The story behind Angus Young’s AC/DC schoolboy outfit
They were labelled as harbingers of satan, and they were hailed as the greatest drunken highway to hell. The intoxicated larks of AC/DC divided the public like no other. But one thing that both parties could agree on is that they really embodied a new insouciant side of pissed-up, firebrand side of rock ‘n’ roll. So, why, then, of all the outfits in all of the world, did Angus Young dress as a saintly schoolboy?
As with everything involving the Australian band, there’s a laughable tale behind it. For starters, uniforms have always, to some extent, been par for the course when it comes to performance of any kind. Johnny Cash mightn’t have always worn the same suit, but his black attire was his staple, Bob Dylan mightn’t have stuck to the same clothes, but he was always the picture of Beatnik disrepute. And this was amplified tenfold when punk and heavy metal arrived.
But what, excuse the French, the fuck does a schoolboy outfit symbolise within all of this? Is it just typical Aussie irreverence? Well, in some ways, yes. At first, when Young was looking for a look he could trademark, he tried out a Superman T-shirt (too lame), a Zorro outfit (capes are a hazard), a gorilla suit (too sweaty and mental), and his own casual wardrobe (highlighted his inner shyness). Like a downtrodden accountant who turns to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, nothing was working out for him.
One day, he was bemoaning this unfortunate sartorial position to his sister, Margaret, and she leaned into the family’s history and wit to come up with a solution. You see, Angus is the youngest of eight brothers and sisters. The whole family began life in Cranhill, a working-class suburb of Glasgow. Unemployment ran rife, and life was tough. Their father worked several jobs trying to scrape them by before having the bright idea to bring everyone over to the sunnier climes of Sydney, Australia.
This is a product of the fact that Angus was not only the youngest member of the swollen family but also because he had faced less harsh winters and retained a youthful complexion. As a result, his siblings often viewed him as just a daft little kid. Margaret, for instance, was 20 years older than him. She had always seen him as ‘the schoolboy’ of the hardy clan.
So, she figured, ‘Why don’t you take that onto the stage’. After all, if music at its best is about sincerity, then it seems fitting that you play into – and ridicule – how you’ve been viewed your whole life. Angus pretty much went straight from school to the band anyway. But to play into it further, he borrowed his sister’s son’s undersized uniform and amped up the joke.
For the psychologists out there, there’s even more to it than that. As Angus recently proclaimed, in 2020, at the age of 65, “We’re a band that still makes rock music for teenagers“. In fact, as a group, they don’t even think rock music should be made for anyone else, nor do they think that you should fall out of love with it when the mortgaged wrinkles of adulthood reveal themselves—there’s always space for a bit of youthful revelry in all of us—AC/DC made that perfectly apparent even on stage.
