The era Malcolm Young said AC/DC lost their footing in: “Get the old feeling back”
The art of making good rock and roll means not messing with the formula all too often. It’s one thing to make music that is by-the-numbers, but if you can find a way to make the whole thing flow naturally and still make it sound authentic, it’s hard for people to really argue with you once the riffs start blaring out of the speakers. But for all of the rock and roll grandeur he saw with AC/DC, Malcolm Young knew when some of their records didn’t hold up as well as they should have.
Granted, it doesn’t seem complicated to make an AC/DC album work. At least, not on the surface. There are many ways for them to twist the same blues riffs into something new whenever they play, but trying to make it sound good is the lost art that no one can master. ‘Highway to Hell’ has simple chords, but getting that same sense of swing that Malcolm had when playing off his brother and drummer Phil Rudd was practically impossible.
But as soon as Back in Black set the world on fire all over again, there were bound to be moments where the bottom fell out for them. Flick of the Switch may not have garnered as much of an audience as it deserved, and Fly on the Wall was a bit too abrasive in most regards, but The Razor’s Edge gave them a proper leg to stand on. In between there were some problems that no amount of Angus bucks could cure.
Because if there’s one thing that AC/DC was never good at, it’s playing along with the mainstream. They were meant to make the music they wanted, and the thought of any of their albums including a ballad is a dark thought that keeps many people up late at night. While no such sin was committed when making Who Made Who, Malcolm knew that there were some pieces of that record that were never going to work.
It’s one thing to be making the record as a tie-in with a Stephen King movie, but Malcolm felt that the whole record was a misstep for the band, saying, “We wanted to carry on where Who Made Who had left off, although there was a long gap between albums. We’d lost our footing by that time, and we needed to get the old feeling back again. So we stuck with [Harry] Vanda & [George] Young again, and went back to our roots.”
Malcolm Young admits AC/DC briefly lost their way
And while Blow Up Your Video made for a decent return to form, it took a while for the rest of the world to catch on. ‘Thunderstruck’ may have been the moment when everyone started paying attention, but given the fact that ‘Heatseeker’ is on this record, it’s impossible to think that any of the band had lost their step. It wasn’t as bluesy as their early days, but it did have enough muscle to crack anyone’s ribs if they weren’t careful.
If anything, Malcolm may have been a bit too harsh on the Who Made Who era. Sure, not everything on that record was salvageable, and it might have stung seeing them go back to their old tunes, but if there was a chance for them to reach blockbuster success by doing what they always did, it would have been hard for them to say no.
And given how much Malcolm and Angus’s older brother was connected with their music, Blow Up Your Video felt like a creative rebirth of sorts. They had their moments working with megaproducers like Mutt Lange, but getting that kind of groove is something that only true members of the family would understand.
