Not a Nice Band
In March 1975, Bon Scott gave an interview to RAM magazine in which he spoke about the difficulty in finding a suitable bass player for AC/DC. ‘It’s a pretty rare type of bloke who’ll fit into our band. He has to be under five feet six. And he has to be able to play bass pretty well too.’ He was joking but it was true. With George Young weary of filling in – and left even wearier by his little brothers’ inability to settle on anyone else as a permanent bassist – the band were forced to continue either with Malcolm taking over on bass, leaving Angus as the sole guitarist, something they had reluctantly begun doing when George flew back to Sydney, or finding someone – anyone – that could play the bass that they could be in the same room as for longer than five minutes. George denies he was ever tempted to simply throw in his lot with his brothers. Staying at a house ‘overrun by girls’ may have brought back memories of what he called ‘the old rock’n’roll days all over again’ but George, despite being the same age as Bon, already felt too old for all that. Besides, he’d already been there, done that. His goals now lay elsewhere. ‘It wouldn’t have been right,’ he said. ‘They were doing their own thing and I would have been too interfering with their music.’ Here, though, he was perhaps being disingenuous. Arguably George had full control over AC/DC’s music without the need to put up with actually being in the band.
Instead, the answer to the band’s problems lay practically on their doorstep. Nineteen-year-old Mark Whitmore Evans had started out as a guitarist then switched to bass – ‘less strings’ – and found he had a talent for rock steady rhythm and blues, drawing his influences in a direct line from Rory Gallagher and Johnny Winter back to Freddy King, the Stones and Howlin’ Wolf, the latter being ‘the greatest of them all’. But if his enthusiasm was real, his experience was limited, extending only as far as senior school groups and semi-pro pub outfits. By the time his old mate Steve McGrath – recently hired as an occasional gear-humper for new dicks on the block AC/DC – told him about the band’s search for a bassist, encouraging him over several beers and games of pool to throw his hat into the ring, Mark had ‘nothing better to do’, working as a clerk at the offices of the Postmaster-General’s Department of the local civil service. ‘So I thought: why not? I was living in a cheap hotel sharing my room with my giant bass rig, bored out of my head and feeling guilty about not being in a proper band.’
Steve gave him the address of the Lansdowne Road house – as chance would have it, Mark’s older sister, Judy, lived in an apartment in the building directly opposite – and the following Saturday afternoon, Evans caught the tram down and simply knocked on the door. To his delight, a ‘very attractive young lady’ answered. Introducing herself as Angus’s girlfriend, she explained that the band were playing a gig that afternoon at the Matthew Flinders Hotel in Chadstone, a nearby Melbourne suburb, but that he was welcome to wait for them to return, if he liked. Evans wandered in past the bedrooms that led off the hall and through the single lounge and out the back towards what he assumed was ‘a family room sort of arrangement’ – until he was told that it was Bon’s domain and that it would not be a good idea to be there when ‘the old man’ returned. He slunk back into the lounge and made himself at home while trying not to stare at his ‘cute as a button’ host.
He didn’t have to wait long. Malcolm was first through the door, followed by Phil and Angus. Seeing Phil, who he recognised from Buster Brown, caused Evans to realise this was no mere bar band. But there was no Bon and no explanation as to why. (There never would be.) Evans would later recall in his memoir, Dirty Deeds, that the first thing he noticed about the brothers was how short they were. ‘I’m only five-six on a good day, but these guys made me feel tall – I couldn’t recall meeting anyone smaller than Angus.’ At which point, ‘the whole school uniform fell into place’. The other thing he noticed was ‘a coldness about [the brothers] that I hadn’t experienced before’. Asked now what he meant by that, he says: ‘I think that’s just the way they were. They were like a lot of pals that I grew up with that are Scottish, who were part of that immigration to Australia in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Once you’re welcomed into that circle, you’re all part of the deal. Of course there are limits to that. Blood’s thicker than water. But they could be, personality-wise, a little standoffish.’
But while the brothers affected not to notice their unexpected guest, they were taking in every word he said, sizing him up from the corners of their hard little eyes. Told to come back the following day for ‘a blow’ – on the strength, he thinks now, of his having mentioned his admiration for the no-frills approach of Rory Gallagher bassist Gerry McAvoy – when Evans returned that Sunday afternoon, he was blown away by the contrast between what his eyes were seeing and his ears were hearing. Angus ‘reminded me of a little old man’ – until he started playing. ‘I was completely unprepared for the Angus and Malcolm show. I wasn’t that experienced but I knew this was something else.’ They ran through most of the songs from High Voltage then took a tea and ciggie break, during which conversation was desultory and non-committal. When, after an hour, Angus laid down his guitar and wandered off Evans assumed that was the end of the audition. Fearing he’d failed, he was cheered when Malcolm invited him, at least, to come and see the band play two nights later at the Station Hotel in nearby Prahran – Mark’s hometown.
Confused, he accepted the offer of a lift back to his digs by Ralph, one of the two roadies that also lived at Lansdowne Road. His spirits lifted when Ralph told him he was sure he’d got the gig. Though there were caveats. ‘He basically said, “There’s two things you’ve got to remember: number one, it’s Malcolm’s band; and number two, we’re gonna be in the UK in twelve months.” And that was after not even playing a gig with the band. So it was put on the table from the start that this thing was moving ahead. He may as well have said to me, “Remember that it’s Malcolm’s band, and we’re gonna be playing on the moon in twelve months.” I just took it with a grain of salt. But it didn’t take me very long to realise these guys were deadly serious – particularly Angus and Malcolm – and that they intended to pick up all the marbles. You got infected by it. It became apparent to me very early on that along with George the band expected to be big. It wasn’t expected to fail, it was going to work – that world domination was the only option.’
It was this latter quality that Evans now recalls best from his time with the band. ‘Once you’re inside, you’re very inside and once you’re outside, you’re pretty much on the outside, let me tell you.’ He laughs. With AC/DC, he says, ‘that’s just the way it works, man, and that’s always the way it’s gonna be. The circle was very, very limited – a siege mentality. That’s the way we operated. It wasn’t us against them; it was us against all of them. There was a confidence and arrogance. We weren’t competing just against other bands, we were competing against everyone.’ He adds: ‘Sometimes it could be a bit stifling. I knew that Bon struggled at times with the constrictions that they put on him socially, but you know, that’s just the way it was.’
