The instrument Malcolm Young said didn’t belong in AC/DC: “Couldn’t be bothered”
While variation is arguably one of the most important ingredients for helping keep a band alive and interested in pursuing their craft, AC/DC have always presented themselves as something of an anomaly in this regard.
Throughout their early years with Bon Scott at the helm, very little was altered in terms of their style and approach, and yet, release after release was met with increasing levels of acclaim both from critics and the public. Virtually nothing could stop the ascent of the Australian band, who had gone from relative obscurity in their home country to globally recognised superstars in just a few short years, with only a few small tweaks and tightening up being done to alter their approach in the process.
The death of Scott and his subsequent replacement with Brian Johnson could have been seen as a potential cause for upset, with the loss of such an important part of the band’s identity hanging in the balance as they went through what was arguably the biggest transition of their career to date.
However, their first album with Johnson was 1980’s Back in Black, which ended up being not just their biggest album, but one of the biggest rock records of all time – this was the sign of complete resilience and self-belief, and was something that seemed impossible to take away from the group.
It was evident that they hadn’t needed to tinker with the formula in the process, but a slight downturn in fortune towards the end of the 1980s had them rethinking this once more and seeing what they could do to inject a bit of life into their sound again.
After a string of poorly-received records to close out a decade that had started with such promise, the band chose to tackle things in a slightly different manner for their 1990 album, The Razors Edge – inevitably, these minor tweaks led to it becoming their biggest album in ten years, and guitarist Malcolm Young knew exactly what it was that had prompted this shift in fortunes.
“When Angus came up with ‘Thunderstruck’ I thought, ‘fuck, we’ve got a great track here,’” Young recounted to Guitar World in 2003. “That set the standard for that album. Also, during the tour before that, my drinking had gotten really out of hand. So I decided to take a little breather from the band, and that gave me a bit more time there to mess around with ideas.”
However, the tweaks and ideas in question were something that the band wouldn’t continue with in the long term, and this was mostly down to the fact that Young didn’t think it was appropriate for the band to be tinkering to such an extravagant degree. “I started using some keyboards, just sampling the guitar into it for the sake of trying something different,” he stated. “It was interesting, but after that album I decided I was done with keyboards. Couldn’t be bothered anymore with that shit!”
It worked for them for this one-off, but it’s hard to imagine them becoming a staple of the band’s sound, even if they did manage to squeeze some bagpipes onto their debut album. AC/DC are all about raw guitar energy, and while a keyboard here and there might not have hurt their fortune much, it’s perhaps a little too flashy for a band who have always revelled in the basics, and only seem to flourish when they stick to what they know.
