The story of AC/DC

From Glasgow to Sydney

The AC/DC story begins in Cranhill, a tough working class district of Glasgow. William and Margaret Young raised eight children there, and nearly all the boys played music. The winter of 1962 into 1963 was one of the worst Scotland had ever seen, and a television advert offered families assisted passage to a new life in Australia. So in late June 1963, fifteen members of the Young family flew to Sydney. Malcolm was ten and Angus was eight. They started out in Nissen huts at the Villawood Migrant Hostel before settling in a semi-detached house in the suburb of Burwood. Angus left school at fifteen, worked night shifts and trained as a printer, and practised guitar in his bedroom every evening after work.[1] [2] [3]

The brothers had a role model close to home. At the Villawood hostel their older brother George met a Dutch migrant named Harry Vanda, and in 1964 they formed the Easybeats with other hostel families, rehearsing in the laundry room. The Easybeats became Australia's biggest pop act, and George and Harry wrote the international hit Friday on My Mind. When the band broke up, the pair became songwriters and producers, and in 1973 they came home to work as the in house producers for Ted Albert's label, Albert Productions. George taught Malcolm and Angus how to play and fed them classic rock and roll and blues records. He also gave them a rule: no band can call itself a band until it has played at least two hundred gigs.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In November 1973 Malcolm put a new band together in Sydney, with Angus on lead guitar, Colin Burgess from the Masters Apprentices on drums, Larry Van Kriedt on bass, and a singer named Dave Evans who had answered a newspaper advert. The name came from their sister Margaret, who noticed the letters AC/DC on her sewing machine. Alternating current, direct current. The brothers loved how it suggested raw power. They played their first official gig at Chequers nightclub in Sydney on New Year's Eve 1973. In those early months they dressed in glam rock satin, and Angus tried costumes including Zorro, a gorilla and a Superman parody he called Super Ang. Then, in April 1974, he walked on stage in a school uniform, and it stuck.[1] [2] [3]

The schoolboy outfit was Margaret's idea too, and she sewed the first one. When it wore out, Angus used his real uniform from Ashfield Boys High. To make the act more believable, the press was told he had been born in 1959, when in fact he was born in 1955. In January 1974 George and Harry produced the band's first session, and their debut single, Can I Sit Next to You, Girl, came out that July and reached the Australian top fifty. But the line up would not hold still. Colin Burgess was fired about a week after that session for being drunk on stage, and the bass and drum stools changed hands again and again over the following year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Bon Scott and the pub rock years

By mid 1974 AC/DC were supporting Lou Reed on his Australian tour, and on that tour Malcolm moved to rhythm guitar for good, leaving the lead to Angus. A Melbourne promoter named Michael Browning liked the brothers but thought the glam image was wrong and so was the singer. When the band got stranded broke in Adelaide, Malcolm called Browning, and in November 1974 he became their manager. The Youngs decided to drop the glitter and go for the harder sound of the Australian pubs. That meant a new frontman. Their answer was already in Adelaide, a man nine years older than Angus, who had a long history in bands and a rough past to go with it. His name was Ronald Belford Scott, and everybody called him Bon.[1] [2]

Bon was born in Forfar in Scotland in 1946 and grew up in Kirriemuir, where his parents ran a bakery. The family emigrated to Australia in 1952, and he got the nickname Bon at school in Melbourne, a play on Bonnie Scotland. In Fremantle he learned drums in a Scottish pipe band, left school at fifteen, and worked as a farmhand and a crayfisherman. As a teenager in 1963 he spent time in Fremantle Prison's assessment centre and nine months at a juvenile institution, on charges that included escaping custody, stealing petrol and unlawful carnal knowledge. He then sang with the Valentines and the prog rock group Fraternity. In May 1974, drunk and furious after a row, he crashed his motorbike in Adelaide and spent three days in a coma.[1]

While Bon recovered, his old Valentines bandmate Vince Lovegrove gave him odd jobs, and when George Young mentioned the band needed a singer, Lovegrove told him the best man for the job was Bon. George worried Bon was too old and still too injured. After a show at the Pooraka Hotel, Bon teased the brothers that they were too young to rock, and they told him he was too old. They jammed until dawn, and by morning AC/DC had a singer. His first show with them was on the fifth of October 1974. Angus later said Bon moulded the character of the band. In November they cut their first album, High Voltage, in about ten days, often working through the night after gigs.[1] [2] [3]

