A Guide to AC/DC

Music history has been written by artists who invented and subverted trends. Yet AC/DC have thrived not only by refusing to evolve, but by making the refusal to evolve an art form unto itself. Salute these Australian heroes for 50 years of unwavering dedication to brash, bluesy anthems about rocking and/or getting rocked.

AC/DC have been many things over the course of five decades, but above all else, they’re a family business. By the time guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young formed the band in Sydney in 1973, they had already watched their older brother George go through the entire life cycle of rock stardom. He was guitarist and songwriter for The Easybeats, whose 1966 single “Friday on My Mind” was the first Australian hit to cross over internationally—but by 1969, the band had flamed out due to the kind of success and excess that was only starting to become rock cliché. Continuing as songwriter and producer alongside fellow ex-Easybeat Harry Vanda, George established the philosophy that has defined AC/DC for 50 years; there is no telling their story without him. “He took us in studios and let us, even when I was in my teens, play on records with him doing the guidance,” Angus told Zane Lowe in 2020. “He said, ‘The real art is making the complex simple.’ And he used to say, with a band like us, there's just the two guitars, the bass and the drums, and the vocal on top, so you've got to keep it pretty tight and basic to get that song idea across.” But AC/DC only became AC/DC once they replaced lead singer Dave Evans with Bon Scott in 1974—not kin but a kindred spirit. Impish and troublemaking, Scott was the perfect foil for Angus, whose revolving stage costumes soon settled on the still-standard schoolboy uniform. They re-recorded their debut single, “Can I Sit Next to You Girl”, with Scott on vocals, and their first album, High Voltage, was released in Australia in February 1975. Five more studio albums followed over the next four years. (Confusingly, the 1976 version of High Voltage was their international debut and mostly contained songs from their second Australian album, the similarly explosion-themed T.N.T.) From here, the formula was set. “You look for new ways of doing riffs and experimenting a little, but when you get something and go, ‘That's definitely AC/DC,’ you know you've cracked the puzzle,” Angus said. Their sixth album, the group’s international breakthrough Highway to Hell, was their first with South African producer Mutt Lange, who opened up their sound in a way George couldn’t—and their last with Scott, who died of alcohol poisoning in 1980, shortly after the album’s release. For any normal band, this would be the end of the story.

“Malcolm, after a couple of weeks, called me up and said, ‘There's no point in the two of us just moping, let's go out and get a little studio,’” Angus told Apple Music. “And that was good therapy for us.” In Englishman and Geordie lead vocalist Brian Johnson, AC/DC had the outrageous fortune of finding perhaps the only other person on earth who sounded like Bon Scott. Released less than a year after Scott’s death and again produced by Lange, the cathartic Back in Black made mourning sound like a party and became not only the biggest AC/DC album but the second-biggest album of all time. What followed was a steady—and still continuing—parade of records pairing a mathematically impossible number of variations on Young brothers riffs with brilliantly direct lyrics delivered in Johnson’s demonic-Chipmunk rasp, cementing AC/DC as a ubiquitous, inimitable capital-B Brand in the least obnoxious sense of the term. If you attend a sporting event and “Thunderstruck” doesn’t blast through the PA at any time, assume the home team has been fined.

AC/DC did not invent the double entendre, but they did perfect it—committing fully and proudly to chiseling grade-school gags out of granite. (Sometimes a single entendre sufficed; 1995’s “Cover You in Oil” is, alas, about covering you in oil.) Do “Givin the Dog a Bone” or “Go Down” look particularly enlightened through a 2023 lens? Not really. But there is something so cartoonish about them that neutralises any real menace; no one listening to the 1976 school breaktime classic “Big Balls” could possibly be more amused by its profound stupidity than Bon Scott himself. And during the heyday of ’80s pop-metal, as high-haired, spandex-clad come-latelies built an industry on objectifying women in videos and album art, AC/DC kept pace with iconography centred around a middle-aged man dressed as a 13-year-old, forever the band’s spiritual age. The only shocking thing about AC/DC’s tongue-in-cheek ribaldry is that they somehow don’t have a song called “Tongue in Cheek”. Yet.

AC/DC’s rise, culminating in the shocking success of Back in Black, kicked open the floodgates for loud, loutish songs with heavy guitars and screeching vocals as bona fide hits throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Van Halen doubled down on the showmanship while Guns N’ Roses were stalwart enough students that when Brian Johnson needed to leave AC/DC’s Rock or Bust tour in 2016 because of hearing loss, Axl Rose stepped right in. Back home in Australia, bands like Jet, and more recently Amyl and the Sniffers, have carried the torch. But this barely scratches the surface: AC/DC’s mastery of George Young’s directive to “make the complex simple” means you can find that simplicity anywhere you want across music. (History may file punk into a different bin, but how could the Ramones’ self-limited selection of chords and wardrobe be anything but a show of solidarity?) Dave Grohl brought his former band’s penchant for ear-bleeding/earworm riffs without Kurt Cobain’s existential angst to Foo Fighters, while Joan Jett and The Donnas flipped AC/DC’s cartoonish machismo. AC/DC didn’t invent, or even reinvent, the wheel—they just make you want to go fast.