Angus Young’s wife Ellen is giving her husband directions. “Stand on the chair, Angus!” she instructs the AC/DC guitarist. “You will look stupid otherwise!” He’s standing next to all 6ft 3in of me, and his official height of 5ft 2in looks like an overestimate, perhaps because he’s always hunched. On my other side, singer Brian Johnson’s comparatively gargantuan 5ft 5ins is lessened by the fact that he’s bending, so his face is resting against my chest. And it is in this position, Young giving the thumbs-up while standing on a chair so that he’s fractionally higher than me, Johnson offering a leer, me grinning broadly, that we are photographed on my iPhone.
It had been a little embarrassing asking for a snap, despite my conviction that AC/DC are one of the greatest rock bands ever, it being the only time I’ve ever asked for a photo with anyone famous, and because the last thing Johnson had said to me before my request was to complain about “the fucking people with iPhones asking for photographs. I understand it, but it’s just a pain in the arse, the new social-media thing. Now every fucker’s got these things and I find it very difficult to cope with that.” Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound.
We meet at the beginning of November. By the end of the week, iPhones would be the last of AC/DC’s worries. Three days after the interview, news breaks that the band’s drummer, Phil Rudd – who missed their most recent video and photoshoot with what was described as a “family emergency” – has been charged with attempting to procure the murder of two people in New Zealand, where he lives. A day later those charges are dropped, but he will still face trial for possession of methamphetamine and cannabis, and for making threats to kill. The band issue a statement that they will release their new album and then tour it in his absence, stopping short of saying whether he is out of the band. Later, Young will tell Associated Press that they have had no contact with Rudd, and that things weren’t going well even before those legal troubles: “Well, we had a few problems. The situation he’s in – that took everyone by surprise. We had a few issues before with him, even when we were recording it was hard even to get to him to do the recording.”
At the point we meet, though, Young and Johnson are cheerful as they talk about Rock or Bust, the first album they have made without Malcolm Young, Angus’s brother, and the group’s rhythm guitarist and founder, whose retirement was announced earlier this year after his dementia made it apparent he could not continue in the band. “I was used to years of working with Malcolm, even before we got together as a band,” Young says. “But I had my nephew Stevie [who has replaced Malcolm], so I had someone to bounce off, and that helped.”
Much of Rock or Bust is composed from bits and pieces the brothers had worked on before the rump of the group assembled in Vancouver earlier this year; there was “a tonne of stuff” from down the years they had never turned into finished songs, and this was the basis of the new record. Young insists there was no question of the band stopping, despite the loss of his brother: “Malcolm was always one to carry something on.”
It seems plain from what Young says next that it must have been apparent long before it was made official that Malcolm would have to leave AC/DC. “He was not well when we went to do [the 2008 album] Black Ice: his symptoms of dementia were starting then, and he got through it. I had said to him, even before we did the album: ‘Are you sure you want to do this? I have to know that you really want to do it.’ He was the one who said: ‘Yes! We’ve really got to do it.’ He’s the one who suggested the producer, who said: ‘See if we can get Brendan O’Brien to do it.’ It was his drive …”
“He was a tough cookie,” Johnson observes.
I’m genuinely taken aback. Not so much because AC/DC are a famously private group, and not prone to talking about their problems, but because this means Malcolm not only recorded an album, but then went on a two-year world tour to promote it, while suffering the onset of dementia.
“I thought that at times it was not Malcolm with me,” Young says. “He would say at the time: ‘I have good days and I have bad days.’ Later on, when he got diagnosed – he had brain shrinkage, and he got diagnosed in America and they gave him some medication to help him – I said: ‘Are you going to be fit for this? Because it’s going to be a hefty tour.’ And he said: ‘We’ll do it. We’ll do it.’ That was how he was. It was hard work for him. He was relearning a lot of those songs that he knew backwards; the ones we were playing that night he’d be relearning. He was his own driver. He himself had that thing, where you’ve just got to keep going.”