The band moved to Melbourne, and in early 1975 the classic rhythm section arrived. Phil Rudd came in on drums from the band Buster Brown, and in March a young post office clerk named Mark Evans took over the bass. High Voltage came out in Australia on the seventeenth of February 1975. On the TV show Countdown, the band played Baby, Please Don't Go with Bon dressed as a blonde schoolgirl. The second album, T.N.T., reached number two in Australia at the end of 1975. It gave them It's a Long Way to the Top, and its famous clip was filmed on the back of a flatbed truck on Swanston Street in Melbourne, with pipers from the Rats of Tobruk Pipe Band riding along.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The bagpipes on It's a Long Way to the Top were George Young's idea. He had heard Bon played in a pipe band and assumed he was a piper. He was actually the drummer. Bon went out anyway and bought a set of pipes for a steep 479 dollars, taught himself well enough to record the part, and played them on stage until 1976, when he put them down at the edge of a stage and fans destroyed them. The song was played live no more than about thirty times, because the whole band had to tune to the drone. After Bon's death, AC/DC retired it out of respect. The chant on T.N.T. was also George's idea, after he heard Angus muttering it to himself in the studio.[1] [2]

Taking on Britain and America

Browning sent the band's material to London, where Phil Carson of Atlantic Records signed them to an international deal in 1976. They landed in Britain in April that year, just as punk was exploding. The press sometimes lumped them in with the punks, which the band hated. They built a following in small clubs and set attendance records during a residency at the Marquee. Then came a blow. Atlantic in America rejected their third album, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and planned to drop the band. Carson went to the executive Nesuhi Ertegun, pointed out they had paid only twenty five thousand dollars for the first album, and saved the deal. Dirty Deeds would not come out in the United States until 1981.[1] [2]

The rejection made them angry, and anger made the next record. Manager Michael Browning remembered the attitude as, we will show them. Angus said they told George they just wanted to make an album of guitar riffs. The result, Let There Be Rock, came out in 1977, and its international cover was the first to carry the famous lightning bolt logo, designed by the American typographer Gerard Huerta. Early that year they toured Europe supporting Black Sabbath. Bon and Ozzy Osbourne became friends, but others in the two camps did not get along, and after a late night confrontation between Malcolm and Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, AC/DC were thrown off the tour. Accounts of that night still differ.[1] [2] [3]

Soon after the Sabbath tour, in May 1977, Mark Evans was fired. The official reason was musical differences, and Malcolm told him they wanted a bassist who could sing, but Evans had been clashing with Angus. Browning steered the brothers towards Cliff Williams, an Englishman from the bands Home and Bandit who had almost quit music. Williams joined on the twenty seventh of May 1977. Angus later joked that his good looks were part of the appeal. That summer AC/DC finally toured America, starting in Austin, Texas, on the twenty seventh of July as support for Moxy. They opened for Kiss, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and others, and played CBGB in New York and the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Powerage, released in May 1978, was Cliff Williams' first album, and it was the last full studio album George and Harry produced in the Bon Scott era. It sold slowly at first, but it became a musicians' favourite. Keith Richards and Eddie Van Halen both named it their favourite AC/DC record, and Malcolm called it the most underrated of them all. A show at the Apollo in Glasgow on the thirtieth of April 1978 became the live album If You Want Blood You've Got It. For the encore the band came back wearing Scotland football shirts. The title came from Bon. At a festival that summer a journalist asked what fans could expect from AC/DC, and he answered with one word. Blood.[1] [2]

Highway to Hell and the death of Bon Scott

Atlantic believed AC/DC could break America if they had a more radio friendly sound, and that meant replacing George and Harry. Malcolm and Angus felt their brother was being disrespected. The label first sent them to Miami with Eddie Kramer, the engineer famous for his work with Jimi Hendrix. It was a disaster. Malcolm later said Kramer looked at Bon and asked whether their guy could sing. After three weeks with no songs finished, the band snuck into the studio on a day off, recorded six demos and sent them to a young producer named Robert John Mutt Lange. Around the same time they fired their manager Michael Browning and signed with the American Peter Mensch.[1]

Recording with Lange began at the Roundhouse studios in north London in March 1979. The band were used to making albums in a few weeks, and Lange worked them fifteen hours a day. He was a trained singer, and he taught Bon how to breathe through a vocal. When Bon challenged him to do it himself, Lange did, and the room went quiet. He sang backing vocals too, standing on the far side of the studio because his voice was so distinctive. Highway to Hell came out on the twenty seventh of July 1979. It reached number seventeen in America, their first top twenty album there, and it made AC/DC one of the biggest hard rock bands in the world.[1] [2]

