The one AC/DC song Angus Young wants to delete from history: “I don’t even remember the words”
AC/DC‘s Angus Young is not a man who appears to have lived a life full of regrets. Any person who can happily walk to their closet and select a schoolboy uniform to wear for every performance in front of thousands of people per night has not fretted about life choices. After all, his group have come to define Australian rock for decades and have been routinely cited as one of hard rock’s most important outfits.
They are your archetypal stadium rock band, and you know what you’ll get from AC/DC, with consistency being their prized strength. Songs that shift away from the Australian band’s seismic formulae are few and far between. They specialise in gigantic riffs and even more magnanimous choruses designed for 50,000 to belt out at the top of their lungs. While their diehard fans may protest, the band have perfected their sound and feel comfortable in repeating it to a baying audience that laps up every note.
Of course, much of that quintessential AC/DC sound has been solidified over years of exposure. The group has honed its identity and developed it into one of the most steadfast brands in music. Naturally, they were still finding their feet during their early years, and the band was yet to become the iconic institution we visualise AC/DC as today.
Though you might not be able to call it exactly avant-garde, the group’s debut album, High Voltage, was experimental by their standards. That means that looking back today, the songs featured on it sometimes leave the band members wishing they could simply erase the tunes from their repertoire. One song in particular on the record sends shudders across Angus Young’s body.
“On our first album, High Voltage, we did a love song called ‘Love Song’. That was very different for us,” he told Vulture in 2017. “I didn’t know if we were trying to parody love songs of the time, because Bon [Scott, the band’s then-vocalist] wrote the lyrics.” There might be a slightly hopeful tone to Young’s words there, largely because “I don’t even remember what the words are.”
To give you a glimpse at the lyrical content of ‘Love Song’, take a look at the final verse: “If you leave me you’ll make me cry, When I think of you saying goodbye, Oh the sky turns to a deeper blue, That’s – that’s how I’d feel if I lost you.” You’d be forgiven for thinking the lyrics hadn’t come from one of the most menacing rock bands of all time but from the exercise book of a lovelorn 14-year-old.
Young further tried to explain why the group made the track and admitted it was in a bid to gain airplay. He said: “I remember that song because the guy who worked for us at our record label told us that’s what was on the local radio at the time – very soft music. His thought we should release that song, because it’ll probably get some airplay. I remember thinking, ‘Who in their right mind would want this to go out?'”
He added: “We were very fortunate, though, because all of the radio stations who had seen us live knew this was not who we were. So these stations started to flip the record over and play the other song, which was a cover of a blues standard called ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’. We actually scored a hit from the B-side. That was the one saving grace of the song.”
If ‘Love Song’ had become a hit, maybe AC/DC would have dipped into that side of their persona, and the world would be bereft of their mighty vibrations. Thankfully, fate put the group on their rightful path to global domination. AC/DC never really went back to making love songs and, instead, focused on making their hard rock sound as identifiable as a certain schoolboy uniform duck-walking across the stage.
