I came to in a hospital bed with tubes running out of my arms, feeling very tired and very hungry. For a moment, I had no idea where I was or why. Then a smiley-faced man appeared and asked me how I was doing – and I remembered that I’d just had the first operation to try and fix my hearing. I was in Sydney, Australia. It was October 2015.
The guy was a nurse, it turned out, and when we got chatting and he realized who I was, he told me something that left me reeling – Malcolm was a resident of the care facility just over the wall outside my window. That was where he was being treated for his early-onset dementia. I couldn’t believe it. Not only was Malcolm just twenty yards from me, but this nurse also did shifts over there – and one of his jobs was to take him out for his daily exercise.
‘Could I see him?’ I asked. ‘I would love to sit and have a chat with him, you know, see how he’s doing.’ The smiley-faced man stopped smiling and dropped his eyes. ‘Sorry, mate, I can’t do that. It’s the family’s wishes.’
I told him I understood. In the next building was the man who I’d shared a stage with for thirty-five years. The man who’d hired me as the lead singer of AC/DC. The man who’d cared about me so much, he once visited my hometown to meet my parents. He’d even taken my dad for a pint at his club – I mean, who does that?
But I couldn’t see or talk to him. It was like he’d become the man in the iron mask.
It’s a tough thing, to shed tears in front of a stranger.
I later learned that it was Malcolm’s wife who didn’t allow visitors.
She was just looking out for her husband, like she always did.
Angus visited him, as did his grandchildren, who I’m told made him very happy.
But it broke my heart all the same.
The next day, the guy who’d operated on my ears – Dr. Chang – came to see me and got straight to the point.
‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘Which do you want first?’
‘This sounds like the start of a joke,’ I told him.
‘There’s no punchline, I’m afraid,’ he said.
I asked him to start with the bad news, to get it over with.
‘Okay,’ began Dr. Chang, ‘so we operated on your left ear, but as hard as we tried not to do any damage, you lost pretty much 100 per cent of your hearing in that ear. I’m sorry. We did everything we could.’
I closed my eyes and felt myself going numb.
Deaf in one ear.
Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .
‘The good news is that we got to your right ear in time,’ Dr. Chang went on, ‘and we were able to retain about 50 per cent of your hearing in that one, which should be enough to stay on the tour. You’ll just have to adjust the mix that you get in your earpiece monitor.’
This was a bigger deal than it sounded. For as long as I’d used an earpiece monitor, I’d never put it in my left ear. That was the ear I used to listen to the band, while the monitor went in my right ear, so I could hear my own voice. But now that I was deaf in my left ear, I wouldn’t be able to hear the band, so I’d need to get a mix of both the band and my vocals in my earpiece – and all with just 50 percent of my hearing left in that ear. It would be a nightmare. But I’d have to find a way to make it work . . .
That was when it dawned on me that Dr. Chang had been trying to soften the blow.
There really hadn’t been any good news at all.
Dr. Chang at least said I’d be okay to play the upcoming show at ANZ Stadium, right there in Sydney – as long as I promised him that I’d never fly again on the day of a show.
So, I pushed ahead . . . and I got through the show, followed by eight more in Australia, then another two in New Zealand. But it was tough going with just one ‘good’ ear.
Finally, after New Zealand, we had a four-month gap until the Rock or Bust World Tour moved to Europe – so I could get some proper rest and get myself back on track.
Then the phone rang. It was Tim, our tour manager.
‘Hello Brian,’ he said. ‘I’m pleased to say the tour’s been going so well, we’re going to add twenty shows in America before we head to Europe. That okay with you?’
Telling my bandmates that I was deaf in one ear, half deaf in the other, and that I needed time to rest my ears and work with Dr. Chang was as difficult and embarrassing as I’d feared.
Everyone was sympathetic, of course. But the twenty new American shows had been locked in.
‘What do you think, Jonna?’ Angus asked me. ‘Can you do it?’
‘I’m not going to let anybody down,’ I told him, ‘but if my hearing gets any worse, I’ll have to stop.’
It was a dreadful, desperate time. We at least got a long break for Christmas and the New Year, during which I made a couple of visits to a specialist hospital near my home in Sarasota, where doctors tried to strengthen what little hearing I had left . . . by injecting steroids directly into my eardrum. Not a pleasant experience.
At the same time, back in Newcastle, my great friend Brendan Healy, the musician and comedian, was dying of cancer – and his condition had taken a turn for the worse. I’d known Brendan since I was in The Jasper Hart Band, and we’d both later become members of the same drinking society, The Legion of the Damned. Tragically, we’d lost another member, the guitarist Dave Black, just a few months earlier. He’d been found dead after being struck by a train. He was only sixty-two years old.