In February 1980 the band were already working on the next album. Bon joined Malcolm and Angus at a rehearsal and sat behind the drums while they worked on early ideas. On the night of the eighteenth of February, after drinking at the Music Machine club in Camden, Bon passed out in a car belonging to his friend Alistair Kinnear. According to the official account, Kinnear could not wake him and left him in the car at his flat in East Dulwich to sleep it off. The next evening Kinnear found him unresponsive and rushed him to King's College Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. It was the nineteenth of February 1980. Bon Scott was thirty three.[1] [2] [3]

The coroner recorded acute alcohol poisoning and a verdict of death by misadventure. The coroner also pointed to him inhaling his own vomit, and later writers have questioned whether heroin was involved, which remains disputed. Bon's family took him home and he was buried at Fremantle Cemetery in Western Australia. His grave is reported to be the most visited in the country and has been listed as a heritage site. Only days before he died, he had spent time with the French band Trust in a London studio and jammed on the AC/DC song Ride On, which turned out to be his last recording. His final appearance with the band had been on Spanish television on the ninth of February.[1] [2] [3]

Back in Black

Malcolm and Angus thought about quitting. It was Bon's parents who told them he would have wanted them to keep going. The papers floated names for a new singer, and the band considered several, including Noddy Holder of Slade. Then they remembered something Bon had told them. On a tour of Britain with Fraternity, he had seen a band called Geordie and raved about their frontman, comparing him to his idol Little Richard. That singer was Brian Johnson, a former paratrooper in the Territorial Army and the son of a coal miner from near Newcastle. Geordie had scored a UK top ten hit in 1973 with All Because of You, and by 1980 Johnson was fronting a new line up of the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Johnson was called to London in March 1980 to audition. He arrived late because he had been downstairs playing pool with the roadies. Malcolm remembered he had tears in his eyes and was as sad about Bon as they were. He sang Whole Lotta Rosie, which he already did with Geordie, and then Ike and Tina Turner's Nutbush City Limits. For the first time since Bon died, Malcolm said, they smiled. After working through the other hopefuls, the band brought him back, and on the twenty ninth of March Malcolm offered him the job. Johnson was stunned. His appointment was announced on the first of April, and within days he had a plane ticket to the Bahamas.[1] [2] [3]

They recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau with Mutt Lange from mid April to May 1980. There were no free studios in Britain, and the Bahamas offered a tax advantage. Tropical storms kept knocking out the power, and Johnson worked the weather into the opening lines of Hells Bells. The studio manager warned them about night time robbers and handed out fishing spears to keep by their doors. Lange pushed Johnson hard, making him redo lines until even his breaths were in the right places. The band asked for a real bell for the opening track. A one ton bronze bell was cast at the John Taylor foundry in Loughborough, and it was recorded inside the foundry itself.[1] [2]

Back in Black came out on the twenty fifth of July 1980, barely five months after Bon's death. The all black cover was a sign of mourning, and Atlantic only accepted it once the band agreed to add a thin grey outline around the logo. The band told Johnson the title track had to be for Bon and had to be a celebration, not something morbid. The album went straight to number one in Britain and number four in America, and it never stopped selling. It is estimated at about fifty million copies worldwide, which makes it the second best-selling album in history after Michael Jackson's Thriller. In America it has been certified twenty seven times platinum.[1] [2] [3]

The success lifted everything around it. Several older AC/DC albums re-entered the British charts, and Atlantic finally released Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap in America in 1981, where it reached number three. Some in the camp later called that decision crass, because it competed with the next new album. That album, For Those About to Rock We Salute You, was made in Paris in 1981 after the first studio was abandoned and the band moved into a rehearsal room with a mobile truck. It became their first number one album in America. But the band had grown tired of Lange's endless perfectionism, and it was the last record they made with him.[1] [2] [3]

The eighties slide

For their ninth album, Flick of the Switch, the band produced themselves and went for a raw, dry sound. Behind the scenes things were falling apart. Phil Rudd had been struggling with drugs and alcohol, and his friendship with Malcolm had broken down. Tour manager Ian Jeffery later recalled that Malcolm punched Rudd after the drummer turned up hours late to a show on Long Island. Rudd was fired in 1983, midway through the sessions, though he had already recorded his parts. The brothers auditioned more than seven hundred drummers before choosing a young Englishman, Simon Wright. Rudd went home to New Zealand, flew helicopters, raced cars and farmed. The album reached number four in Britain, but critics called it tired.[1] [2] [3]