I can barely keep my jaw from dropping. AC/DC on that tour were a juggernaut: taut and brutal and thrilling, so much so they made a film from one of those shows. They ended up grossing $441.6m, making it the fourth most successful tour ever. Yet the band’s driving force faced having to relearn the set between shows because of his deteriorating condition.
“Sometimes you would look and he’d be there, and you’d be, ‘Malcolm!’” Young says. “And you’d have a really great day and he’d be Malcolm again. And other times, his mind was going. But he still held it together. He’d still get on the stage. Some nights he played and you’d think: ‘Does he know where he is?’ But he got through.”
“God knows what went through his mind in some nights when he wasn’t that well,” Johnson says, his broad geordie unaffected by years of living in Florida. “He’d go onstage and … ‘Oh shit!’ Can you imagine knowing you’re not sure about [what’s happening]? Y’know where you are, put it that way, but your mind’s playing tricks. He was brilliant. He did brilliant.”
It must have been very difficult, I suggest, for them to see Malcolm go through this ordeal.
“It was tough,” Johnson says, “But you couldn’t say anything or do anything, because it would have been like giving pity. You had to treat it like a normal day. So we did.”
The band were furious when the exact nature of Malcolm’s condition and the location where he was being treated, carefully kept private, were revealed via a report in the Sydney Morning Herald in September. “That was bottom feeding, that was,” Johnson says. “Bottom feeding.”
“His wife called me and she was in a bit of a panic,” Young says. “I can understand them putting that he was in a place where he was getting help. But you don’t have to put the address. Besides Malcolm, there’s a lot of other people there, and there are their families.”
Malcolm still has his good days. “Every now and then he’s still the Malcolm I know,” says Angus. He gets out every day for a walk and a cup of coffee. But it’s all a long way from what once was.
Angus and Malcolm were first exposed to rock stardom just shy of half a century ago, in 1965, when their older brother George became famous in Australia with his group the Easybeats – the Antipodean answer to the Beatles. “At first, I didn’t even know,” Young says. “I knew my brother was in bands, but I’d never seen him play. I remember coming home from school and seeing all these people outside the house, and I couldn’t get in the house. There was all these police, all these schoolgirls … I’m this little kid saying to the policeman: ‘I live in this house!’ ‘Yeah kid, sure.’ I went right round the block then asked the people behind: ‘Can I go over your fence so I can get in my house?’ That’s how I found out my brother had a hit. My father, he said: ‘You tell no one.’ At school I couldn’t say what my brother did. There’d be some kids at the bottom of the street saying: ‘Angus, that’s your brother.’ And I’m going ‘I’m not allowed to talk about it.’”
The pair formed AC/DC in late 1973, releasing their first album in 1975, touring incessantly and then breaking in to the big time with the 1979 album Highway to Hell, their sixth. With the world at their feet, disaster struck when Bon Scott, frontman during their initial rise to fame, died in south London in February 1980 after a night of heavy drinking. He was replaced by Johnson, and within six months the group had released Back in Black, which went on to become the fifth-highest selling album of all time.
There’s never been much deviation from the formula: AC/DC’s first four albums mix driving hard rock and bluesy shuffles, with lyrics switching between laments for the life of the aspirant rock star, malevolent reflections on relationships and innuendo seaside postcard artists would dismiss as too obvious (“Some balls are held for charity/ And some for fancy dress/ But when they’re held for pleasure/ They’re the balls that I like best”). On the fifth, Powerage (“The closest we ever got to an experiment”, according to Young), the bluesy shuffles were discarded, pretty much forever, in favour of a straightahead, four-to-the-floor style driven by Malcolm’s rhythm guitar (“Most people can do what I do – they can do guitar solos – but they can’t do a good, hard rhythm guitar and be dedicated to it,” Young says). And that’s been it in terms of evolution, really, save for dropping the malevolence after Scott died. Now it’s either innuendo or songs that mention rock (23 AC/DC tracks contain rock, rockin’, rocks or rocker in the titles alone).
