The 1975 AC/DC song Angus Young wants to delete from history: “Very soft music”
Every band, even behemoths like AC/DC, has songs from their early years that make them wince, and in a perfect world, they’d erase from their back catalogues.
While AC/DC, and particularly Angus Young, don’t give off the exterior of being anxious souls that stay up all night ruing errors that he’s made in his past. After all, Young is a man in his 70s who is content with dressing in a school uniform in front of a stadium to deliver his best duckwalk, which doesn’t suggest he gives a shit about the opinions of others.
AC/DC have also never bought into the widespread musical belief that rock bands need to evolve constantly. They know who they are, you know who they are, and what you see is what you’ll get. The Australian group are your archetypal stadium rock band, with consistency being their prized strength.
Experimentalism isn’t a word that exists in their lexicon. They specialise in gigantic riffs and even more magnanimous choruses designed for 50,000 to belt out at the top of their lungs, which they have honed to a tee for decades.
However, even AC/DC didn’t always have a nailed-on identity. During their early years, just like every other band, they had to learn through failure about what did and didn’t work for them.
Though it wasn’t avant-garde by any stretch of the imagination, the group’s debut album, High Voltage, was experimental by their standards, including ‘Love Song’, which Young has always detested.
“On our first album, High Voltage, we did a love song called ‘Love Song’. That was very different for us,” he told Vulture in 2017, while looking back at their early years. The subject matter isn’t even known to Young, who honestly admitted, “I didn’t know if we were trying to parody love songs of the time, because Bon [Scott, the band’s then-vocalist] wrote the lyrics.”
To give you a glimpse at the un-AC/DC-style lyrical content of ‘Love Song’, take a look at the final verse: “If you leave me you’ll make me cry, When I think of you saying goodbye, Oh the sky turns to a deeper blue, That’s – that’s how I’d feel if I lost you.” You’d be forgiven for thinking the lyrics hadn’t come from one of the most menacing rock bands of all time but from the exercise book of a lovelorn 14-year-old.
The guitarist then conceded that AC/DC made ‘Love Song’ for all the wrong reasons. Rather than being fuelled by artistic desires, it was a bid to follow radio trends, and gain airtime, admitting, “I remember that song because the guy who worked for us at our record label told us that’s what was on the local radio at the time – very soft music. His thought we should release that song, because it’ll probably get some airplay.”
However, even back then, Young was against the notion, adding, “I remember thinking, ‘Who in their right mind would want this to go out?'”
Thankfully, it didn’t become a radio hit, which Young believes was a stroke of luck, sharing, “We were very fortunate, though, because all of the radio stations who had seen us live knew this was not who we were. So these stations started to flip the record over and play the other song, which was a cover of a blues standard called ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’. We actually scored a hit from the B-side. That was the one saving grace of the song.”
While AC/DC, who were yet to be fully established, were likely desperate for any of their songs to become a hit, the failure of ‘Love Song’ to do so proved to be a huge blessing in disguise. It could have sent them down the wrong track, causing them to chase a sound they never believed in and become an unwanted albatross around their neck. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, but nevertheless, ‘Love Song’ does offer a glimpse into who AC/DC could have potentially been in a parallel universe.