Malcolm and Angus cleared house. Mutt Lange was gone, and so were manager Peter Mensch and tour manager Ian Jeffery. Fly on the Wall followed in 1985, made in Montreux in Switzerland, and critics were even harsher. It was the first AC/DC album where every member had been born in Britain. In January 1985 they headlined Rock in Rio in Brazil. Then that summer the band was dragged into a horror story. Police in Los Angeles arrested Richard Ramirez, the serial killer the press called the Night Stalker, who murdered and raped victims across California in 1984 and 1985. Ramirez was a fan, and police said he had left an AC/DC cap at one of the crime scenes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Ramirez case landed in the middle of America's satanic panic, and AC/DC became a target. Their song Night Prowler, the closing track on Highway to Hell, was picked apart for hidden meanings, and some papers claimed the band's name stood for Anti Christ, Devil's Child. Shows faced protests from parents. The band insisted the song was about a boy sneaking into his girlfriend's room at night, and Angus answered the devil worship charge with a dry line. He said he could not remember the last black mass he attended. In 1986 things brightened when Stephen King asked them to score his film Maximum Overdrive. The soundtrack, Who Made Who, gave them their first big single in years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For Blow Up Your Video in 1988, the brothers went back to George and Harry, recording at Studio Miraval in the south of France. It reached number two in Britain and in Australia. But George could see that Malcolm, always a heavy drinker, was in the grip of alcoholism, and he threatened to walk out if his brother did not sort himself out. In April 1988, remembering what drink had done to Bon, Malcolm stepped away from the North American tour and began going to Alcoholics Anonymous. He later said he felt like Jekyll and Hyde. His nephew Stevie Young took his place, and he looked so much like Malcolm that many fans never noticed. Malcolm got sober and came back.[1] [2] [3]

Thunderstruck and the nineties comeback

In 1989 Simon Wright left to join Dio, and the Welsh drummer Chris Slade, a veteran of Manfred Mann's Earth Band and Gary Moore's band, took his place. Brian Johnson was tied up with his divorce, so Malcolm and Angus wrote all the songs themselves, a habit that continued on every album after. They recorded The Razors Edge in Vancouver with producer Bruce Fairbairn. The lead single began with a trick Angus found by accident, flicking fretted notes against an open string. Malcolm added a rhythm part, and they named it after a childhood toy. It was Thunderstruck. The album came out in September 1990, reached number two in America, and put AC/DC back at the top.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour that followed brought tragedy. On the eighteenth of January 1991, AC/DC played the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, a general admission show with more than thirteen thousand fans. As the band opened with Thunderstruck, the crowd surged towards the stage and people fell and were crushed. Fourteen year old Jimmie Boyd died that night. Fourteen year old Curtis Child and nineteen year old Elizabeth Glausi died in hospital in the days that followed. Brian Johnson later said he was shattered and that Angus was close to tears. The families sued the band, the county and others, and the band settled out of court. Their lawyer said it was the right thing to do.[1] [2] [3]

Later in 1991 the band played the Monsters of Rock festival in Moscow, the first open air rock concert in the Soviet Union, before a vast crowd that some estimates put above a million people. Shows from the tour became the 1992 album Live, often praised as one of the best live records of the decade. In 1993 they recorded Big Gun for the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Last Action Hero, with Rick Rubin producing, and it became their first number one on the American mainstream rock chart. Meanwhile Phil Rudd had quietly reappeared. He came to their show in Auckland in 1991, and there was no talk of rejoining, but the door had been opened.[1] [2] [3]

In 1994 the brothers invited Rudd to jam, and in August he was back in the band. Chris Slade, who had been recording demos, was out, and he was so hurt he said he did not touch his drums for three years. The band said a certain groove had been missing since 1983. The comeback album, Ballbreaker, was produced by Rick Rubin, a long time fan who had once been overheard comparing his mix of the Cult directly against the guitar sound of Back in Black. The sessions were difficult. The band moved from New York to Los Angeles because the drums sounded wrong, Rubin asked for dozens of retakes, and Malcolm later called working with him a mistake. It came out in September 1995.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Elder statesmen of rock

The band planned to make their next album with Bruce Fairbairn, but he died in May 1999. So the brothers turned to George, who produced Stiff Upper Lip on his own, recording in Bryan Adams' Warehouse Studio in Vancouver. It came out in February 2000 and was the last album George ever produced for them. The cover showed a bronze statue of Angus, and on tour a version several storeys high towered over the stage. Angus said the title came to him in a traffic jam, thinking about Elvis, Mick Jagger and famous rock and roll lips. That same year the town of Leganés near Madrid named a street after the band, and the plaque was stolen so often the town began selling replicas.[1] [2] [3]

