A life lived all about music
Malcolm Young, rock musician, b January 6, 1953, d November 18, age 64.
At the height of AC/DC’S success as one of the biggest-selling rock bands in the world, an interviewer in search of a cheap headline invited Malcolm Young to throw a TV out of a hotel window at his newspaper’s expense.
The guitarist politely declined, but suggested that if someone else was footing the bill, perhaps he could simply take home the TV instead.
Such a sensible attitude wasn’t always his way. In his early years Young was a famous hell-raiser who revelled in the notoriety of being in a rock’n’roll band. ‘‘We were a scandal,’’ he once boasted with obvious pride. ‘‘Mums tugging their kids away from us in the street’’.
His wild living led to him missing AC/DC’S 1988 world tour while he underwent rehab. ‘‘It caught right up with me and I lost the plot,’’ he admitted. ‘‘So I took that break and cleaned myself up.’’
Having survived popular culture’s ruinous ‘‘live fast, die young’’ mythology, which had consumed Bon Scott, the band’s lead singer who drank himself to death in 1980, Young re-emerged to become the sober businessman of the group, hiring and firing managers and producers in a manner that was likened to Mick Jagger’s strategic role in the Rolling Stones. Meanwhile Angus, Young’s younger brother and the group’s lead guitarist, fulfilled the more mercurial Keith Richards function.
Famously taciturn, Young rarely gave interviews and when he did, he seemed to have little to say. On learning of his death, the author Stephen King, who worked with AC/ DC on the film Maximum Overdrive, described Young as a ‘‘sweet, quiet man who made all his noise with his guitar’’.
‘‘It was Malcolm who had the vision of what the band should be,’’ Angus once said. ‘‘We sound like we do because of him. My part is just adding the colour on top. Mal’s the foundation. He’s rock solid and he pumps it along with the power of a machine.’’ His powerful approach was also simple. ‘‘People can go and hear REM if they want deep lyrics, but at the end of the night, they want to go home and get laid,’’ Malcolm noted. ‘‘That’s where AC/DC comes into it.’’
Malcolm Mitchell Young was born in Glasgow in 1953, one of eight children. His father, William, was a labourer and his mother, Margaret, a housewife. He was 10 when he emigrated to Australia with his parents, by which time he had developed a passion for Glasgow Rangers. They settled in Sydney, where his older brother George, who died in October, formed the Easybeats, the biggest Australian pop group of the 1960s.
Growing up, Malcolm found that he had a strong affinity with the blues. ‘‘When a family uproots itself and moves to the other side of the world because your dad couldn’t get a job, you didn’t feel part of the system,’’ he said.
‘‘The blues singers pushed a button in us.’’
He formed AC/DC in 1973, the name supplied by his sister, Margaret, after she had seen the initials on a sewing machine, and invited Angus, his 18-year-old brother, to join him. By 1976 they were the biggest band in Australia and relocated to Britain in search of international success.
Albums such as Let There be Rock, Highway to Hell and Back in Black, which sold 50 million copies, established AC/DC as Led Zeppelin’s only rivals as the biggest-selling hard rock band in the world, although drink, drugs and personality clashes took their toll.
In 1979, Young married Linda, who survives him with their son, Ross, a musician, and their daughter, Cara, the mother of his three grandchildren. Despite never taking a drink after 1988, years of alcohol abuse appeared to have caused long-term neurological damage. As long ago as 1992, Young confessed to an interviewer that he could not remember which songs were on which AC/DC albums.
By 2010, he was receiving medical treatment for his failing memory and four years later it was confirmed that he was suffering from dementia and required full-time care in a nursing home. Angus reported that he also underwent operations on a lung and his heart around the same time.
The last AC/DC album on which Young played was Black Ice (2008), which went to No 1 in 29 countries and was followed by an 18-month world tour on which the group played to an estimated five million people. It was during the tour that Young’s colleagues first reported that he appeared ‘‘disorganised and confused’’.
For Young, life was all about the music and its effect on audiences.
‘‘When we started as a band we were told by club owners that they wanted people to dance so they’d drink more,’’ he said in 2003.
‘‘That’s how we cut our teeth – getting people hot and sweaty and drinking and enjoying themselves. We stayed on that and remained true to it.’’
The Times