The generation game

With their singer silenced, drummer arrested and riffmaker deceased, AC/DC looked done for. James McNair hails rock’s unlikeliest comeback.

AC/DC ★★★★ Power Up

AT THE START OF OCTOBER 2020, TWO giants passed in the night. Outgoing: Eddie Van Halen. Incoming: AC/DC, back against all odds. As Angus Young tweeted of Van Halen’s prowess and sent heartfelt condolences to his family, we listened to the American, of course, but also to the new AC/DC single Shot In The Dark. Possessed of a hooky little intro and backing vocals decidedly more roustabout than Beach Boy, the DC song’s adrenalised wattage felt medicinal after Van Halen passed; a fortifying dram as another strata of the hard rock canon crumbled. Someone monumental had gone; but equally, something monumentally comforting remained.

In truth, it had been a job keeping Stonehenge up (see illustration and Back Story). But ever since Geordie’s Brian Johnson succeeded the late Bon Scott for 1980’s 50-million selling Back In Black, AC/DC has been a vortex for obstacles, countless hurdles approached and cleared. Particularly testing, naturally, was the sad 2017 passing of tiny metronome Malcolm Young, the rhythm-guitar yardstick of AC/DC’s engine room. “He was there in spirit; he was never far from my thoughts,” kid brother Angus has said of Malc and the making of Power Up. And while Malcolm doesn’t play on the album, he has a writing credit on all 12 of its songs.

Power Up’s producer Brendan O’Brien also oversaw 2008’s Black Ice and 2014’s Rock Or Bust. Rumours of another DC album began circulating in 2018 after random fan sightings of Angus and co in Vancouver, Canada. Down at recording studio The Warehouse, O’Brien and engineer/mixer Mike Fraser were helping AC/DC finesse some unused riffs Angus and Malcolm had hatched much earlier, sifting through boxes and boxes of tapes, and building new songs around the best nuggets.

October’s masterful teaser campaign saw a Power Up poster appear outside Ashfield Boys High School, Angus’s alma mater in Sydney, then came confirmation that, together with Malcolm’s 63-year-old apprentice/nephew Stevie Young, Brian Johnson, Cliff Williams and Phil Rudd were also back. Absent from 2015-16’s Rock Or Bust tour having been arrested on various charges, including attempting to procure a murder (that particular charge was dropped), Rudd served eight months’ home detention from July 2015, was heavily fined and sought psychiatric help for his “crazy shit”. His reinstatement chez DC has raised eyebrows, but as a joke the errant drummer recently told Johnson underlined, the rhythmic parsimony he brings to the band is priceless:

Rudd: “You’ve got to watch out for those dentist drummers.”

Johnson: “Dentist drummers?”

Rudd: “Yeah, they see a hole and they think they have to fill it.” The guitars are mixed especially loud on Power Up, but Brian Johnson’s strangulated yelp can cut through any maelstrom. At 73, he brings astonishing appetite here, airing a rare falsetto note or two on Rejection, and relishing his outsider role on Wild Reputation. The latter is classic AC/DC, though built on the kind of syncopated lattice of riffage you might associate with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. Like the chorus guitar interplay on Witch’s Spell, it flicks a switch inside you, turning you on, and reassuring you that something in this world still works a treat.

Money Shot, too, hits the spot, employing that time-served AC/DC tactic of delaying the bass guitar’s entry until the first chorus. It might be a typically daft conceit riffing on porn’s grand finale, but a deal of thought has gone into ensuring it reaches lift-off. It’s also a reminder that, for those of us of a certain musical persuasion, there is no pickme-up like a cranked Marshall stack. Naturally, Angus’s input is crucial. Indeed, to paraphrase John Lydon, Angus is an energy. It’s as though a whole career’s worth of electrical parlance – Powerage, High Voltage and the rest – has somehow been transmuted into his singular, platonically electric guitar sound. Static seems to crackle in Angus’s pick slides, and sparks fly in his solos, lobbed hand-grenades which he delights in detonating. Nobody attacks a solo quite like Angus. Witness the one in Kick You When You’re Down, another of Power Up’s stand-outs.

Even Axl Rose is politically aware now, but there’s still nothing woke about AC/DC’s lyrics. Trapped in a world where sex is either a serendipitous contact sport or an industrial process (“You got the right position/A heated transmission”); where women are either insatiable cougars or inherently evil à la Tom Jones’s Daughter Of Darkness, Johnson sings of being “Caught in a witch’s spell”. But he also gets misty-eyed about “painted ladies looking so divine” in Through The Mists Of Time, a song that’s surprisingly close to wistful, and which – almost shocking, this – briefly finds Phil Rudd playing out with 4/4 time.

Palpably game for one last, very loud hurrah – AC/DC now have an average age of 67 – there are moments here where they conjure the miraculously rejuvenated pensioners in Ron Howard’s 1985 sci-fi comedy film Cocoon, even if good old rock’n’roll – not advanced alien science – is the catalyst.

Angus has said that he and Malcolm’s store of quality, unused riffs is still well-stocked, but Power Up must surely be the last AC/ DC album, given the six-year gaps between the band’s last three long-players? Hard to imagine Angus porting his schoolbag aged 71, far less Brian Johnson dangling Quasimodo-like from those stage-prop Hell Bells aged 79 – and given the current dearth of live action one can hardly envisage AC/DC making another record unless there was a hope of touring it.

When the schoolboy in Angus Young does eventually fade away, the school kid in many of us will doubtless fade a little too, but that’s hopefully a long way off. Power Up is one mighty curtain call, and listening to it feels a bit like playtime. In a year of so many adult worries and responsibilities, thank God for that.

“It flicks a switch inside you, turning you on and reassuring you that something in this world still works a treat.”