Less than a week later the new-look AC/DC gave their first performance on the country’s newest weekly TV pop show, Countdown. Recently launched on Sunday evenings and hosted by Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum, previously of Go-Set magazine, Countdown was unashamedly based on the same chart-driven format as the UK’s Top of the Pops: the week’s highest-placed chart acts invited to mime to their hits before a studiously attentive audience of young dancers. Plumping for ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go’ over ‘Love Song (Oh Jene)’ as a sure-fire crowd-pleaser, which the band was happy to mime to while Bon provided a live vocal, most bands in their position – making their show debut as a relatively new outfit – would have been delighted merely to have got through the song and milk the canned applause. As a veteran of several earlier incarnations of the same thing with first The Valentines and then Fraternity, Bon, however, had his sights set higher than that, coming up with the knife-edge idea of dressing up as a schoolgirl, replete with blonde, pigtailed wig, rouged cheeks, blue eye-shadow and short school dress, blouse sleeves rolled up to reveal his tatts. Whether intended as some kind of psychedelic refraction of Angus’s hyperrealist schoolboy, or merely a piss-take of Malcolm’s much-loathed Skyhooks’ own now regular is-it-a-boy-or-is-it-an-alien appearances on the show – or possibly both, with a dash of bourbon breath and weed-exhalation thrown in for good measure – it took everybody by surprise, including Malcolm and Angus, who snickered throughout the taping. Not least when Bon lit a cigarette halfway through the song – something that could not be imagined on a TV pop show today – then fell backwards during the vocal-to-guitar call-and-response routine to reveal bulging white ‘knickers’. Angus recalled how ‘Bon thought, well, if we come along and be who we are, he [Meldrum] will just walk away [thinking], “Oh yeah, ho hum.” But when Bon showed up like that, [Molly] just went nuts!’
It left such an impression on both the show’s producers and the Oz public at large, the band was invited back on to do it all again three weeks later – and again shortly after that. AC/DC would become part of the furniture on Countdown, making 38 appearances on the show over the next two years, regardless of whether they had a new single out or not. ‘That show was hugely influential on record sales in Australia and they were on Countdown all the time,’ remembers Browning. ‘Countdown really loved them – that was during the screaming-girl era.’ Whenever they appeared on the show they tried to make an event of it. On one occasion Angus revived his Super Ang routine, leaping from a telephone box. On another they rigged up the set to make it appear as though he was piloting a propeller plane. Browning’s carpenter at the Hard Rock became adept at knocking up whatever sets the band dreamed up. Hence also the giant spider’s web used as backdrop for Bon to appear in a spider suit with eight arms, and the gorilla suit Angus wore the time Bon dragged him out playing wildly from a cage. On yet another, Bon came on wearing a red and white straw boater and striped blazer undone to the waist, his hairy chest exposed in laughing counterpoint, clutching an old man’s walking stick with a crooked handle. If Angus was definitely not the stereotypical self-absorbed Seventies axe hero, Bon was most definitely not your average conceited heavy rock vocalist, either. More of a cabaret-style showman, in fact. Or a character actor, inventing the character of Bon Scott, gap-toothed, tattooed hard man of animated-movie rockers AC/DC. ‘When he joined us he took us by the scruff of the neck,’ said Malcolm. ‘On stage it’d be: “Don’t just stand there, you cunt” . . . whatever AC/DC went on to achieve, Bon was also very responsible for.’
Arriving at the same moment in Australia as colour television, these Countdown appearances became a huge factor in the band’s early success. Or as Bon later put it, ‘If you don’t show your arse to Molly Meldrum [on Countdown] you’re fucked.’ It was an unkind if deadeningly accurate put-down. Bon and Molly – a genuine Melbourne mover and shaker who delighted in describing himself as ‘The oldest teenager in Australia’ – would enjoy a fitful personal relationship. Yet it was Meldrum who became AC/DC’s most influential supporter in these, their earliest, empire-building days. Jerry Ewing, an Australian-born rock critic who would go on to found Classic Rock magazine in London in the Nineties, was nine years old and living in Sydney the first time he saw AC/DC on Countdown in 1975. ‘The next day at school it was all we talked about. And of course everyone my age picked up on the fact that Angus was in a school uniform. That was the link that got us in. Otherwise it could have just been another band. Literally, the next day we were all running around with our satchels on our backs pretending to play the guitar! Next thing, every kid had the album, High Voltage, with the red cover. Until then everyone’s favourite band at school had been Skyhooks, which everyone kept on liking, and Sherbet. But they were more middle-of-the-road. Then AC/DC came along and they had more to do with the anti-establishment kind of approach. They actually scared parents.’
In April, hard on the heels of AC/DC’s first Countdown appearances and with both album and single climbing the Australian charts, RAM published their first major feature on the new band. Writer Anthony O’Grady revealed how the first time he met Angus, ‘all five foot five of him’, the guitarist had approached him ‘with homicide in his eyes’ – due to O’Grady’s review of the disastrous Sunbury festival, in which he mistakenly reported that the promoters had cancelled the band’s appearance, because, he explained, ‘the group had left the Festival grounds and were uncontactable’. Fortunately, Bon the Likeable was also present, steering the conversation around to High Voltage. ‘It’s real tough music so it’s good to play on stage,’ he said. ‘Melbourne and Adelaide radio are playing stuff from it.’ Though Malcolm warned, ‘One of the problems with the album is the words. There’s a lot of “dirty” words in the songs which they can’t play on straight radio . . . like on one line there’s the word climax . . . as in sex. And you can’t have a climax on radio . . . Wouldn’t want to corrupt the kids, you know.’ He also admitted that both he and Angus were not always so basic in their musical tastes. ‘We were into jazz chords and progressive music . . . the real complex time-change things. But that only lasted a year, cos really we grew up on rock’n’roll and we’ve been progressing through rock’n’roll ever since. It’s the way it’s played that we’re really into. If we don’t come off stage really sweating and absolutely stuffed we don’t reckon it’s been worthwhile out there.’ Or as Angus put it, ‘It’s a lot harder to play something simple in a way that hasn’t been played before, than it is to play something complex.’
