The band Angus Young said AC/DC will never be: “We just go on stage and rock and roll”
For Angus Young, excellence has always been simple in principle. “If you hear a good song, you don’t dissect it,” he once said. “You just listen, and every bit seems right.”
For this reason, AC/DC’s success has always come from a place of pure intuition. Young himself has admitted that he often follows whatever he feels is the most fun instead of whatever he thinks might be the most commercially successful thing to do, and he also knows immediately if there’s a sound or style that he likes, resulting in music that comes purely from the soul, untouched by any outside influences.
However, that’s not to say that he’s always overly confident in what he does. In fact, he cares so much about the audience having a good time that, before going on stage, the nerves often spike, and he spends the first few songs in some sort of state of anxiety. It does settle, though, but only once he’s satisfied that the energy from the crowd is exactly as it should be.
And most of the time, it is. Young credits much of this to his brother, Malcolm, whom he explained to Guitar World was the reason why their sound is so big and full, and even went so far as to say he played better than Van Halen. While Halen has good technique, he said that he prefers feel and groove, which Malcolm delivers in spades, much like many of his other rock heroes across rock ‘n’ roll history.
That said, despite their seeming simplicity at times, Young believes they’re much more complicated than simple labels. In fact, he disregards the ‘heavy metal’ label entirely, arguing that “calling AC/DC heavy metal is like saying the Police is a reggae band”. They might have some of that style, but that’s not solely what they are. But then again, they’re not a straight-up rock band either, and most certainly aren’t pop.
In fact, Young almost hisses at the idea. Those who attended AC/DC shows back in the day were mainly teenage boys who had a few pints and got a bit drunk and disorderly, which means that, if they had fit into any other categories like pop, Young would be able to tell just by the crowd; something he detects by observing the fans of other bands, like Duran Duran.
“There’s usually more guys than girls who come to our shows,” he observed, adding that “girls are more into the pretty side of things” and the “Duran Durans of the world”. He went on to say that AC/DC “don’t go onstage with fancy haircuts and flashy clothes”, they “just go onstage and rock and roll.”
Clearly, there’s much to unpack in this statement, but if we ignore the slightly controversial undertone for a moment, Young is clearly attempting to navigate all the reasons why AC/DC are difficult to box into one singular description, and all the reasons why they’ll never be able to be as easily categorised as other bands, like Duran Duran.
In essence, they’re hard to define in his mind because they’re all about the art of rock ‘n’ roll, which typically looks one specific way whenever he looks out into the audience – namely, people having fun and getting lost in the moment and the music, not caring what box they might fit into because it doesn’t matter, not when the music is loud and their feet are moving.
