The impossible return of AC/DC: 'You could feel the electricity in the air'
At the end of an AC/DC show, Angus Young has a routine. After a couple of hours of perpetual motion in his schoolboy outfit, he heads straight for the shower and then, because he hasn’t been able to eat since noon – you can’t do an AC/DC show on a full stomach – he looks for food. “The first thing that enters my head is: I’m starving.”
When he left the stage of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on 20 September 2016 – the last night of the Rock or Bust tour – he might have been running through that routine for the last time in the band’s then 43-year history. The final 23 shows had been completed with Axl Rose as singer ( brilliantly, it must be said), after hearing problems had forced Brian Johnson to retire from the road; he could no longer find his pitch onstage, and every show made his hearing worse. That summer, their bassist Cliff Williams had said he, too, would be leaving the band.
Drummer Phil Rudd, the longest-serving member bar Young, had not even made it on to the tour, after getting himself involved in what Young had called “a bit of a pickle”: pleading guilty in a New Zealand court to charges of threatening to kill his personal assistant, plus possession of methamphetamine and cannabis. Angus’s brother Malcolm – the band’s de facto leader – had already left, owing to dementia, to be replaced by their nephew Stevie. Little more than a year after that final show, Malcolm was dead.
So when, in September 2018, photos emerged of AC/DC – including Johnson, Williams and Rudd – together at a Vancouver studio, it seemed miraculous. Johnson, his hearing now much better thanks to what he calls a pair of “prosthetic eardrums”, agrees. “It just shows the resilience and the bond that exists between us. We walked into the studio, and you could feel the electricity in the air. And, of course, Malcolm was there. He was there in such a strong spirit that it was palpable. I think everybody could feel it.”
When Williams is asked if he had expected it to happen, his answer is rather more to the point. “No,” he says, simply, and bursts into laughter. But Young – since Malcolm’s retirement, the band’s undisputed kingpin – says he had always thought their story was not necessarily over. “I figured at some point either the record company or somebody would say to me: ‘Do you think you could put something together?’’ So I had that in the back of my head. But putting out newer material, I hadn’t really given that a thought.”
But here we are with Power Up, the band’s 17th studio album, and it is a good bit better than one might have feared. It would be unreasonable to expect another Powerage, Highway to Hell or Back in Black at this point, but
Power Up is a genuinely decent album, a lot better than their last few. There are even surprises: Through the Mists of Time is curiously reminiscent of a midtempo track from an early REM album, albeit played by a hard rock band.
“I still get goosebumps when I hear that song,” Johnson says. “I can hear Malcolm through that song. It’s a throwback to the days when rock’n’roll was so much fun and we were younger and it just seemed like nothing would end and it was always gonna be life in the early 80s, before Aids, before all that. And when I listen to it, it’s almost like time travel.”
The origins of Power Up date back to the early years of this century. After the tour for Stiff Upper Lip ended in 2001, the band were silent for seven years, but Angus and Malcolm set to work on writing not just whole songs, but extra riffs, hooks and choruses. Young says they spent five years in the studio together accumulating material, with 2008’s Black Ice the first album made from those writing sessions.
Had Malcolm already been diagnosed with dementia? Were they stockpiling against the day when he wouldn’t be able to write? “There was the odd moment towards the end of that time … you could see something was not right. But he still held himself together pretty good,” says Young. “So for this album I was determined to use some of the strong ideas he had put a lot of effort into. I thought: ‘ He knows me better than anyone,’ and he was my audience whenever I had my own ideas. And he used me as the same. Sometimes he might write something and he would go: ‘Is that too clever?’ And I would go: ‘No!’”
Young says he went into the studio to make Power Up with songs – all credited to Young and Young – pretty much complete, although Williams has a slightly different recollection: “Ang and Mal had a big pool of ideas for riffs and stuff that Angus pulls from. He identified 12 of them, and we worked them up in the studio.”
Johnson adds: “When we were in