In December 2002 AC/DC signed a long term deal with Sony, and in March 2003 they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith inducted them and sang Highway to Hell and You Shook Me All Night Long with the band. Bon was honoured too, and his nephews accepted in his place. One name was missing. Former bassist Mark Evans had been announced as an inductee in November 2002, only to be dropped six weeks later without a clear explanation. Some linked it to a long legal battle he had fought with the band, which was settled out of court. That July, AC/DC played a benefit in Toronto after the SARS outbreak, and the crowd of about four hundred and fifty thousand set a Canadian record.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The next album took eight years, the longest gap of their career. Cliff Williams injured his hand and could not play for eighteen months, and the band changed labels. Black Ice was finally recorded in Vancouver in 2008 with producer Brendan O'Brien, who pushed them back towards the sound of Highway to Hell and got Johnson to croon a little instead of screaming. The band still refused to sell songs as single downloads, so in America the album was sold only through Walmart and the band's website. It went to number one in twenty nine countries. The world tour that followed, with a full size locomotive on stage, grossed more than four hundred and forty million dollars.[1] [2] [3]

The Black Ice tour ran for twenty months and played to around four point nine million people. In Australia, the band played High Voltage in tribute to Bon around the thirtieth anniversary of his death, with his face on the screens during the chorus. The track War Machine won a Grammy in 2010. But the tour hid a secret. Angus later revealed that Malcolm had been having lapses in memory and concentration even before they made Black Ice, and that he had been rehearsing the songs over and over before each show just to remember how they went. The final night was in Bilbao, Spain, on the twenty eighth of June 2010. It would be Malcolm Young's last show.[1] [2] [3]

Losses and upheaval

After the tour Malcolm was treated for lung cancer, caught early and removed by surgery, and he was fitted with a pacemaker. Then in April 2014 he became seriously ill and could no longer play. The band said he was taking a break, and Angus quietly recruited their nephew Stevie Young, who had covered for Malcolm back in 1988. In September 2014 the band confirmed Malcolm had retired. Days later it was reported that he had dementia and was in full time care. Johnson had wanted to call the new album Man Down, but felt it was too bleak. Instead it was Rock or Bust, and every song still carried Malcolm's name, built from riffs the brothers had stored away over the years.[1] [2] [3]

Weeks before Rock or Bust came out, on the sixth of November 2014, police raided Phil Rudd's home in Tauranga, New Zealand. He had already arrived ten days late to the recording sessions. He was charged with attempting to procure a murder, threatening to kill, and possession of methamphetamine and cannabis. The murder procurement charge was dropped the next day. According to the court case as reported by Rolling Stone, he had threatened to kill a former assistant. In April 2015 he pleaded guilty, and that July he was sentenced to eight months of home detention and ordered to pay one hundred and twenty thousand New Zealand dollars in reparation. Chris Slade returned to take his place on drums.[1] [2] [3]

The Rock or Bust tour opened at Coachella in April 2015 and was huge. In Germany more than three hundred thousand tickets sold in seventy seven minutes. Then, in March 2016, the band announced that Brian Johnson's doctors had ordered him to stop touring immediately or risk going completely deaf. He said later he could no longer hear the guitars and had been getting by on muscle memory. Johnson said the damage did not come from all those years of loud shows, but from a motor race when he forgot his earplugs and punctured his left eardrum. His last show was in Kansas City on the twenty eighth of February 2016. He said he had had a pretty good run.[1] [2] [3]

Angus was determined to finish the tour. In April 2016 the band announced a surprising replacement, the Guns N' Roses singer Axl Rose, who fronted AC/DC for about two dozen shows across Europe and North America. It was the first time since January 1980 that anyone other than Brian Johnson had sung for the band. Cliff Williams had had enough. He said that with Malcolm gone, Phil in trouble and Brian unable to sing, AC/DC had become a changed animal. At the final show in Philadelphia on the twentieth of September 2016, Angus led him to the front of the stage to take a bow during For Those About to Rock. Then the band went quiet.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In late 2017 the Young family lost two brothers in less than a month. George Young, the man who taught them to play and produced their early records, died in Singapore on the twenty second of October, aged seventy. On the eighteenth of November 2017, Malcolm died at a care home in Sydney, aged sixty four. The band called him the founder and driving force of AC/DC, a perfectionist who always stuck to his guns. His funeral was held at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney. Tributes came from across rock, and bands including Foo Fighters, Cheap Trick and Guns N' Roses played AC/DC songs in his honour. The following year a memorial plaque to him was placed beside Bon Scott's statue in Kirriemuir.[1] [2]

