Beers and brawls in 1975: the band that wanted to fight AC/DC
In January 1975, AC/DC found themselves engaging in a little ‘battle of the bands’ with one of the decade’s hard rock heavyweights.
They were still up and comers. While forging a formidable reputation in the local Melbourne club circuit after their Sydney decamp, the original domestic issue of High Voltage was a month away, and they’d only recently recruited driver and drinking buddy Bon Scott for frontman duties. AC/DC had plenty to prove among the stiff rock competition, their biggest test of mettle yet being a booking at 1975’s Sunbury Pop Festival.
It was the country’s biggest and most significant rock festival at the time. Dubbed “Australia’s Woodstock,” the Sunbury festival was marking its fourth event at Victoria’s Diggers Rest, growing in stature with the local pub and hard rock community heading to George Duncan’s farm and including a prize booking of Queen just before their superstardom the previous year. Yet, serious financial losses and ticket sales south of 16,000 resulted in most bands billed receiving next to no pay, apart from that year’s major big-name.
It turned out AC/DC had actually been pulled to the Sunbury show due to the promoters’ anxieties that the festival’s top draw would be a no-show. Keen to quell a potential riot in the event, AC/DC duly arrived at the muddy 620-acre private farm with their gear, and roping in Angus and Malcolm Young’s brother, George, to fill in for bass duties, walked a mile or so across the site due to their driver refusing the risk of bogging his car.
As the band were trekking to the stage, a fleet of flashy cars hurtled past, chaperoning the one booking who’d been paid a handsome $60,000 for their appearance and swallowing the majority of Sunbury’s precarious budget, one Deep Purple.
It’s not entirely clear how the brouhaha between the two bands was sparked. According to Angus, AC/DC were getting dressed in a caravan backstage when word got around that one of Deep Purple’s boys threw a punch at their manager, Michael Browning, resulting in the entire band piling out of the caravan with fisticuffs at the ready, including a nearby forklift truck driver keen to get stuck in too.
Deep Purple frontman David Coverdale claimed the then little-known Aussie band took to the stage and plugged in their gear to his band’s amps. “Well, all hell broke loose, from what I was told,” he recalled. “Our roadies (big buggers to a man) wrestled with the young band to get them off our equipment and off the stage. Chaos and frolics ensued.”
Whatever the case, fists were flying, headlocks were had, and a general ruckus played out live on stage in front of thousands of tanked-up rock fans. Peace and love were hard to find at “Australia’s Woodstock,” Angus inviting the eager scrappers at the front of the crowd to hop on stage and provide some back-up muscle with their heavy metal duel. Once the dust was settled, a narked Deep Purple blitzed through their set before cutting it short and stripping the stage of their gear, which later acts were supposed to use, to the promoters’ horror, triggering another fracas between the parties.
AC/DC never played in the end, rejecting the offer to return the next day, but they needn’t have worried. High Voltage was dropped amid an emerging lore of a hard rock mob full of scrappy, beer swillin’ fight befitting their Aussie ‘ard bloke tunes. In a few short years, they’d take on the world and win.
