Though the Young brothers, Angus and Malcolm, had formed AC/DC in 1973, their story really begins with the arrival of Bon Scott in September 1974. Scott was a veteran of the Australian rock scene – he'd sung with the Spektors, the Valentines and Fraternity without ever reaching any level of real success. He'd also worked in a fertiliser plant, and in May 1974 had a motorcycle accident – riding drunk after a row – that left him in a coma for three days. So, 28 years old by the time he joined AC/DC, he was well acquainted with the vicissitudes of life, and quite how long the way to the top was if you wanted to rock'n'roll. The anger at spending years on the fringes and the joy at getting another shot burst through in his lyrics in the early AC/DC records. The group's first Australian album, High Voltage, came out in February 1975, but their second, TNT (released in December of the same year) was where Scott really found his voice. It opened with It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock'n'Roll) and Rock'n'Roll Singer, which were pretty much Scott's manifestoes of the rock'n'roll life – grubby, dirty, venal, but a whole lot better than the alternative. "Well you can stick your nine-to-five living / And your collar and your tie / And you can stick your moral standards / 'Cos it's all a dirty lie," he sings on Rock'n'Roll Singer, those last two words given an almost camp inflection. (It's often overlooked that Scott was, at his best, an excellent lyric writer, and – just as important – brilliant at phrasing in his delivery.) And, in one of the all time great asides in rock, he comes off the second chorus of "Gonna be a rock'n'roll singer / Gonna be a rock'n'roll star" with the perfect justification for his ambition: "I hear it pays well!"
The third AC/DC album brought a title track that became a staple of their live set, still a centrepiece performance on last year's shows with Axl Rose. It was also an illustration of another facet of Scott's persona – the confrontational, violent one. That was a feature of other songs on the record – Problem Child and Squealer (the latter featured one of the most unpleasant lyrics Scott ever wrote: "She said she'd never been / Never been balled before / And I don't think / She'll ever ball no more / Fixed her good"). On Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, though, the malevolence was turned to comic effect, which was perhaps why it remained in the live set with the much more amiable Brian Johnson singing. Well, comic effect is relative, of course – Scott was saying he'd be happy to kill your wife or girlfriend for you if you were fed up of her nagging. It's the riff, though, that drives Dirty Deeds before going into those verses with the stuttering drums that link the band back to the 60s R&B that was their bedrock – this could be the Pretty Things, but amped up and exaggerated.
Live from Atlantic Studios was recorded in New York in December 1977, a radio-only promo disc that was much bootlegged before finally getting an official release as part of the 1997 box set Bonfire. Live Wire had been the fourth track on both the TNT album and the international edition of High Voltage, but it always sounded like an opener, and it began Live from Atlantic Studios as a showcase for the economical brutality of AC/DC live. Hearing the band perform like this – just the four instruments and the voice, without evident overdubs, is a reminder why there were those who linked them with punk, despite AC/DC's disavowal of anything in common with the genre. Cliff Williams picks out the bassline – a single humming note – before three softly strummed chords come in. Bass and guitar pick up intensity, the riff strips back to two chords, but more insistent, foreboding, before the full band comes in and the riff kicks in properly. It's the simplest of songs – a bare handful of chords reshuffle through its length, and the sustain in Malcolm Young's rhythm guitar provides the bedrock – and unshowy. Restraint was at the heart of the best AC/DC songs, and Live Wire is all about restraint. What makes this version so perfect is that it combines that restraint with a rawness the studio recording didn't quite capture.
I've written before that 1978's Powerage is the best AC/DC album, and I've had no cause to change my mind. For an entire album, Scott left the double entendres to one side, writing instead about hardscrabble and desperate lives, where escape is no more than a dream. The album is short on "big numbers" – only Sin City became a setlist regular down the decades – and the riffs were often dialled back. Though the bluesy shuffle that had featured on every previous album was expunged in favour of strict four-to-the-floor (this was the album where the classic AC/DC sound was forged), it was also AC/DC's real blues album. Atlantic Records weren't happy and complained about the lack of obvious singles. AC/DC responded by writing and recording Rock'n'Roll Damnation, which was put on later pressings in place of Cold Hearted Man. Riff Raff was the record's fiercest rocker, but Down Payment Blues was its centrepiece, a desperate cry of poverty ("Feeling like a paper cup / Floating down a storm drain / Got myself a sailing boat / But I can't afford a drop of rain") in which the guitars build and release, and Scott's delivery gets more anguished with every chorus until he's nearly weeping.
The most understated song on Powerage, and one of the most subdued in the whole AC/DC catalogue, was also its best, with one of Scott's most elusive and allusive lyrics, mixing pop culture references – film noir, silent movies, Saturday evening serials, superheroes – into a confession of murder, topped off with a sigh at the pointlessness of it all: "What's next to the moon?" The imagery is so vivid and violent it's hard not to be grimly fascinated by the picture Scott lays out from the brilliant opening verse: "Well I tied my baby to the railroad track / Cannonball down the line / Giving that woman just a one more chance / To give it to me one more time / Engineer wishing he was home in bed / Dreaming about Casey Jones / Wide-eyed woman lookin' a mile ahead / Thinking 'bout broken bones."