Back on the road AC/DC were now on a roll. Evans may not have been the greatest bass player in the world but he fitted the bill. ‘When you’ve got Malcolm on rhythm guitar and Phil on drums, you really are flying first class. If you can’t play bass with these guys, find another fucking job, you know what I mean?’ The youngest member of the band, and free from any musical decisions, Mark liked to have fun. Not least with what he calls his ‘research assistants’: taking his pick from the endless stream of young groupies the band attracted in even greater numbers since ‘we’d been on the telly’. Where, though, just a year before that had spelled the death-knell for Colin Burgess and Dave Evans, Malcolm was a lot more secure working with the much younger, inexperienced Evans. ‘Malcolm was a tough cookie. By the same token when we were relaxed and away from the band situation, a night off having a few beers, playing darts and playing pool, we’d have a fucking ball, man. We’d be laughing ourselves fucking stupid [and] it would generally be me, Malcolm and Phil out drinking. Angus wouldn’t go out drinking then Bon would be off doing his own thing. We had great times but once it was business that personal side of it may as well have not existed.’
The worst times were always after a bad gig or one that Malcolm had deemed not good enough. ‘Malcolm used to have this saying: “We could have been the fucking Beatles tonight and [the audience] still would have been the same.” He was always very unexcited about anything. If it was a bad gig absolutely nothing would be said, but nothing would need to be said, because it would be like a refrigerator in the room. Like a fucking big iceberg in there – as quiet as you could possibly imagine. And you’d be going, “Fuck, okay.” It would be oppressive, completely oppressive. But then those guys can get something across without saying anything, particularly Malcolm.’
The star of the show for Evans was always Bon. As a frontman, ‘He was the gold medallist, man.’ Angus may have been the centre of much of the attention, but from Evans’s vantage point on the stage, ‘Angus was riding shotgun. Angus was [Bon’s] little mate onstage – his little partner-in-crime. I think that says a lot about Bon’s stage presence and charisma that he was still very much the frontman.’ It was the same offstage, he says. ‘[Bon] was a very warm-hearted guy. Sure, he could get out of control and stuff, but the guy had impeccable manners.’ Once the band began to make it though, ‘he did feel a very strong responsibility and a duty to the image of Bon Scott, which would probably cause him to push the envelope a bit too far on occasion, you know?’ Some of that was front – ‘When you looked at him, there was this hard-assed rock’n’roller, but inside there was a hippy, let me tell you’ – but not all of it. ‘He could be a hard-ass when you wound him up! He was a tough guy, I’ll tell you. He was a softie at heart, but man, if you rattled his cage, he could fight. He could protect himself and a lot of people around him, oh yeah. Hard guy. Really hard guy when he got going.’
Just before Evans had arrived at Lansdowne Road, George Young had taken the band back into Alberts’ Sydney studio to record a new single. It was important to keep up the momentum. As if to cover all angles, it was decided to write a new song – called ‘High Voltage’, a promotional no-brainer dreamed up by the ever resourceful Chris Gilbey. To add the finishing touch, George decided, it would be built around the chords A, C, D and C. It sounded formulaic and it was. Yet with George on bass and Phil Rudd now providing the metronomic drums, all Angus and Malcolm had to do was vamp it up, Bon layering the cake with typical rock’n’roll rebel icing, railing against anybody unhip enough to ask him about the clothes he wears or why he grows his hair. Short, anthemic, and, in retrospect, more authentically AC/DC-sounding than anything from the album it steals its name from, ‘High Voltage’ was the first classic single from the band – and their first real hit when it was released in June. The first AC/DC single to get added to all the major radio station playlists, as well as teeing up several more Countdown appearances, eventually peaking at No. 6 in the national chart, it also helped drag the album it was named after back up the charts. By the end of that Australian winter, High Voltage had topped 150,000 sales. ‘For the population,’ says manager Michael Browning, ‘the album sales were just phenomenal.’
An indication of how far AC/DC had come was their headline appearance at Melbourne’s Festival Hall – with Stevie Wright (and another future Vanda and Young protégé, John Paul Young) in support: a complete reversal of their show opening for Wright at the Sydney Opera House exactly 12 months before. This though was another part of Gilbey’s marketing strategy. There was no way the band could have filled the venue on their own but with Wright on the bill too it became the biggest concert event in Melbourne that week. Certainly the subsequent film of the show – commissioned by Gilbey initially against the wishes of Ted Albert, who Gilbey says he ‘pushed into it’ – looks grand and exciting, helped again by some inspired ‘editing’ by Gilbey, who overdubbed applause lifted from George Harrison’s Concert For Bangladesh album. ‘We also had some guys waving big AC/DC banners that I think Chris paid to be there,’ remembers Browning. ‘It looked fantastic on video though.’ Something that would have unforeseen reverberations when it began to get shown privately in London some weeks later . . .
Conscious of the fact that while things in Melbourne had built in a pleasing crescendo for AC/DC, Sydney, conversely, both Alberts’ and the Youngs’ home, remained tantalisingly out of their reach commercially, George pressed for the band to return to King Street and begin work immediately on another album. The brothers were elated. It meant they could return home to the comforts of family life in Burwood. The rest of the band, led by Bon, who knew all about the pleasures Sydney had to offer, were also keen. With the three of them sharing one large open-plan room at the Squire Inn at Bondi Junction, most nights when they weren’t working in the studio would be spent across the road at a club called The Lifesaver. Nicknamed the Wife Swapper, and populated by groupies with attention-grabbing handles like Mandrax Margaret, Amphetamine Annie and Ruby Tuesday (the latter soon to be made famous in an AC/DC song called ‘Go Down’), life was an even bigger party than it had been at Lansdowne Road.