Power Up and the road to 2026

Johnson had not given up. In 2016 the inventor Stephen Ambrose, who created the wireless in ear monitor, publicly urged him not to stop performing and said help was on the way. Johnson went on to work with a hearing specialist whose device, he said, first looked like a car battery and took about two and a half years to shrink down. All Johnson would reveal was that it uses the bones of the skull as a receiver. In August 2018 a fan in an apartment near the Warehouse Studio in Vancouver claimed to have seen Johnson and Rudd outside. The rumours were true. In secret, Angus, Stevie, Johnson, Rudd and a returning Cliff Williams recorded a new album over six weeks with Brendan O'Brien.[1] [2] [3] [4]

AC/DC confirmed the reunion on the thirtieth of September 2020. Power Up followed on the thirteenth of November 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Every song was credited to Angus and Malcolm. Angus had gone back through years of riffs the brothers had written together, with Stevie helping him sort them, and he described the album as a tribute to Malcolm. It went to number one in twenty one countries, including America, Britain and Germany, where it was the best-selling album of 2020. In Australia it made AC/DC the first act to have a number one album in five consecutive decades. Its lead single, Shot in the Dark, topped the American mainstream rock chart.[1] [2]

The band finally returned to the stage on the seventh of October 2023 at the Power Trip festival in Indio, California, their first show in seven years. Cliff Williams played, but Phil Rudd did not. The American drummer Matt Laug took his place. It later emerged that Rudd was staying home in New Zealand with his partner Toni Wilson, who has terminal breast cancer, and he sold his memorabilia to raise money for the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation. When the Power Up Tour was announced in February 2024, the bassist Chris Chaney replaced Williams on the road, though both Rudd and Williams remain official members. In 2025 Rudd said the people he thought loved him like a brother had not even picked up the phone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Power Up Tour opened in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, on the seventeenth of May 2024, and the agency behind it said one and a half million European tickets sold in a single day. In November 2025 AC/DC played Australia for the first time in a decade. At the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the twelfth of November, the concert registered on earthquake monitoring equipment several kilometres away. The tour carried on into 2026 with shows in South America and a North American leg from July, with Brian Johnson singing at seventy eight. The band's founding drummer Colin Burgess died in December 2023, and in August 2026 Chris Slade retired from drumming, citing the effects of a stroke. As of 2026, Angus Young is still AC/DC's only constant.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

AC/DC are estimated to have sold more than two hundred million records worldwide, and the American industry body credits them with eighty four million in the United States alone. Critics have long mocked them as simple, and plenty have called their lyrics sexist, a charge the band always brushed off as jokes. Malcolm once said they took the music far more seriously than the words. Musicians have paid them the biggest compliments. Tom Morello said Back in Black put hard rock back on the throne. Rick Rubin called them the greatest rock and roll band of all time. Dave Grohl said seeing the film Let There Be Rock was his first punk rock moment. Their own description was always shorter. A rock and roll band, nothing more.[1] [2]

The people around AC/DC

Angus Young and Malcolm Young. The two brothers founded AC/DC and wrote nearly all its music together. Malcolm was the organiser, dating and filing every riff, and the rhythm guitar engine Angus called the band's foundation. Angus was the showman in the school uniform. Malcolm fought alcoholism while Angus never drank at all. After Malcolm's dementia forced him out in 2014, Angus kept building albums from the riffs they had stored together.[1] [2]

George Young and Harry Vanda. George, the older Young brother, met Harry Vanda at the Villawood migrant hostel in 1964. Together they wrote hits for the Easybeats and then produced AC/DC's first six albums as Vanda and Young. George taught his little brothers to play, played bass on early records and suggested the bagpipes. Atlantic's push for an outside producer in 1979 wounded the brothers' loyalty to him.[1] [2] [3]

Bon Scott and Vince Lovegrove. Lovegrove and Bon shared the microphone in the sixties band the Valentines. After Bon's 1974 motorbike crash, Lovegrove gave him odd jobs and then recommended him to George Young as AC/DC's new singer. Years later, when a memorial stone was unveiled in Kirriemuir, Lovegrove sent a message calling Bon the street poet of his generation.[1]

Bon Scott and Irene Thornton. Bon met Irene Thornton in Adelaide in 1971 and married her in January 1972. They separated after two years and divorced in 1977 but stayed friends until his death. The early AC/DC song She's Got Balls was about her. She later wrote a memoir about their life together called My Bon Scott.[1] [2]

Bon Scott and Brian Johnson. They crossed paths in the early seventies when Bon's band Fraternity supported Johnson's band Geordie in Britain. Bon raved about Johnson to the Youngs, comparing him to Little Richard. After Bon's death, Johnson was the first name the brothers thought of. Johnson has always spoken of Bon with respect and insisted the Back in Black lyrics were his own.[1] [2] [3]

