Angus Young once picked “the most imitated” guitarist in history
Don’t ever be fooled by the schoolboy uniform that Angus Young wears on stage; that guy knows a thing or two about guitars.
His own raw, duckwalk-esque guitar approach has defined huge hits like ‘Highway to Hell’, a riff that has bounced around thousands of practice rooms, punctuating the sets of many a cloddish cover band to make them seem like they might be the next big thing.
It’s difficult to think of another example of a guitar riff more endlessly imitated and influential, but if anyone could do it, it’d be Young himself. Though the man has unfathomable dexterity, he had his eye on a guitarist who distilled everything down into something simple, like a tart, sharp martini.
Young was in awe: “Pete Townshend is another guy who can sit on one string or one chord and make something seemingly mundane thing come really alive.” In favour of the simple side of life, Young praised the iconic keyboardist, guitarist, and principal songwriter for British rock legends, The Who.
The guitarist held his hands up; after all, the guitar is one of the most played instruments in the world, and most people manage to create their own relationship between the fretboard and the strings that has something special about it: “There are a lot of good guitarists in the world,” he confessed. The problem? “You just lose interest. It’s like if you saw Pete Townshend when he first started off. It was all bang, bang the hell out of the guitar.”
Still, the question of imitation was forefront in Young’s mind when he said of Townshend, “But the style he plays is probably the most imitated in the world.”
A close second might’ve been the one and only Eric Clapton, English rock and blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter, able to craft a riff from thin air. But he doesn’t quite take the crown, as Young doubles down on the question of mundanity here again, drifting away from Clapton: “Clapton was happening, but he got too technical. He made 12 bars seem like a big thing.”
You can’t claim a musician is one of the most imitated in the world if even the maestros can’t rip off his riffs (phew, that was a mouthful and a half). Townshend might have an imitable style, but he has a musical connection to his instrument that is far from rudimentary. Of course, it was this very guy who once said, “I played the guitar for ten years before I realised it wasn’t a weapon.” A scathing metaphor if there ever was one.
If Young didn’t have such integrity, we might question where the pick came from and trace the friendship between the AC/DC and The Who representatives all the way back to 1979, when the pair met on tour in Europe. At that point, it was Townshend’s turn to be awe-struck by Young, admitting that he was barely able to follow up their opening performance. Not so shocking that the two went on to become some of the biggest guitarists in the whole damn business.
