‘She’s Got Balls’: Bon Scott’s twisted love song that ended in divorce
AC/DC set out to put vitality back into rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s precisely what they did. No Australian bands had pierced the Western cultural fabric before them, and after testing their raucous brand in the beer-drenched clubs of their native land, it was only natural that the rest of the world would come a-knocking and they continue to spread their gospel to new climes. Although the group became famed for their good-time sonics, they have been pointed now and again, and it’s not just Angus Young tearing into established acts such as Led Zeppelin, either. Sometimes, the subject of their ire was much closer to home.
Broadly speaking, AC/DC’s story is a tale of two halves. The first was when they were led by one of the definitive rock frontmen in the late Bon Scott, the beer-swigging Scot who tragically succumbed to his penchant for imbibing when he died of acute alcohol poisoning aged 33 in 1980. Despite his tale serving as a cautionary one and a sad reminder of the destruction that alcohol can cause, he left a tremendous legacy. His partnership with lead guitarist Young was a potent one.
In a reflection of the band’s resolve, they hired Geordie frontman Brian Johnson to fill Scott’s boots, and he would do so seamlessly, proving the doubters wrong and playing a crucial role in AC/DC taking their music to even greater masses of listeners. It says it all that their first album together, 1980’s Back in Black, produced their definitive hit, the title track, as well as several other oeuvre highlights.
Most rock fans are familiar with much of the Johnson era’s output, but the Scott-fronted one contains many moments overlooked by those who are not diehard fans of AC/DC. One of these is ‘She’s Got Balls’ from 1976’s High Voltage, their first internationally released album, which introduced the band of long-haired rockers to the rest of the world. The track is a particularly puckish moment, as much of the Scott material was, and as you can guess from the title, it concerns a woman possessing the proverbial cajones, a biological region that Scott would discuss again on the following album’s cult classic, ‘Big Balls’. In that song, the partially ironic frontman sang: “I’ve got big balls / They’re such big balls / And they’re dirty big balls”.
While ‘Big Balls’ mainly concerned his own testicles, ‘She’s Got Balls’ discussed an unlikely source: Scott’s wife, Irene Thornton. This was one of his more pointed moments in song. A sharp riposte, after Thornton – who he married in 1972 – complained that he’d never written a song about her, he decided to pen the lyrics to ‘She’s Got Balls’. Featuring lines such as “The lady’s got balls / She’s got balls” and “Likes to crawl, my baby / All around the floor on her hands and knees / Ooh, because she likes to please me”, it stands as a starkly grim reminder of the gender roles of the day, and there’s no wonder Thornton hated it.
In Paul Stenning’s book, AC/DC: Two Sides to Every Glory: The Complete Biography, Young is quoted saying: “So he wrote She’s Got Balls, and she left him!”
It wasn’t as simple as this twisted love song ending in divorce, though; the relationship was already on the rocks. This was due to many factors, but the situation was particularly exacerbated by the pair travelling to the UK with Scott’s pre-AC/DC band Fraternity, where they spent a torrid 18 months before splitting up and returning to Adelaide. They wouldn’t divorce until 1977, and the pair remained friends, with Thornton there for Scott after the severe motorcycle crash that left him comatose for three days in 1974.
Scott wrote the lyrics to his love song while drunk. He even expressed a touch of regret at penning such filthy words when speaking to Mojo but caveated his point by claiming his mum hated it when he played the demo to her, which meant he thought he was on the right track. He said: “When I listen to it back the next morning, I think, hey, did I say that? Did I think that? But out of it, you can usually get some pretty good stuff. I’d play it to my mum, and if she said, ‘That’s not very nice.’ I’d keep it.”
In true form, Bon Scott didn’t care what anyone thought. This might have produced the offensive nature of ‘She’s Got Balls’ and other somewhat dated early moments, but this attitude is what underscored all of AC/DC’s success in breaking out of Australia and heading to the major leagues. It was a much different time.