A bar-restaurant open each night until 2 a.m., the Wife Swapper became Bon’s ‘office’ throughout July and August. Making himself at home, he quickly hooked up with another teenage girlfriend-cum-fan: 16-year-old Helen Carter, a Bondi beach babe who’d been a regular pub-goer since her early teens, and would later form the post-punk outfit Do-Re-Mi (who hit the Oz charts in 1985 with the single ‘Man Overboard’). Sharing Bon’s bed at the Squire, though, meant sharing the room with Phil and Mark too. ‘Bon had the double bed because he was the oldest,’ she would tell Clinton Walker. ‘It was almost as if there was an invisible wall.’ The Bon Helen recalled was ‘meticulous’ in his dress sense: basic jeans and T-shirt uniform but always ‘perfectly laundered’; the sort of guy who washed his hair every day and styled it with a hairdryer. ‘He was very proud of his hair. He wasn’t just the archetypal grub rock’n’roller.’ Once across the road at the Wife Swapper though, it was a different story. In public, Bon had an image to live up to, though he would always warn Helen in advance not to take his ‘antics’ there too seriously. ‘You’d just be standing there trying to hold a normal conversation, and Bon would turn his back and say, “Don’t look.” The girl would just lift her dress and they’d start doing it. You’d think it couldn’t have been any fun for anybody.’
Some extra tracks had already been begun during the sessions for the ‘High Voltage’ single: a straight-ahead recording of their live staple, Chuck Berry’s ‘School Days’, and a re-recording of ‘Can I Sit Next To You Girl’, which lost a comma but gained immeasurably from the extra comic zest Bon’s lascivious vocal was able to bring to it. More significantly, they also recorded another new original; a typically bumptious Bon lyric set to a suitably hobnailed blues riff called ‘The Jack’ – Oz slang for venereal disease; a rowdy call-and-response version of which had already infiltrated their live set.
‘The Jack’ was destined to become one of the key moments of the AC/DC live set, where it remains to this day; a showpiece routine which their audiences never seem to tire of – despite its plodding musical backdrop and tediously repetitive chorus. And of course it was inspired, as almost always, by true-life events – in this case, when Malcolm received a letter from a now forgotten one-night stand informing him she had VD and so, in all probability, therefore, did he. Giving the note to Bon to gloat over, ‘I started playing a blues and we started [singing] together “She’s got the jack”. We sort of threw it away and didn’t worry about it, but then a couple of days later we just had a jam with it with the guys, a slow blues, and Bon started singing it again. [It] just evolved out of that, really.’ In fact, having ‘the jack’ was such a regular occurrence – the product of their habit of ‘sharing’ their groupies, as much as the ‘quality’ of the groupies in question, some of whom belonged to a brothel near to Lansdowne Road – Angus would later boast they ‘got group rates from the doctor’. Bon said he became so well-known to the doctors and nurses at the ‘clap clinic’ that while everyone else was called by number, when it came to him ‘it was just “Bon”’. The late Melody Maker writer, Carol Clerk, who got to know the band when they first came to London, recalled bumping into Angus in a bar once as he announced: ‘It’s Bon’s twenty-first!’ Knowing Bon was already closer to thirty, Clerk enquired further. ‘It turned out to be [Bon’s] twenty-first bout of gonorrhoea.’
Beneath the unbearably blokey exterior of ‘The Jack’, however, lay growing evidence of Bon Scott’s gift as a lyricist. Concerned with what the conservative, family-oriented Ted Albert – who’d already looked the other way once with ‘She’s Got Balls’ – would make of such graphic lines from ‘The Jack’ as ‘She was number nine ninety-nine on the clinical list / And I had to fall in love with that dirty little bitch . . .’, when George had a quiet word, asking him to change them, he was amazed and delighted when the singer merely grinned and came back with ‘She was holdin’ a pair but I had to try / Her deuce was wild but my ace was high . . .’ By turning the metaphor of ‘The Jack’ from VD to card game Bon had done something ‘so clever’, said George – also known for his ability to come up with lines on the spot if an idea wasn’t working – he felt he was dealing at last with a singer he could really do business with. So clever, in fact, that while it was the latter idea that made it onto the band’s next album, it was the original, ‘dirty’ lyric that Bon would always sing live.
As a lyric writer Bon had an amazing eye for detail yet wasted no time getting straight to the moral point of the story. He didn’t care that it made him look bad sometimes, or even absurd. Life would do that to you too and his songs were all scooped whole straight from real life – often in such high style they rivalled the work of old world European minstrel-storytellers like Jacques Brel. As riff-makers, the Young brothers shared the same minutely telling addiction to detail, but again they didn’t want to fuck around, they always got right into it: the smell, the action. The irony is that this intensely populist approach made them outsiders not just to the critics but to the entire rock’n’roll community of the Seventies. Yet because their songs always had humour, had attitude, in their desire to please no one but themselves they ended up appealing to everyman, becoming over time virtually critic-proof. ‘He had years of lyrics that his previous bands wouldn’t let him use,’ Malcolm reflected. ‘He could knock up a set of lyrics for a song overnight, with the help of a bottle of Jack Daniels. You’d read ’em and go: “That’s fucking eloquent, Bon.”’ In fact, Bon would often struggle with his lyrics, and become uncomfortable when praised for them. Angus: ‘If you asked him about his lyrics, he’d always just say it was toilet poetry. But he was gifted, believe me.’
Recording through the night at Alberts in July, the only other hiccup in the studio – and again it revolved around Bon – concerned what became the opening track, and something of a mission statement for AC/DC, ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll)’. The idea came from a line in Bon’s notebook that George had picked up on. ‘It was just sitting there. He hadn’t written any lyric for it, just the title.’ Again, the lyrics were diary entries – the no-holds-barred tale of what it actually takes to make it in a band. But set to such a joyously unstoppable come-on-in-the-water’s-fine riff that actually getting there sounds like it’s worth every rip-off, every disappointment, every broke day and lonely night. When George in a flash of inspiration suggested adding bagpipes to the maelstrom of guitars and drums – egged on by Bon having told him he used to play in a Scottish pipe band, not realising he meant he’d played drums, not the actual bagpipes – the singer, bending over backwards to please, simply grabbed the pipes and began blowing like his life depended on it as Malcolm and Angus looked on in comic disbelief. When, finally, he managed to get a passable drone out of them, George simply recorded the sound and, using the most rudimentary razorblade-to-tape technique, spliced it all together. ‘The whole song was made that way actually,’ recalls Mark Evans. ‘The riff came from these jams we were doing which Bon put words to and George sort of made something out of.’ Released as their next single, the result was their biggest Australian hit yet.