The riff of riffs, the best loved AC/DC song of all, the track that launched Kerrang!, whose first issue was a list of the greatest songs ever, with Whole Lotta Rosie at No 1, the song to which everyone knows you shout "Angus!" in the gap in the riff at the opening. The truth is, though, that the studio version from the 1977 album Let There Be Rock is just a little flabby – there's no good reason for it to last five and a half minutes – but the version from the 1978 live album If You Want Blood (You've Got It) trimmed it back to a compact four minutes of excitement. It's better, because the song itself – Scott's hymn to a fat Tasmanian woman who had slept with 28 famous men before making Scott her 29th – is actually quite slight, padded out by an Angus Young guitar solo that lasts the final two minutes of the song. AC/DC had already taken a pass at the riff in 1976, on the song Dirty Eyes, which remained unreleased until the Bonfire box. The decision not to release it at the time was proof of AC/DC's judgment: the riff was there, but not yet refined into the taut, monumental edifice of Whole Lotta Rosie – it was worth waiting for the right version, rather than rushing it out. A little work and they had the most exciting chord sequence in rock.
OK, there will be some – many of you, all of you – who criticise the omission of anything from Highway to Hell, the album that pushed AC/DC to the precipice of global stardom. And, yes, the title track is eternal. But Highway to Hell turned out to be dry run for the second biggest selling album of all time and unquestionably the greatest comeback in rock history. Scott died in February 1980, yet by April the band were back in the studio with a new singer, Brian Johnson, and by the end of July their new album was out. But it wasn't Johnson's voice that captured the imagination so much as the combination of the fearlessness of the band's return, their strongest and most accessible set of songs yet, and a production from Robert John "Mutt" Lange that buffed said songs into a bright, radio-friendly sheen. Nevertheless, they opened the album not with one of those pop-rock anthems, but with something much darker – a tolling bell, a mournful guitar line, and riff that takes nearly 90 seconds to introduce the new singer. Its power is only marginally diminished by the fact that the lyric is about Johnson being frightened by a storm while flying to Nassau to record the album.
Nowhere was Lange's attention to detail more evident than on Back in Black's title track. Many AC/DC fans – me among them – prefer the sound of the recordings produced by Harry Vanda and Angus and Malcolm's older brother George, but it took Lange to make them sound like the biggest rock band in the world, as well as one of the very best. Back in Black managed to combine the space and musical concision of the great AC/DC songs with a sonic breadth and depth. More to the point, it was staggeringly precise – listen to the interaction between Phil Rudd's drums and the guitars on that hiccup in the verses and how the guitars, despite swinging just a little off the beat throughout, are always in exactly the right place. It sounds like something from one of the earlier albums, but somehow mechanised, a search for rock perfection that's as much mathematical as musical. Lange would later take this approach to extremes on his work with Def Leppard, where it sometimes seemed as if the actual contents of the songs took second place to their construction, a kind of Frankenstinian approach whereby if you bolted the right bits together you'd end up with a superhuman rock record. Still, the sales figures suggest he knew exactly what he was doing.
Let's not pretend that AC/DC had a glorious 1980s. There was the inevitable problem of following Back in Black – their third album with Lange, For Those About to Rock We Salute You, suffered a paucity of top-notch songs, and the band themselves wanted to break from his way of working. They produced themselves on Flick of the Switch, a rawer album that had a troubled gestation and which saw their audience shrink. Subsequent albums were padded out with too much filler and too few huge songs, the kind that fill their live set. It took until 1990 before they managed to pull out a song that bore comparison with the best songs of a decade earlier. Thunderstruck begins with a tricksy opening pattern from Angus Young – one that has fans debating whether he's picking or using one hand to play it with hammer-ons and pull-offs (the answer? Well, on AC/DC live films, he's picking, though some say he plays it both ways at different times). As with other great AC/DC songs, it's one where they have such confidence in the opening that they let it run on – and on and on. Though the rest of the band come in, they keep Angus's pattern running on until the first chorus erupts at 2m40s. This song and Rock N Roll Train from 2008's Black Ice were the only songs from after For Those About to Rock that would gain regular places in AC/DC's setlists from the 1980s onwards.
In late 1999, the band reunited with George Young for the first time in 22 years, after he was brought in to produce their 14th studio album following the death of the original producer, Bruce Fairbairn. The result was the best sounding AC/DC record since Back in Black, and their bluesiest since they had parted ways with George. Once again, AC/DC sounded sparse and spare, like a band recording in a room rather than trying to employ the latest technology. As Angus Young told me in 2014 of the band's recording techniques: "You find a good room, a good sounding room. That's part of the process. There was a big thing, specially from the 80s when more technology was coming into the record business – you'd blink and there'd be new gadgets coming along. And there was that tendency when engineers would think, 'Ah, they're out of the room, I'll just plug in this new reverb unit.' We need a good soundin' room. You need the engineer to go round the speaker box and find the best speaker in the box; they get old microphones, especially on drums; same with the amps. You want it flat. We were a band, when we started with my older brother, he had said: 'I could sit here and twiddle and put bits of EQ here and play you back this ultra lush sound, but I'll 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 in that 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. A lot of it is that." And on Stiff Upper Lip, AC/DC sounded like they had gone back to basics. Its title track opened with a snaking blues line, overlaid with Johnson's lascivious gargle – both reminiscent of ZZ Top – before the band kick in, one of those propulsive, mid-tempo rockers that they made their stock in trade. Always different, always the same.
