What was AC/DC’s worst-selling album?
If you were at a pub quiz and asked the question of ‘What’s the best-selling album AC/DC ever made?’, it would be worrying if your answer was anything but Back in Black.
It’s almost one of life’s most obvious statements, like the sky is blue and the grass is green. But put the question down the other end of the scale, and when asked if you know what the worst-selling AC/DC album is, you may well come up stumped.
It’s hardly surprising, given not only the band’s extensive back catalogue and the very nature of their least prominent album, that people may not widely know the answer. They could hazard a guess, perhaps, at the tumultuous period in the mid-1980s when Bon Scott took the helm, as the band produced a run of duds in the form of Flick of a Switch in 1983 followed by Fly on the Wall in 1985, but despite their notorious commercial failures at the time, they didn’t quite take the bottom spot.
Instead, it was decades down the line when the band were ageing into their twilight years, and indeed Malcolm Young had retired due to illness, that they released their current penultimate album, Rock or Bust, in 2014. For lifelong AC/DC diehards, it was perhaps the feeling of too much change in the air within the band’s dynamics that left a slightly sour taste, as they just didn’t take to the album as rapturously as they had done to any of the others before.
That said, for a band of AC/DC’s calibre, any so-called failure is still going to create a pretty seismic indent, even if it wasn’t quite as big as their previous records. In that spirit, Rock or Bust was by no means a flop – it was certified gold, and sold over 500,000 copies in the US – but beyond the simmer of excitement in its release year, it didn’t seem to make a lasting impact on the world of rock in the way Back in Black did upon its landing on Earth in 1980.
What challenges did AC/DC face during Rock or Bust?
Rock or Bust stood out in a number of different ways as an anomaly to the AC/DC back catalogue, not just in the sense that it was their least successful. Lasting only 35 minutes in length, it also became their shortest ever album, beating 1983’s Flick of a Switch to the record, which clocked in 120 seconds longer at a 37-minute span. Selling 2.8 million copies worldwide, it could hardly be chalked up as a disaster, but something in the magic of the band’s midst had been lost along the way.
With the original Young brother seriously ill by the time the recording process for the album began, his nephew Stevie Young was drafted in to take the reins – but with that crisis narrowly averted, it transpired to be the least of AC/DC’s worries. Then, just weeks before the album was due to be released, their drummer Phil Rudd was arrested on charges of conspiracy to murder, and the whole thing threatened to go up in flames. To then really add insult to injury, once the band eventually made it out on tour, Scott was ordered to stop performing due to potential permanent hearing damage, causing Axl Rose to be swooped in at the last minute.
All in all, perhaps the lesser sales figures of Rock or Bust were emblematic of the troubles that beset the band in one of their most harrowing periods to date. Not three years later, with the tragic death of Young, it was clearly the call to rebuild. Thankfully, this time it succeeded, with 2020’s Power Up launching them back to the stratosphere, where they always belonged.