Having to play the pipes live, though, became such torture for Bon it became his least favourite moment in the set. ‘He grew to hate them,’ says Michael Browning. ‘In fact, I’d say having to play them put more pressure on him than anything else at that stage. It became one of those things the crowd always loved, but they were always going out of tune and Bon would be so out of breath from the show they could sound bloody terrible some nights.’
Other things were also starting to get Bon down, sending him into the blackest of moods. ‘Having to finish off the lyrics, or write the lyrics, or kind of just having it all together so that it coincided with the conclusion of the recording process. That was a particularly stressful period, I remember, for Bon.’ The three Young brothers would work together, the music written and recorded at lightning speed during the first week in the studio. But Bon would be left to come up with the lyrics on his own, expected just to have them all ready by the second week. Says Browning: ‘He was a fabulous lyricist but you can’t just pour it on and off, can you? He had a notebook thing that he used to put down ideas in it. I think he had concepts and ideas, then if Malcolm would come up with the riff, Bon would go, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got a song about ‘TNT’ . . .”’
The track ‘TNT’ – and title of the new album – was built around a chanted chorus inspired, says Mark Evans, by Angus’s stock answer to being asked how he was doing. ‘Angus had the saying – “I’m TNT, I’m dynamite” – he used to recite that all the time, like a Muhammad Ali float-like-a-butterfly sort of thing. We had a guitar to go with that but once we got in the studio how it ended up was completely different, because George changed it around.’ The thuggish riff Angus eventually concocted to go with it, with its baiting ‘Oi! Oi! Oi!’ opening gambit, anticipating the football-terrace backing vocals of punk by at least a year, conspired to make ‘TNT’ another that quickly became a live anthem. On the one hand, entirely throwaway – the first line of the second verse was lifted from a TV ad for fly spray – on the other, the product of more astute footwork on the studio floor from George. ‘When we were doing the lyrics,’ Angus recalled, ‘Bon came in and said, “I’m getting stuck with this chorus.” I was in the back there, chanting along, and George said, “What are you doing? Why don’t you hop out and do what you’re doing there? Try it.” So it started from that.’
The remaining three tracks that would comprise TNT were all written and recorded during these late-night sessions and were all prime-time AC/DC belters. Beginning with ‘Rock’n’Roll Singer’, which dated back to Dave Evans’s time again but now hit new levels of swagger and sweat with Bon’s own lyrics and piratical vocals, and a riff so catchy it would later be ‘borrowed’ by reinvented Brit rockers The Cult for their 1987 hit, ‘Wild Flower’. Of the remaining two tracks, the first, ‘Live Wire’, was a tour de force that would open almost every AC/DC show for the next five years; starting with an ominously rumbling bass figure like a distant train approaching at high speed, before erupting into full Bon-as-bad-motherfucker mode. The second track was a fast and furious piece of old-school rock called simply ‘Rocker’. Full of semi-ironical references to Cadillacs, teenage dreams, blue suede shoes and tattoos, it’s the sound of Fifties-style Jerry Lee Lewis channelled through the cheap stereo speakers of a teenage hoodlum from the Seventies. Less than three minutes long on record, live it would blossom to become a 10-minute Angus showcase, the one where he ran riot through the audience, taking the basic high-speed riff and spinning it like spaghetti into crazy new shapes as the band thundered away behind him.
With the album recorded, mixed and mastered in just two weeks, AC/DC continued on their mission to win over the rest of Australia, beginning with Sydney. A free show at Victoria Park was announced for early September and Chris Gilbey set to work devising a new radio campaign that would really ram home the group’s image as credible rockers, as well as Countdown regulars. Taking his inspiration from a saying well-known at the time in the UK but less so in Australia – ‘Your mother wouldn’t like it’ (the title of a nightly rock show on London’s premier commercial radio channel, Capital, hosted by Nicky Horne) – Gilbey concocted a radio campaign based on vox-pop interviews done with young fans on Bondi beach. When most of them turned out not to have actually heard of AC/DC, he simply asked them to talk about whichever bands they did know and like, then edited down the tapes to make it sound like they were talking about AC/DC. Hence the radio voice asking: ‘What do you like about Angus?’ The answer: ‘I like his legs!’ coming from a quote about Sherbet singer Daryl Braithwaite. A further element was added when Gilbey picked up on the deep and sexy voice of a friend’s girlfriend, who he told to ‘do a stoned rave’ as she pretended to be the outraged mother of a kid who wants to go and see AC/DC. ‘She did this whole thing about how disgusting and awful AC/DC are – it was perfect!’
Gilbey added one final touch to the ads: the voice of well-known Australian radio announcer Mike Drayson, intoning the line Chris had written for him: ‘AC/DC – they’re not a nice band.’ It worked: the Victoria Park show was a triumph and the High Voltage album headed back up the chart again. Suddenly AC/DC were as big and well-known in Sydney as in Melbourne and, increasingly, everywhere else in Australia. Back in Melbourne, where the band had returned to sign a new five-year management contract with Michael Browning, the band’s first major venue headlining tour of Australia was announced for December, in time for the much-hyped pre-Christmas release of the TNT album. Longer-term plans were also now afoot to get them over to London for a quick promotional trip. No AC/DC records had yet been issued outside Australia and New Zealand, and the chances of some UK-based record company executive wandering into a show in Sydney or Melbourne were so remote Browning felt sure the best way to make it happen was to put the band where all the top A&R men could see them – under their noses in London.
Meanwhile, with one foot of the band still very much in the pop world of Countdown, Browning had booked them into a week-long series of free school holiday lunchtime concerts in the girls’ clothing section of the Myer department store in Melbourne. The idea was to ramp up the PR for the band while at the same time reinforcing their teenage fan-base – a no-brainer on paper that backfired spectacularly when thousands of fans tried to get into the first show. With the band literally swept off the tiny in-store stage, they had to stop playing halfway through the second song and make a dash for the safety of the changing rooms. Bon had his jeans partly ripped off and lost both his shoes, while Malcolm was knocked flying and came back with a large cut above his eye. The store, meanwhile, was wrecked, with the cost of the damage – and the many items simply stolen – reckoned to be in the tens of thousands. Pat Pickett, an old larrikin pal of Bon’s who had recently talked himself into a job with the band as Bon’s ‘Percy’ – personal roadie – recalls how ‘they expected seven or nine hundred kids [but] seven to ten thousand turned up, something ridiculous. It was sort of terrifying.’ Even when Pat managed to get Bon out through a back door and onto a passing tram, dozens of girls managed to follow them onto it. ‘They [were] tearing us to bits. It was freaky . . .’
