of his own; his brother told him to keep that one, since he was not going to put it on again. Before long audiences were remembering them as the band whose singer wore the cap, and that recognition brought them gigs.
The title For Those About To Rock We Salute You is a twist on the line Roman gladiators are said to have addressed to their rulers: we who are about to die salute you. Songfacts notes that Angus Young remembers the book that gave him the idea as For Those About To Die We Salute You by Robert Graves — but Graves never wrote a book with that title, and the site reckons it was most likely Those About to Die by Daniel Mannix.
The cannons on AC/DC's stage began at a rehearsal in Paris. As Songfacts tells it, the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana was on a television nearby, cannons could be heard marking the occasion, and the idea of using them on the song followed. In concert two cannons have since been set up behind the band and fired during it. It was not the first time they had brought a non-standard instrument on stage: in 1980 they had put an enormous bell up there to ring in Hells Bells.
AC/DC's US number one album is, surprisingly, not Back In Black. As Songfacts points out, that record — one of the best-selling albums ever made — never topped the US albums chart, whereas its follow-up, For Those About To Rock, did; so did Black Ice in 2008. The only single from For Those About To Rock to reach the US Hot 100 was Let's Get It Up, but the title track became a fixture of the live show and a favourite among fans.
The For Those About To Rock sessions began on Monday 6 July 1981 at EMI's Pathé Marconi studios in Paris, with Mutt Lange — producer of Highway To Hell and Back In Black — at the desk. Lange, a South African, was a perfectionist who did not believe in getting it right on the night, and his appetite for repeated takes would reach its apotheosis years later on Def Leppard's Hysteria. His engineer on the Paris sessions, Mark Dearnley, describes a man with a picture of the sound in his head who keeps bashing away until he hits it: in Paris they spent the first three days on the snare drum sound alone. At the end of the second day Lange asked Dearnley what he thought of it, and Dearnley said he had not got a clue.
From the band's side, the Paris sessions were mostly waiting. Angus Young says probably all the songs had been written long before they got to the studio: they go in with complete songs, they know what they want, and they do not mess about — unlike Lange. Johnson and the Young brothers spent much of their time on a large sofa waiting for the producer to finish tinkering, and Malcolm in particular was unimpressed. To fill the hours the band jammed for the fun of it, and engineer Mark Dearnley still has out-takes of Angus singing things like Feelings.
On the distinctive guitar part that opens Thunderstruck, Songfacts cites the book The Story of AC/DC: Let There Be Rock: Angus Young made the sound by playing with all the strings taped up except the B. It was a studio trick he had learned from his older brother George Young, who produced several AC/DC albums and had been a member of The Easybeats.
Two explanations of how Thunderstruck came about are in circulation. The band would often tell a story about the song emerging from an occasion when Angus Young was flying in a plane that was struck by lightning and nearly crashed. In the liner notes to the 2003 reissue of The Razors Edge, however, Angus gives a different account: it started from a little trick he had on guitar, he played it to Malcolm, who said he had a rhythm idea that would sit well behind it, and they built the song up from there, fiddling with it for a few months before everything fell into place. Lyrically, he says, it was a matter of finding a good title along the same lines as Powerage or Highway To Hell — and the thunder idea had a good ring to it.
The missing apostrophe in The Razors Edge is not a slip but a nod to the song. As Songfacts explains, Australians call the dark clouds of an approaching storm "the razor's edge" — which makes it a fitting title for an album that opens with Thunderstruck. The record was made with producer Bruce Fairbairn at Little Mountain Sound Studios in Vancouver, the same room where he had produced Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet and Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation and Pump. It was the band's first time working with him.
The Thunderstruck video was directed by David Mallet, who had also made the clip for You Shook Me All Night Long. According to Songfacts he set out to create the ultimate performance video, capturing AC/DC's live energy. It was shot at Brixton Academy in London, with Angus doing his duckwalk over plexiglass so it could be filmed from underneath, and small cameras mounted on the guitar and on one of the drumsticks.
Thunderstruck opened the album and opened the Razors Edge tour, electrifying crowds — and in America it was never sold as a single. According to Songfacts, that helped propel the more lucrative album sales instead. The US chart hit from the record was the more radio-friendly Moneytalks, which reached number twenty-three.
Angus Young talked about his brother Malcolm's final days in an interview for the Australian television programme 60 Minutes. As BARKS reported it, the hardest part for him was not the death itself but the decline before it — watching the man they knew disappear. Even so, right to the end, Malcolm would break into a broad smile when Angus came to see him, and would enjoy it when Angus played guitar, trying to tap his foot. His brother always knew he was there, Angus said, and he stayed with him to the end.
Power Up, released in November 2020, is dedicated to Malcolm Young, who died in 2017. In interview footage reported by BARKS, Angus Young called the band Malcolm's baby and Malcolm's life, and said his brother had always told them to keep going. No performance by Malcolm from his lifetime appears on the record, but he is credited as a writer on all twelve of its songs. In a separate interview Angus explained that Malcolm's contribution was mainly in the song ideas, and that it runs through the whole album.
Of Power Up, Angus Young said that what they always aim at is a record you recognise as AC/DC the moment you hear it — one listen, and you should think that is them and nobody else. In the same interview he was explicit that retirement and the end of the band were not in his thoughts, however far apart the albums had become: he likes making and playing AC/DC music, and having done it for so long he knows more about that than about anything else.
Sony Music Japan, the band's Japanese licensee, calls AC/DC a genuine rock'n'roll monster. Back In Black was Brian Johnson's first record with them and the one that put the band among the biggest in the world. Songfacts makes the same point more briefly: released five months after Bon Scott's death, the album proved that AC/DC could carry on without him.