Angus Young’s five favourite guitarists
Angus Young has always been about rock and roll before anything else. As much as fans might come to AC/DC for the screaming vocals, there’s something about the primal instinct Angus had when performing opposite his brother Malcolm that made him feel like a feral animal let loose whenever he kicked into a solo. But he would have never had the itch to play if he didn’t have so many giants whose shoulders he stood on for years.
Then again, that’s not to discount what Angus brought to rock and roll. His signature duckwalk and schoolboy uniform are practically common knowledge for people even vaguely familiar with rock and roll music, but this is about him going back to the musicians that lit a fire in him when that uniform actually managed to fit a bit nicer, and he somehow had even more energy than he does today.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some new people on the scene that blew him away. Whether it’s those in the same league as him or beyond anything that he ever played, Angus could always acknowledge when someone could whoop his ass on guitar, even if he had a lot more swing to his delivery than anyone else.
A lot can be said for the hard labour that goes into making every AC/DC song work, but if any of Angus’s influences tried to play his music, chances are their arms would fall off or they would pass out due to exhaustion. Before anyone decides to play a mile a minute, they have to make sure the music grooves, and Angus has made sure to study everyone from rock and roll to blues to make AC/DC a rhythmic machine.
Angus Young’s five favourite guitarists
Chuck Berry
There have always been many different avenues when it comes to rock and roll. Whereas some people might gravitate towards the bluesy side of the spectrum, there are others who find their calling in metal or think that they can bring their music to the masses through punk rock. But no matter where anyone chooses to start with their music, chances are they will throw in a couple of Chuck Berry licks without even noticing.
And it’s not hard to see Berry’s influence on Angus, either. From the way that he adopted his classic duckwalk to the way he bends the strings and favours playing two strings at once, his solos on ‘Back in Black’ are practically unintended sequels to tunes like ‘Johnny B Goode’, only this time with a bit more of a bluesy attitude behind it. There are many ways that people can bend and twist their music into something different, but it’s time that all guitarists recognise Berry as the king of rock rather than Elvis Presley.
Eddie Van Halen
Most people know those moments where music seemed to stop in its tracks over time. The 1960s had the moment when The Beatles played the Ed Sullivan Show, and the 1980s shocked the world once MTV started airing clips by everyone from Michael Jackson to Prince. Eddie Van Halen may have been lost in the shuffle by debuting in 1978, but no one who ever picked up a guitar was ever the same after they put the needle on the turntable and heard ‘Eruption’ for the first time.
Angus was already gigging by this point, but even he had to admit that Eddie completely restructured the world of guitar on Van Halen’s records, always trying something new while still keeping pieces from what Eric Clapton did in the early days of Cream. There’s no way anyone’s going to see Angus flying off the handle and tapping his way through every AC/DC solo, but when you look at the time he put into making sure everything sounded perfect, the showboating of ‘Thunderstruck’ live may have come from watching what Eddie could do onstage.
Muddy Waters
Any classic rock guitarist usually has that one phase where nothing else mattered more than the blues. After all, the genre was practically the stepfather of rock and roll, and everyone from Robert Johnson to Buddy Guy was more than welcome on the turntables of people like Keith Richards and Joe Perry. When Angus heard Muddy Waters, though, he knew that the blues could mean something more than simply playing the most lowdown and depressing music anyone had ever heard.
In much of Waters’s music, you can hear him being a lot more upbeat, no doubt when he had his mojo working on some of his classic licks. Even when making some of his tunes on acoustic guitar on Folk Singer, he never stopped pushing himself forward, always coming through with the kind of lick that any rock guitarist would kill to have written. Angus wasn’t going to be caught dead playing an acoustic guitar live, but in terms of the sexual tension in many of Waters’s lyrics, it’s possible that their entire songbook is descended from his erotic side.
Malcolm Young
When talking about one’s influences, it normally goes back to the kind of artists that they had on their turntables back in the day. It’s not always like they show in the movies, but there’s often a moment where everything clicks when a guitarist realises that their instrument should never leave their side after listening to a particular song, album, or live show. But back in the day, all Angus needed to do to get inspired was look one room over and see what Malcolm was doing with riffs.
Despite being a rhythm player for the majority of AC/DC’s career, Malcolm was always a muse for Angus in terms of focusing on keeping everything in the pocket. Much of what AC/DC plays is easy, but it’s incredibly difficult to master because of how well the band locks in on everything, to the point where they seem like a guitar army whenever they hit the stage. While Malcolm has since passed on and has left guitar duties to his nephew ever since, Angus never forgot the core lesson his big brother taught him: if it doesn’t swing, it doesn’t mean a thing.
Jimi Hendrix
Much of what has influenced Angus comes from those early days of rock and roll. If you were to ask anyone in AC/DC, the core years for the genre tapered off around the time Elvis Presley went into the army, and they had already begun making something much more edgy when the Flower Children started taking over the world. But when talking about the archetype for what a guitar hero should be, all signs point to Jimi Hendrix’s songbook.
From the moment he hit the London club scene, Hendrix was a force of nature, blending everything from rock to blues to jazz to pure colours into his music. There had been many guitarists that have come before, but Angus knew that he would be a fool not to call Hendrix one of the greatest ever to pick up an instrument. He may have been placed right in the middle of the counterculture, but regardless of how you felt about the hippie scene, Hendrix’s music was pure beauty and emotion being channelled on the spot every time he played.