It wasn’t just the girls that liked them either. With the band also astutely booked into half a dozen school halls and holiday camps, Angus recalled doing ‘a gig for a school of deaf children. They sat at the front of the stage, put their ears to the ground and soaked up the vibration. And they fucking loved it, even the youngest ones.’ As Jerry Ewing says, ‘I guess it was similar to the way teenyboppers in England were into the Bay City Rollers. Plus it was Australian – no one had any idea that most of them came from Scotland – it was ours.’ He was one of many 11-year-olds at his Sydney school now obsessed with AC/DC: ‘We all had long hair. We all loved AC/DC. There were kids that didn’t, but they were like the outsiders, the nerds. It was like every kid in Australia was into AC/DC.’
To add to the impression, in October the band was invited to perform live at the annual TV Week magazine King Of Pop awards, which were televised nationally. Unlike Countdown, watched faithfully each week by a loyal audience, the King Of Pop awards show was billed as family viewing, so drawing a much larger, broader-based audience – the first time AC/DC had been seen in this regard. Determined to steal the show, Bon again rose to the occasion, vamping it up in skin-tight white trousers, white drawstring waistcoat opened to the navel, no shirt, and a plum-coloured Teddy Boy drape jacket – all set off nicely by a bright red, outsized bowtie strapped across his bare throat. With Angus in what looked like a freshly laundered blue school uniform and Malcolm still squeezing his little legs into knee-length high-heeled boots, Phil and Mark having trouble keeping the grins off their faces, it became the most talked-about highlight of the show. Keen to leave the right impression on the show’s producers, at the after-show dinner that night Bon pulled a large and noisy vibrator from out of his jacket pocket, waving it around in the face of a lady TV Week executive. Happy drunk Bon turned into angry drunk Bon, though, later, when he ripped apart dozens of issues of the magazine that had been left in piles for guests to take home with them. He then grabbed a cooked turkey from one of the catering tables and filled its empty carcass to the brim with champagne, and used it as a kind of surreal goblet, taking gulps of champagne between mouthfuls of the bird’s meat. All of which he just about got away with; until he swapped the champagne for his own urine then handed it to Daryl Braithwaite, who happened to be passing, inviting him to have a swig – which the Sherbet vocalist duly did. Then spat out onto the floor as Bon looked on and roared with laughter, and the rest of the room pretended not to notice.
Bon was too drunk to realise he’d stopped being funny, but the fact is there was a genuinely antisocial side to AC/DC. As Anthony O’Grady later observed, ‘You’d say hi to them and they’d look at you sideways like, “Whaddya saying hi to me for?”’ It was also a sign of how out of control Bon’s drinking had become again since finding success with AC/DC. Alcohol, it seemed, was something Bon simply could not do without – except on those occasions when he would ‘white knuckle it’ and go days, sometimes weeks without a drink, before descending into yet more bingeing. Even when he was off the booze he would still start each day by gargling Coonawarra red wine mixed with honey – the secret ingredient to his singing voice, he claimed. But then before a show each night he would also ‘gargle’ with port, which he said gave his voice its raspy edge. The fact that he didn’t always spit out the gargled wine afterwards was neither here nor there. He said.
AC/DC’s first nationwide headline tour of major venues kicked off on Tuesday, 4 November, with a sold-out show at the 5,400-capacity Festival Hall in Melbourne. Still playing pubs and clubs, hotels and school halls, practically up to the day the tour started, right from the word go everyone, including Michael Browning and George Young, who’d seen it all before, felt they were now operating on a different level. Nevertheless, as Angus would point out, the size of the crowds may have got bigger but the way they viewed the band hadn’t. If anything, he laughed, things had got even more rowdy. ‘Dodge a bottle here, dodge a fist there. The only time they’d stop trying to pick a fight with us was when it was hard and fast. Songs could start off slow but they might have to speed up in the middle!’ Then there was the perennial problem of returning to places where previously they had laid waste to the town groupies – many of whom now had disgruntled husbands and boyfriends. ‘Upsetting the diggers’, as Bon put it. Malcolm recalled how at one show in Victoria, ‘all the youth of the town were ready to beat the shit out of us!’ They got used to running straight off the stage each night and onto the tour bus. ‘They’d like a bit of a car chase, and Phil is a maniac behind the wheel so if any shit like that went on, Phil was doing his driving and all sorts of tricks. We used to get out in the bush roads and pull around corners, quickly pull over, all lights out, hide! And we’d watch the guys go screaming past, crank up and go back into town, then get their women . . .’
Other times the band came up with more ingenious ways of getting out of trouble. When they played a special New Year’s Eve show in Adelaide and there was a power cut halfway through the set, a near riot ensued, with hundreds of angry, drunken punters storming the stage and trying to smash the equipment. Overpowered, the band exited the stage, wondering what to do next. Fortunately, Molly Meldrum was there and it was he who suggested Bon take his bagpipes out into the crowd and try and provide some sort of distraction, until things calmed down again and/or the power was turned back on. The rest of the band, harking to the sound of smashing glass and breaking metal beyond the dressing room door, thought this a very bad idea. But Bon the Likeable decided to give it a go – after all, it was as though Molly had dared him and he wasn’t going to back down in front of that cobber. Going out a back door and around to the front of the venue, moments later Bon seemed to appear out of nowhere in the middle of the crowd, perched atop Pat Pickett’s muscular shoulders and blowing for all his might on those bloody bagpipes that he hated so much. Remarkably, it worked. The crowd began to listen then laugh at the sight of the shirtless and sweating singer wobbling around making a fearful noise. By the time the chimes of midnight were being called in the power was back on and the band was blasting away like nothing had happened. It was, says Mark Evans, ‘a bloody good way to see in the New Year – and very typical of Bon’.