Because of the situation with my ears, the next chance I would get to fly back to see Brendan would be at the end of February. ‘Brendan,’ I pleaded with him on the telephone. ‘Keep fighting, mate. I’ll be there as fast as I can. Can you do that for me?’
‘Well,’ said Brendan, who never lost his sense of humour, ‘if you insist . . .’
The American gigs that followed – Tacoma, Las Vegas, Denver, Fargo and St. Paul – were some of the most difficult of my life. They were all arenas, for a start, which are much louder than outdoor stadiums. Hardly able to hear the band through my earpiece, I had to watch Cliff’s fingers on his bass to see where we were in each song. I was constantly looking over to the side of the stage to John, my sound man, going, ‘Is this okay?’
Some of the songs were almost impossible.
One night, I had to do ‘Highway to Hell’ and couldn’t for the life of me find the note. I just said to the audience, ‘Come on, you’re going to have to help me out here.’ I had no idea what key I was in . . . thank God they did. I was mortified when I came off stage. I knew that I couldn’t go on like this. It was crippling. Something had to give.
Then, just as we got to Chicago – three days before I was due to fly back to Newcastle – I got a call from Brendan’s home number in Haydon Bridge. It was his son Jack with the news that I’d been dreading. Brendan hadn’t been able to hold on any longer.
We’d lost him.
I felt so useless and empty after Brendan died. He was only fifty-nine years old, with so much life left to live. Everyone who knew him was devastated. I hate the C-word, but cancer really is a c * * *, it has taken far too many of my family members and friends.
There were four more AC/DC shows before Brendan’s funeral, and they went by in a blur.
The last of them was at Sprint Center in Kansas City. The moment the show ended at 11 p.m., I rushed to the airport, took a jet to New York, then a long-haul flight to London, followed by another flight to Newcastle, arriving just as the service was starting.
Everyone who was anyone in Newcastle was there.
Except for Brendan, of course.
But true to form, he found a way to get a big laugh. At the end of the service, as his coffin was being moved into the crematorium incinerator and the curtain closed, there was a deafening roar as we all cheered and applauded the man we’d all loved.
‘Actually,’ coughed the priest, with a little smile, ‘Brendan left instructions if this happened.’
Then he nodded his head, the curtains reopened, and out came Brendan’s coffin again.
It was his final encore.
We all laughed hysterically and sobbed our hearts out at the same time – not an easy thing to do.
When I got back to America, everything was different.
I wasn’t just struggling to hear any more.
I couldn’t hear anything.
A murderous silence had descended, leaving me feeling trapped and very alone.
Whether it was the flights to the funeral that made it worse, or just the natural progression of my condition, the situation had become critical. When I phoned Dr. Chang in Australia to tell him, he ordered me to go immediately to a hearing institute near my home in Sarasota and get tests. So off I went – and the verdict wasn’t good.
‘Mr. Johnson,’ said the doctor, ‘your ears are an absolute mess. This is very serious. And I’m told that you’re on tour. You’re not doing any more shows are you?’
‘Actually,’ I admitted, ‘I’ve got another show in Atlanta in two days’ time.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Absolutely not. You cannot do it.’
‘But I have to do it. I’ve got a contract.’
‘Mr. Johnson, what you’ve just suffered is a temporary complete hearing loss. If it happens again, it could be permanent. You’d be completely deaf, and at that point, your only option would be implants. We’d have to put you under and make an incision from each ear all the way down to the back of your skull, and the implants would stick out, so the batteries could be changed. You could suffer nerve damage, balance problems, tinnitus, there are all kinds of risks. And your brain would have to relearn to hear, which could take months – and what you’d hear would be synthetic. So, I’ll say this one last time. Stop now. Or risk never hearing and singing again.’
The message had finally got through.
I called Tim, the tour manager, on my mobile right there in the room to tell him that I just couldn’t continue. It was one of the most difficult conversations of my life – the pain of it made worse over the weeks that followed when the tour simply went on without me.
When I had to leave AC/DC in February 2016, it was a sheer cliff. I didn’t tumble down, I was in freefall.
For most people, hearing loss is slow and manageable – a normal part of getting older. Not for me. One minute, I’d been travelling the world with a rock’n’roll band, singing to millions at packed-out stadiums. The next, the world had fallen silent, and it was like I was looking out at my own life from behind soundproofed glass.