Malcolm Young and Phil Rudd. Rudd's loose, steady groove was a pillar of the classic sound, but by 1983 his drug and alcohol problems and a breakdown in his friendship with Malcolm led to a physical fight and his firing. A decade later the brothers invited him to jam again and brought him back in 1994, saying a certain groove had been missing without him.[1] [2]

AC/DC and Mutt Lange. Robert John Mutt Lange produced Highway to Hell, Back in Black and For Those About to Rock, polishing the band's sound with big backing vocals and exacting takes. He taught Bon breathing and sat Angus beside him to shape solos. His perfectionism wore the band out, and they parted after 1981. According to Angus, Lange once said Let There Be Rock was the album he wished he had made.[1] [2] [3] [4]

AC/DC and Mark Evans. Evans played bass on four of the classic Bon Scott era albums before being fired in 1977 after clashing with Angus. He later fought a long legal battle with the band that was settled out of court. In 2002 he was named as a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, then dropped six weeks later. He now plays bass in Rose Tattoo.[1] [2]

AC/DC and Axl Rose. When Brian Johnson was ordered off the road in 2016, Angus turned to Guns N' Roses singer Axl Rose, a longtime fan whose own band had covered Whole Lotta Rosie. Rose sang on about two dozen shows and introduced the band on the final night. There was talk he might stay, but in 2020 AC/DC announced Johnson's return instead.[1] [2] [3]

Brian Johnson and Cliff Williams. The two Englishmen became neighbours as well as bandmates. In 1986 Williams moved his family to Fort Myers, Florida, on Johnson's suggestion, and the pair played charity concerts together for the John Entwistle Foundation. Both left in 2016, Johnson for his hearing and Williams by choice, and both came back for Power Up.[1] [2]

AC/DC and Michael Browning. The Melbourne promoter took over as manager in November 1974 after Malcolm called him from Adelaide, stranded and broke. He pushed the band away from glam, got their demo to Atlantic in London and steered them to hire Cliff Williams. He was fired in 1979 in favour of Peter Mensch, and later wrote a memoir, Dog Eat Dog.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about AC/DC