The same month ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll)’ was released as a single. The band had already performed it twice on Countdown before it hit the shops, and by the end of January 1976 it had become the first AC/DC single to reach the Australian Top 5. The real celebrations, though, were kept for the chart performance of the TNT album, released in time for the Christmas shopping spree. Just as Chris Gilbey and Michael Browning had anticipated, initial sales were through the roof, the album selling more than 11,000 copies in its first week of release, taking it straight into the charts at No. 2, kept off the top spot only by Bob Dylan’s newly released Desire album. Within weeks, TNT had gone to No. 1 – on its way to becoming the biggest-selling album by a domestic Australian act in 1976. As Harry Vanda later observed, ‘TNT was the one that really pulled the identity; like, this is AC/DC [and] that’s who it’s going to be and that’s how it’s going to stay.’ The rave review in Juke magazine described it as ‘an instruction manual for a rock and roll band’ and that’s exactly what it was. But then the promotional campaign Chris Gilbey had devised for the album was also extremely persuasive, white-label copies of the record being sent out to all the most influential journalists and radio people wrapped in a pair of red ladies’ panties with a black-and-white insignia over the crotch that read simply: ‘Dynamite’.
The second AC/DC album also helped send their first album back into the charts. Within 12 months, according to Browning, TNT had sold ‘around 300,000 in Australia’. Added to the approximately 150,000 sales of High Voltage and the accumulated sales of their three Top 10 singles, and there were over half a million AC/DC records sold in Australia in the two years since Bon Scott had joined. Yet nobody was getting rich just yet. ‘There was a stream of income from record sales,’ says Browning, ‘but I mean, the groups in those days were on a very small percentage of retail, so it wasn’t huge. It wasn’t like it is these days.’ Indeed, on the band’s meagre 3.4 per cent royalty rate, approximately 450,000 total sales at a time when albums retailed for around A$3.50, would have given AC/DC an income of around A$53,550, or very roughly speaking around £34,000. Split five ways, less Michael’s 20 per cent management commission and tax, spread over two years, it was clear that Australian success alone was never going to be enough to do more than keep the band going long enough to make another album that was hopefully as successful. Fortunately for them, even as they set out on what they dubbed the Lock Up Your Daughters Summer Vacation Tour of ’75–’76, Michael Browning was on the brink of something momentous that would make the achievement of conquering Australia seem simple and meagre by comparison. Something that would mean they could leave Australia behind. The gang had had their fun, taken what they wanted. Time now for them to move on to the next place of rich pickings . . .
Phil Carson was a musician whose biggest claim to fame was working on the road in the late Sixties as the bass player for Dusty Springfield. By 1970, however, he’d swapped his guitar for a desk and was fronting the London office of Polar Music, the Swedish record label that was first home to Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus – a working relationship that eventually resulted in Abba signing to Atlantic Records for America and Canada. By 1973 Carson had also moved on to become Senior Vice President at Atlantic – appointed when they opened their first London offices in Berners Street, just around the corner from Oxford Circus – and was a major contributor in the early Seventies in the development of its trio of groundbreaking English bands: Led Zeppelin, Yes, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Carson had also been responsible for bringing Richard Branson’s fledgling Virgin Records label to Atlantic, via a lucrative distribution deal for the US, the first fruits of which was Mike Oldfield’s multimillion-selling Tubular Bells, one of the classic albums of the period and which also became the soundtrack for one of the most memorable hit Hollywood movies of the era, The Exorcist.
In 1976, another British band that Carson was hoping to lead into the big time was Back Street Crawler, the outfit formed around the talented but doomed former Free guitarist Paul Kossoff, who’d been signed personally to Atlantic by its co-founder, Ahmet Ertegun. Naturally keen to try and fulfil his boss’s ambitions for the intermittently interesting blues-rock itinerant, Carson had nursed along their debut album, The Band Plays On, only to see keyboardist and Kossoff’s chief co-songwriter Mike Montgomery throw in the towel after it became clear the guitarist’s chronic drug dependency was not going to change any time soon. Thinking on his feet, Carson came up with what on paper appeared to be the ideal solution: the recruitment on keyboards of another prolific songwriter – and former band mate of Kossoff’s – named John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick. Born in Houston, Texas, the 27-year-old Rabbit had arrived in Britain three years before as a member of American reggae star Johnny Nash’s backing band. Offered the chance to play on Bob Marley & The Wailers’ debut Island Records album, Catch A Fire, Rabbit became such a sought-after presence on the London session scene he found himself recording – and writing six of the ten tracks on – the post-Free album Kossoff, Kirke, Tetsu And Rabbit – before being invited to join the re-formed Free with both Kossoff and vocalist Paul Rodgers for what turned out to be their final album together, Heartbreaker, in 1973. Since then he had become the go-to keyboardist for artists such as Sandy Denny, John Martyn, Jim Capaldi and Kevin Ayers. At the time Phil Carson decided to seek him out as a possible replacement for Montgomery in Back Street Crawler, Rabbit had just finished playing on the sound-track album for The Rocky Horror Picture Show movie. He was also being managed by the same company that handled Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Gil Scott-Heron. Also working at the company was a beautiful young Australian go-getter named Coral Browning – Michael’s younger sister.
‘In those days the British music business was being run by a handful of companies all basically within walking distance of each other in London,’ Carson remembers now. ‘I remember calling Coral on the phone about Rabbit and her saying she’d swing by my office later that day to talk it over and go through the paperwork. Next thing I know there’s the vision of a 23-year-old-ish willowy brunette. We laugh about this now because I still see her from time to time, but I’ll never forget it. She’s wearing this almost see-through Laura Ashley print dress. I managed to position her between the sunlight and my desk and there I am having a fucking good time, you know. She was pretty good-looking but completely professional . . .’ A deal was agreed for Rabbit to play on the next Back Street Crawler album, as well as join them for some American dates. ‘The whole thing was done in fifteen minutes, but I was in no hurry for her to leave, you know? I’m quite happy to carry on chatting so when she says something about, “I hope you don’t mind, but my brother has this group he’s managing . . .” I don’t mind at all! I mean, in the Seventies, who the fuck cared about Australia? But I cared because Coral Brown looked really hot and she was Australian. At that point she could have sold me anything . . .’
