AC/DC and Ally McCoist: A snapshot of the modern day cultural metaverse
When I asked my father who his favourite band were when he was growing up, at the sort of age you are when you ask such questions, he didn’t just say The Stranglers, he explained the tale of how that came to be.
It’s a scene I can still recall vividly in the playground of my imagination: lads huddled around a pool table, rummaging for coins in the pockets of their tight Geordie Jeans to play their debut single, ‘(Get a) Grip (On Yourself)’, over and over on the jukebox. It had popped up by accident, blew their minds, and, perhaps to the chagrin of the rest of the bar (they neither knew nor cared), they craved repeat hits of its adrenalised dosage.
That’s a normal story. It stacks up and makes sense. My own experience with Arctic Monkeys wasn’t a million miles away from it, in fact. But these days, there’s a legion of youngsters who will announce that their favourite band growing up was a hard rock group, formed 30 years before they were born, because of a behind-the-scenes clip before the broadcast of a Champions League match involving ‘Hell’s Bells’ and the beloved football pundit Ally McCoist.
That’s not a normal story. But it will become the norm. I know this because one of my favourite pubs in Newcastle happens to be around the corner from an indie nightclub. While my days of darkening its doors are behind me, it’s nice to still have the tether to my halcyon days by simply strolling by it, and when I do, it’ll either be playing AC/DC or there will be a young patron sporting one of their t-shirts in the vicinity.
Granted, they’ve always been a big band, appealing to teenagers by their own admission. But the boom of the hell-raiser’s recent second coming in the UK seems indelibly linked to one measly clip of McCoist sound-checking before doing co-coms ahead of a Champions League game, hearing the distinctive camponology that opens the classic rock anthem, and exclaiming in stupefied awe, “That cannae be AC/DC? If there’s a guitar comes in here in a minute, it’s unbelievable.”
This small errand clip, that for the entirety of human history up until about 2017 would’ve been lost to the sands of time, ended up being viewed by millions of people last year. That’s strange. And it’s even stranger how impactful it has proven played forward.
The first time I got a major insight into this development came a few confounding years earlier. At a game at St James’ Park, a friend asked me, ‘Have you seen that clip of Jody Moore’s first touch at a Chelsea youth match the other day?’ There’s no way that in a logical universe I could reply ‘yes’ to that, but indeed I had seen it. In fact, maybe a decade later, I can still recall the utterly fatuous viral moment and Dirty Bert asking me about it a few weeks later at the football.
Fatuous though the whole thing may be, this strange quirk of the metaverse now dictates modern culture. At the recent AC/DC tour, the audience was younger than you might expect. And while I obviously wasn’t able to ask every single one of them about what endeared them to the ageing group, I know for a fact that at least one student was drawn into their raging rock cannon thanks to McCoist’s viral moment.
“TikTok claimed 84% of songs that entered Billboard’s Global 200 chart in 2024 went viral on TikTok first.”
Professor Steve McCarthy
So, how can it be that a football pundit, albeit a beloved one, can somehow shape the future of society, and it is as grand as that given the implications, thanks to an off-air moment of the former Rangers man simply enjoying an old song? That’s not an easy question to answer, so I turned to Steve McCarthy, the Programme Leader for Music Business at LCCM, to find out more.
He informed me that “TikTok claimed 84% of songs that entered Billboard’s Global 200 chart in 2024 went viral on TikTok first.” That’s a pretty startling statistic given that TikTok’s algorithm is far from governed by serving up ‘the best new music’.
Alas, labels are aware of this trend and are attempting to hack their way into it. “Influencers and content creators are often paid to promote music. The line between genuine organic growth and calculated marketing strategies is often blurred,” McCarthy adds.
The problem they face is an obvious one: you can’t engineer Jody Moore’s first touch, that takes years of training and the perfect circumstances, namely an awful goalkick. You can’t recreate the magic of McCoist’s daft little moment. These are organic and unpredictable, but in an entirely different manner to the organic, unpredictable yet highly explainable way in which bygone generations got into The Stranglers or the Arctic Monkeys.
The consequence of this is that culture is no longer a linear progression. It doesn’t stand to reason that modernism will turn to post-modernism or that prog will be countered by punk. The trends are random, beyond even the whims of an algorithm’s calculations. So, the next rock ‘n’ roll bands might have a hefty hint of hard rock about them, purely because good old McCoist was taken back to the “Glasgow Apollo, 1980” after hearing a song he hadn’t heard for a while.
And these bands might flounder in the doldrums because the kids who would once play them endlessly on a jukebox are busy listening Fleetwood Mac‘s 1977 album Rumours thanks to a man skateboarding while drinking cranberry juice and listening to ‘Dreams‘, while the rest of our metaverse is filled with hapless, futile bids to create this by bots, label bosses and other bozos trying to trick the impossible.