• Bon Scott got his nickname at school in Melbourne because another boy in his class was also called Ronald. His classmates played on the phrase Bonnie Scotland, and the name Bon stuck for the rest of his life.[1]
• Angus once wore a Superman parody costume on stage called Super Ang, before settling on the school uniform. In the early glam days he also tried dressing as Zorro, Spider-Man and a gorilla. His sister Margaret suggested the schoolboy look and made the first uniform.[1]
• Angus Young is a lifelong teetotaller, even though he has been a heavy smoker. In a band famous for its drinking stories, and whose singer died after a night of drinking, the lead guitarist has never touched alcohol.[1] [2]
• The press were told Angus was born in 1959, four years later than his real birth year. Angus was born on the thirty first of March 1955. Shaving four years off made the schoolboy act easier to believe.[1]
• Malcolm's main guitar, nicknamed The Beast, originally belonged to Harry Vanda of the Easybeats. The red Gretsch Jet Firebird passed from Vanda to Malcolm and was heavily modified over the years. It was his primary guitar for his whole AC/DC career.[1]
• Bon Scott paid 479 Australian dollars for the bagpipes on It's a Long Way to the Top. Mark Evans joked the money could have bought two Stratocasters. Bon had never played bagpipes before, but taught himself well enough to record and perform the part.[1]
• Melbourne's ACDC Lane has no slash, because city rules banned the character from street names. The lane was renamed on the first of October 2004, near the Swanston Street spot where the band filmed It's a Long Way to the Top. Bagpipers played that song at the launch.[1] [2]
• The phone number in Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap sparked a real lawsuit in 1981. A couple in Libertyville, Illinois, sued Atlantic for 250 thousand dollars, saying the digits plus a shout in the song matched their number and brought hundreds of prank calls.[1] [2]
• The phrase Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap came from a cartoon villain's business card. Angus watched Beany and Cecil as a child. The character Dishonest John carried a card offering dirty deeds done dirt cheap, with special rates on Sundays and holidays.[1]
• Stephen King won AC/DC over by singing their song Ain't No Fun to them line for line. According to a band biography, King played the record and sang the entire song to prove he was a real fan, and the band agreed to make the Maximum Overdrive soundtrack.[1]
• The real Rosie of Whole Lotta Rosie was identified in 2021 as a young Tasmanian woman. Biographer Jesse Fink named her as Rose-Maree Garcia, born in Launceston. She died in Melbourne in 1979 aged twenty two, and Fink said she was far smaller than the song claims.[1] [2]
• Fans shouting Angus between the opening riffs of Whole Lotta Rosie started with the live album If You Want Blood. The chant can be heard on the 1978 Glasgow recording, and crowds have copied it at almost every show since.[1]
• An AC/DC song called I'm a Rebel, written by another Young brother, ended up recorded by the German band Accept instead. Alex Young, who stayed in Britain when the family emigrated, wrote it. AC/DC recorded a version that stayed in the vaults, and Accept released it and named an album after it.[1]
• The fingers on the Australian cover of Let There Be Rock belong to another band's guitarist. The band were out of town, so the photographer used Chris Turner of Buffalo. Angus reportedly looked at the result and remarked that he had fat fingers.[1]
• A child in Miami unravelled the cassette holding the first idea for Highway to Hell, and Bon repaired it. Angus recalled that he and Malcolm taped the intro and beat, and a man in the studio took the tape home, where his child pulled it apart.[1]
• AC/DC's first UK top ten single came in 2013, thanks to a Facebook campaign. Fans pushed Highway to Hell to number four in the Christmas chart that year, raising money for a testicular cancer charity, thirty four years after the song came out.[1] [2]
• The church bells first recorded for Hells Bells were ruined by birds taking off every time they rang. Engineer Tony Platt tried a local church while the band's own bell was being cast, but fluttering wings spoiled every take. They waited for the foundry bell instead.[1] [2]
• One Back in Black take was interrupted by a crab walking across the studio floor. The Bahamas sessions at Compass Point were full of surprises, from power cuts during storms to wildlife in the recording room.[1]
• Back in Black is the best-selling album in America that never reached number one there. It peaked at number four on the American chart but has been certified twenty seven times platinum.[1]
• Brian Johnson's flat cap was his brother's, and he never gave it back. His brother suggested it to stop sweat from his curly hair running into his eyes. Three songs into a set, Johnson gave him a thumbs up, and he has worn one ever since.[1]
• Angus is afraid of heights, which the director David Mallet discovered while filming the Who Made Who video. Mallet planned to lower him from a balcony on wires, and only then learned the man who leaps around stage risers dislikes being up high.[1]
• The Angus clones in the Who Made Who video were about three hundred real fans in school uniforms. Many travelled from across Britain and slept in the cold outside Brixton Academy for the chance to take part.[1]
• Everyone in the Thunderstruck video crowd wore a free shirt reading I was Thunderstruck. The clip was filmed at Brixton Academy in London on the seventeenth of August 1990, and each fan was handed the shirt to wear during the shoot.[1]
• During Moneytalks on the 1990 tour, the band showered crowds with fake dollar bills bearing Angus's face. The so-called Angus Bucks copied an American one dollar bill, with Angus in place of George Washington.[1]
• Angus said the Razors Edge song Mistress for Christmas was about Donald Trump. In a 1991 Guitar World interview he called it the funniest song on the album. Moneytalks on the same record also took aim at the wealthy.[1]
• Some vinyl copies of Black Ice were mispressed with a live album by the Clash on one side. An unknown number of the double LPs had songs from the Clash's Live at Shea Stadium in place of AC/DC tracks.[1]
• Black Ice was almost called Runaway Train, until Angus decided too many artists had used the phrase. He chose Black Ice after the road warnings he remembered from winter gigs in Scotland, which rolled off the tongue.[1]
• Brian Johnson tied Simon Cowell's lap time as the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car on Top Gear. A keen racer, Johnson also drove in the Rolex twenty four hour race at Daytona in 2012.[1]
• Brian Johnson spent years writing a musical about Helen of Troy that was never staged. He started in 2003 after being underwhelmed by Cats, working with writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Malcolm McDowell recorded a song as Zeus.[1]
• Stevie Young's early band Starfighters supported AC/DC on the 1980 Back in Black UK tour. Decades before replacing his uncle Malcolm, he was opening for the band. Malcolm also produced a demo for his later group Little Big Horn.[1]
• Phil Rudd opened a restaurant called Phil's Place at a marina in Tauranga, New Zealand. In 2014 he was ordered to pay more than seventy thousand dollars to three former staff for unjustified dismissal, reportedly after his dinner was delivered to the wrong place.[1]
• A statue of Bon Scott stands in Kirriemuir, where the town holds an annual festival called Bonfest. The life-sized bronze was unveiled by former bassist Mark Evans in 2016. Another statue shows Bon on a Marshall amp at Fremantle's fishing boat harbour.[1]
• AC/DC's 2025 Melbourne show was picked up by earthquake monitors about three and a half kilometres away. Seismologists said the vibrations came mostly from the crowd bouncing in time. Taylor Swift's 2024 shows there still made a bigger signal.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.