Phil sat there as this determined young woman gave him her pitch. ‘She told me that the band had already sold over 100,000 records back home, which was huge back then for Australia.’ His attention finally shifted to what it was she was actually talking about, when Coral pulled out ‘this briefcase type thing, inside of which was like a mini-movie projector. I’d never seen anything like it before and suddenly my curiosity was really sparked. She turned it on and there was this film clip of this band playing a gig somewhere and the whole crowd going apeshit, holding up banners and things with the name of the band on it: AC/DC.’ The clip came from the promotional film Chris Gilbey had commissioned of the band’s Melbourne’s Festival Hall show back in June. The briefcase came from Michael Browning’s time in London with Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs. ‘I’d seen it in a shop window in Melbourne, this little briefcase with a video thing that folded up in a briefcase. I thought to myself, wow, what a great thing to take over to London to show a clip of Billy and The Aztecs. Videos were made in film in those days so we transferred it onto a format that worked in this briefcase and I went over there and it worked really well. Everyone would be amazed that someone would come into their office and pull out this briefcase and show them a music clip.’ When Michael left London he gave the case and cine projector to Coral, who had come over with him but now decided to stay on. Later, Browning had sent her the AC/DC tape purely on the off-chance that it might enable his sister ‘to rustle up a few gigs in London whenever we finally got there’. Which is what Coral had been trying to do when she received the phone call from Phil Carson enquiring about Rabbit.
‘She told me she was putting together an itinerary for them based on whatever pub and club gigs she could cobble together – hoping to get the band a record deal on the basis of dragging some A&R men down to them.’ Carson, however, had other ideas. ‘I think I watched less than two minutes of [the film clip] then told her to turn it off. Coral looked at me, like, “But you’ve hardly seen anything yet. Don’t you like it?” I said, “I’ve seen enough. Let’s make a deal. Get your brother on the phone . . .”’ It was nearly three o’clock in the morning in Melbourne but Michael Browning was used to getting phone calls in the middle of the night. According to Carson, he and Browning agreed a deal for AC/DC then and there for 15 albums at $25,000 per album in advance. ‘One album firm, with options for two more albums a year and then more yearly options, adding up to fifteen albums, and a $25,000 advance with everything recoupable. Plus the record label – Alberts – at their expense had to send them to England. I told them to forget about bringing them in for a few club shows on their own, that I would put them on the next Back Street Crawler tour – much higher profile. Michael got it. He realised that for this unknown band from this country that nobody cares about to be signed to Atlantic Records and be guaranteed what ought to be a pretty decent tour of England, as against just coming over and hoping you’re gonna get signed, really was a big opportunity.’
Michael Browning, however, has a somewhat different recollection. ‘I knew it was our big chance to get the band out of Australia but didn’t really do the deal until I flew over to London the following week. And I think fifteen albums is a bit exaggerated. I think it was probably for five albums. And I seem to recall the advances were $35,000, rising gradually for delivery of each of those albums.’ Carson says he recalls the deal coming with a royalty of 12 per cent. This Browning does not dispute. ‘The twelve per cent would have been what we used to call in Australia a third-party deal. The deal was between Atlantic and Alberts, it wasn’t between the group and Atlantic. All of the royalties and advances went directly back to Alberts and there would have been a split between the group and Alberts – from memory, a fifty-fifty split on international income.’ In short, the band would end up with approximately 6 per cent of Atlantic-generated revenue. Out of that, says Browning, the band’s 50 per cent share of the 12 per cent from international income would be set against un-recouped advances before they were paid out. ‘They would have to recoup the advances that were paid to sustain the living expenses of the group when we first went over there [to London] and subsequent tour supports. I virtually didn’t get anything out of it. To be honest, I just went and did the deal because I wanted to. And I think they paid my airfare to go over and tour. I think that was about all I got out of it.’
Atlantic coming in when it did was a big lifeline though, he says, ‘because even though the record sales were good in Australia, no one was really that excited. It was always the challenge of doing it outside of Australia. It was just a given that you were gonna sell a lot of records here, given that whole teenybopper thing. I mean, it was good and everyone was happy. But it wasn’t really what it was all about [for AC/DC]. The Atlantic thing, although financially it wasn’t a huge deal, in terms of advances and that type of thing – it was a huge thing that we had the opportunity and the vehicle to do what we wanted to do, which was to make it internationally.’
Money-wise, AC/DC were able to take the Carson deal because they had that cushion of money already from their Australian success. They weren’t rich but they weren’t begging. ‘The advances overseas weren’t as crucial as they would have been for someone starting from scratch in England or America. Basically, what I did was go to Ted Albert and say, “Whatever the advance I end up negotiating, I want you to put that back into providing a source of revenue for the group to go over there, live there for a while and gig, do whatever.” Which he agreed to, and allowed us to go over there and do what we initially did.’
For Phil Carson, the motivation was simple. ‘I thought, nobody can say I’ve done a bad deal whatever happens, because I actually think they can sell a few records, by the way.’ There was just one hitch. Jerry Greenburg in New York was the President of Atlantic. And while Phil ran Atlantic everywhere outside America, it was Greenberg to whom he had to report. Phil had never done a deal without first running it by Jerry. But Jerry was on vacation and Coral was very persuasive in her thin floral-print dress, so Phil just went ahead. He would deal with Jerry in his own time. He also had what he felt was one other important card up his sleeve. As he says, by 1976 ‘my position at Atlantic Records was totally fireproof. I was the go-to guy for Led Zeppelin. I was one of the only people [fearsome Zep manager] Peter Grant would talk to.’ He had also engineered the deal that brought Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells to Atlantic in America. Yet Carson’s bravado would have both short- and long-term consequences for AC/DC’s prospects outside Australia that neither he nor they could have anticipated. ‘I told Coral to send me over both their albums and that I would take them home that night and listen to them,’ he smiles. ‘As far as I was concerned, the deal was done.’
Done perhaps but not quite dusted. And nor would it be – certainly not in America – for some years to come. Not that anyone, not even Phil Carson, was thinking that far ahead yet. No one, that is, except the brothers.