I’d always been told there’s nothing you can do about your hearing going. It’s like being shot on the battlefield – it’s just your turn. But no one had ever warned me about the awkwardness of not being able to understand, the sense of futility as you try to overcome what is a very real physical disability, not to mention the crushing sense of loneliness you feel when you finally realize, fuck, this is how things are going to be from now on. As The Beatles’ producer George Martin once put it, you find yourself becoming the nodding dog at the dinner table.
Part of the pain of it was that I blamed myself.
For most of my career, I’d been in the loudest band in the world. I’d flown constantly. I’d flown even when I knew I wasn’t well . . .
For a while, people would ask me if I was depressed. But depression is treatable. My hearing loss wasn’t. What I was feeling wasn’t depression. It was something closer to despair.
In my situation, others might have turned to drugs – or worse, therapy. But neither of those things are my style. So, I just went into my office and buried my head in a bottle of whisky. And before you start worrying, don’t – I made sure that it was the good stuff.
I was replaced for the rest of the Rock or Bust World Tour by Axl Rose. I’m told that he did a great job. But I just couldn’t watch, especially when you’ve been doing it for thirty-five years. It’s like finding a stranger in your house, sitting in your favourite chair. But I bear no grudges. It was a tough situation. Angus and the lads did what they felt they had to do.
That said, after the band released a statement confirming that I was leaving the tour and wishing me all the best for the future, I couldn’t relax or concentrate on anything.
It was just always there.
Then the calls started coming in.
Joe Walsh from The Eagles was the first, God bless him. Then it was Billy Connolly . . . ‘How ya doin’ Brian, does this mean we’re not going to hear those dulcet tones from you any more?’ which made me smile for the first time. Then my pal Roger Daltrey, who I’d first met backstage at Top of the Pops – then Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, sending me their love and support.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but most of them had hearing issues of their own. ‘There are only five restaurants I go to in New York, because they’re the only ones I can hear in,’ said Sting, adding that he blamed ‘cymbals, of all things’.
Then the letters came, and kept on coming, from all over the world. Sacks of them. They were from people wishing me well and hoping I would one day sing on stage again. These people were the fans and I have to say it helped me more than you’ll ever know. I wrote back to as many as I could. It was heartfelt. Thank you all so much for the kind words. They got me through.
Meanwhile, I distracted myself by doing the other thing I’ve always loved: racing cars.
Funnily enough, I found myself winning more than usual. People would come up to me afterwards and say, ‘Brian, you’re fearless!’ But I wasn’t fearless. I just didn’t fucking care any more. I’d always thought that the best way to go out would be at 180 mph, flat-out around a corner. You’d hit the wall and boom, it would be over, just like that.
Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to die . . .
I just wouldn’t have minded all that much.
Then one day I was contacted by a wonderful man named Stephen Ambrose, an audio and hearing expert from Nashville who’d started making in-ear monitors back in the 1960s, when he was a teenager. When we first met up, he brought along this machine that looked like a car battery, and he hooked me up to it, then put me through all kinds of tests. The way he explained it, the earpiece part of it was a kind of prosthetic eardrum, using a tiny inflatable bubble to conduct the sound. At the time, he was still working on miniaturizing it, which he’s since achieved.
Whatever magic he used, it worked. I could hear again – even in my deaf ear, meaning I was able to enjoy stereo for the first time since that flight to Vancouver in 2015.
Suddenly, I felt something that I hadn’t felt in what seemed like an eternity.
Hope.
Four months after leaving the AC/DC tour, I flew back to Britain to see my family and some friends – but no sooner had I arrived in Newcastle with my wife Brenda than the phone rang.
‘Hello Brian, it’s Peter Mensch. I’m managing Muse now.’
It was great to hear Peter’s voice after so many years. I told him I thought Muse were a really solid band.
‘Well, they’ll be glad to hear that . . . because they’d love you to sing “Back in Black” with them.’
‘What? Really? When?’
‘Tomorrow. At Glastonbury.’
Now, by this point my hearing had got a lot better, but I hadn’t performed on stage since the AD/DC show in Kansas before I flew home for Brendan Healy’s funeral. I looked over at my wife, Brenda, who’d overheard the conversation, and she gave me a ‘just do it’ look.