Nowadays, AC/DC are an international treasure. It’s pretty much impossible to find anyone prepared to express a dislike for them, something that has come as a surprise to Young and Johnson after years in which the disparity between their critical and commercial reception was unfathomably vast. As Young observes, an AC/DC T-shirt – worn by Shania Twain – made the cover of Rolling Stone before the band themselves did. In the 70s and 80s, too, there were those in the US who considered them a threat to the moral fabric of society: They were Satanists! Their name stood for Anti Christ Devil’s Child! Matters weren’t helped when the serial murderer and rapist Richard Ramirez was identified as a fan, particularly of the especially unpleasant song Night Prowler.
“The Americans, every time …” says Johnson, still angry about how the “moral majority” targeted the group, and irritated that there are still some who feel the group are in some way evil. “If it’s a bad parenting issue, just blame fucking rock’n’roll. That’s the easiest way out if it. It was ridiculous. It got out of hand. ‘Stop these children of Satan!’ It was just outrageously dumb. You can’t fix stupid. You just can’t fix it. It’s dumb. It’s blind. It’s blind dumbness.”
Young, perhaps sensing Johnson’s remarks might not endear him to their American audience, tries to placate him. “It’s the same in any nation. You’re always going to find that.”
“But they’re foolish to think that,” Johnson protests.
“But it’s always been the same. Look at Presley …”
“Yeah, but it’s nonsensical that this should happen in this day and age.”
It is, Young says, a fairly simple matter making an AC/DC record sound like an AC/DC record, not least because everyone who works with them knows exactly what they expect. You get a good-sounding room, the best available speakers and mics, and you don’t bother with new technology. Their sound was defined early, after George – who produced their first five albums, with his former Easybeats bandmate Harry Vanda – explained how to make records. “He said: ‘I could sit here and twiddle and put bits of EQ here and play you back this ultra-lush sound,’” Young recalls. “‘But I’d be fooling you. The best way is to just get used to listening to it dry. If that guitar sounds a bit rough, try and get it right in the room first. If it’s that speakerbox, try another speakerbox. Try a different microphone, try a different position on it. Find the best sound before you start going in there and adding gadgetry.’” It’s no coincidence that the worst AC/DC albums, from the late 80s, were when they did add gadgetry.
Concept albums, sonic experiments and constant reinvention are out. “Even the Beatles went a little bit that way with that white one,” Young observes, seemingly unable to refer to the album in question, even as The White Album. “At least it had a few good ones, like Yer Blues or Helter Skelter.”
Young is now 59, Johnson 67. How much longer AC/DC can continue, regardless of this year’s tribulations, seems open to question. Their albums and tours are infrequent, now – once every five years or so. Would Young really want to be a pensioner dressing in a schoolboy’s uniform and rolling around on a stage while playing the solo in Let There Be Rock? If it’s five years until the next album, will Johnson still be able to take a running jump and swing from the giant bell that’s one of the group’s stage props? Even with the recording of Rock or Bust, Johnson says, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to deliver a performance until he sang his first song. “You never know if you can or not,” he says. “Like Angus, when he goes back onstage, he knows he’s got this thing to do – the start of Thunderstruck. Fucking nightmare! Angus once said to me: ‘If I don’t do that two or three times a day in my room before I go on, I can’t fucking do it.’ It’s one of them things: can I still do it?”
For now, though, being AC/DC is still a pleasure. All they need, both say, is to hear the crowd. “They give you that adrenaline,” says Young. “because they’re going to party – sometimes, you think, whether we’re on there or not. You get on there and you start playing and they’re louder than the band, Sometimes it’s overpowering. I’m struggling to hear what the band’s playing cos I’m hearing the audience.”
And then, Johnson says, they slip into that AC/DC groove and everything falls into place. “You’re just delivering the fucking post. There you fucking go, as regular as the fucking Royal Mail.”
“The Royal Mail?” Young shakes his head.
“Ha! Maybe that’s not such a good analogy. As regular as the rent man! There you go!”
Rock or Bust is released on 1 December on Sony/Columbia