Next thing I knew, I was with the boys from Muse, running through the song behind a curtain at one of the backstage areas of the festival. But it was loud enough for people to overhear, and the second I walked out, there was a mob of promoters – a guy from Germany, in particular – all wanting to know what I was doing there. That was when I realized it would probably be a good idea to let AC/DC know what I was doing. So, I phoned George Fearon in New York, and he asked me if I could give him twenty minutes to talk to the band’s lawyers to see if there’d be any legal issues. And, of course, this being the music business . . . there were legal issues.
Lots and lots – and lots – of legal issues.
I couldn’t do it. I had to back out.
I felt terrible, especially after Peter and Muse had gone out of their way to ask me to sing.
‘Well, how about Reading next year?’ asked Peter. ‘We’ll sort out all the legal stuff by then.’
‘If you remember . . . I’ll do it,’ I told him.
He did remember.
And although I was nervous before I went on, it was wonderful – and when we had finished Matt Bellamy came over and gave me a great hug on stage.
That’s when it all came flooding back. The excitement. The fun. The noise. There’s nothing like playing live rock’n’roll, and I got my life back – it just flew out there over all these kids in the audience, college-age kids who’d been singing along, because somehow they knew every word. My daughters were crying. My wife was crying. ‘I wish all my sets were this short,’ I told Matt, laughing with relief. It was only one song but after two years of silence, it felt like a victory.
A couple of months later we lost Malcolm. His funeral was at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney at the end of 2017.
He was just sixty-four when the dementia that he’d been battling for years finally got the better of him.
A truly awful day.
O’Linda his wife, Ross and Cara, his children, led the mourning. Malcolm’s Gretsch guitar was next to his casket. And when the mass ended, the family followed the pallbearers out to the hearse. Out on the street were the massed band of Scottish pipes and drums. The cortege set off to the tune of ‘Waltzing Matilda’. I hope you can imagine it. The crowds, the tears, the pride and the love for one man.
When Malcolm left AC/DC back in 2014, the heart of the band stopped beating. To this day, I miss him more than I could ever put into words. He never missed a trick, from a band member’s performance to a crew member’s well-being. I don’t know how he did it. He had his demons, but he beat them, and he beat them good. His guitar playing was masterful. And behind that powerful sound, there was a subtlety that music critics could never understand. Standing to his right on stage, I could only ever marvel at the man. But I kept my admiration to myself for the most part because he wasn’t the kind of guy who enjoyed taking a compliment.
It was hard to see Angus struggle with such grief.
He and Malcolm weren’t twins, but they could have been.
And to have lost him so soon after George, his older brother – another icon – it was incredibly tough. But the band and his wife, Ella, were there to support him.
I was sitting next to Phil Rudd at the wake afterwards, and he turned to me and asked, ‘So which is your bad ear?’ I pointed to my left eye and said, ‘That one’ – which broke the ice like nothing else. Tears and laughter, that strange combination again.
Then AC/DC’s sound engineer Paul Boothroyd – a Scouse known for speaking his mind – piped up and said, ‘So c’mon lads, when’s the band getting back together then?’
The whole room fell silent. We all looked at each other.
‘Just saying . . .’
George Fearon called me not long after.
‘Angus wondered if you’d be interested in doing a new album,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I would fucking love to.’
The following summer, we were on our way to Vancouver, Canada, to record Power Up – with Brendan O’Brien producing. I’d been scared to get too excited about it in case the lawyers reared their heads again and found a reason to stop it.
But as the date drew closer and closer, I realized . . . shit, we really are coming back.
It was exhilarating. And a little nerve-wracking, to put it mildly.
I mean, when I’d left the band, a lot of people had written me off. So, in a funny way, it felt like starting all over again . . . Going into the studio was just what I did. But this time it felt very special.
I’m sure Angus, Cliff and Phil were also feeling the same – not that we ever discuss such things. Angus no longer had his brother at his side. Cliff was coming out of a comfortable retirement. Phil had been through some truly crazy shit in New Zealand.
But there was defiance.
We all had a point to prove.
We were the originals. We wanted to show what we could do.
And now here we are, on the other side of a pandemic – I hope – with all the rules of life changed.
Power Up ended up being released during some of the darkest days of the lockdowns, reaching No. 1 in twenty-one countries, while doing something that absolutely no one had ever expected: making the critics happy. Well boys, it only took forty years!
I listened to the album again last night. It’s a miracle that it ever happened. I couldn’t be happier that it did, though, because singing in AC/DC is not like singing in any other band. There are no ballads. There’s no saving your voice for the next song. Every moment, you’re standing your ground. It’s attack. Like singing with a fixed bayonet.
Like I said before, ‘nine lives, cat’s eyes, abusin’ every one of them and running wild.’