AC/DC Face The Harsh Realities Of Showbiz!

AC/DC Face The Harsh Realities Of Showbiz!

Sylvie Simmons

Everybody likes AC/DC. Even the people who don’t like AC/DC like them really. Impossible not to, when you get right down to it; AC/DC’s like an old friendfun, familiar, not likely to come out with anything to surprise you but the best companion for getting deaf, dumb, blind and out of your head with a smile on your face and a beat in your brain cells. If, year after year, they’re always the same, at least they’ve had plenty of practice getting it right: the undisputed kings of bad-boy boogie, a perfect mix of innocence and sleaze.

‘I’m just a bleeding guitarist. ”

They’ve been in London shooting a new video for an old song—“You Shook Me All Night Long,” one of the only two good things about 1980; the other was “Hells Bells.” Both show up on the last album they released: Who Made Who, as boozing, floozing, skin-crawling sleazy as ever, only two-thirds of this is familiar sleaze, songs any person of taste already knows and loves and sings themselves to sleep with, standards like “For Those About To Rock,” “Sink The Pink” (what a title!), “Shake Your Foundations,” not forgetting “Ride On,” the slowest, dirtiest, low-down blues this side of ZZ, 10 years old and still growling, spitting and pissing on the walls like an alleycat staggering home. Good stuff. And the three chunks of unfamiliarity: “Who Made Who,” “D.T.” and “Chase The Ace,” the first in the classic AC/DC tradition (i.e., same as before!) the other two Angusand-Malcolm-composed instrumentals, one a worthy rip-off of “Cocaine,” the other a big muscle-flexer.

The point of this package so soon after Fly On The Wall was the movie Maximum Overdrive, horror-hack Stephen King’s directional debut and something to do with a comet coming too close to earth and turning household appliances into killers. Let’s hear it for psychotic fridges! What made him think of AC/DC for the soundtrack to such nastiness is beyond me—except he’s always claimed to be a rock ’n’ roll fan and he managed to blag a backstage pass to a gig in New York, fell on his feet, declared that he, like everybody, likes AC/DC and talked them into appearing on the soundtrack.

“There are so many crimes held against AC/DC, it’s a wonder we’re not blamed for everything. Dropping bombs on Libya or anything. ”

“He just said he wanted very loud rock music,” says Angus in an accent kangaroos would strain to understand. Angus, it should be said, is as short on the quotes as he is on the trousers; as nice an Aussie as you could ever hope to meet, but tough in an interview, stopping himself constantly just when it looks like he’s about to make a Grand Statement in case you think he’s getting out of order; “I’m just a bleeding guitarist,” with a laugh, is one of his favorite lines. But where were we? “Loud,” he said. Well, he would have been stupid coming up to us and saying, ‘Would you write something nice and soft?”’

What started out as just one song—it was going to be one of those tedious compilation soundtrack jobs that have been breaking out your side of the water lately like spots on a rockstar’s bum—turned into the whole bloody thing, including the incidental music.

“We hadn’t planned to do it originally,” says Angus. “Stephen King asked us if he could use old material for the film and we’d just finished the Fly On The Wall album and he said ‘Can I use some of this too?’ So we said ‘OK.’

“And then”—this man is insatiable!— “he came back again and said, ‘Listen. Could you write me a title track for the movie?’ So we said ‘OK.’ And then," Angus laughs, “he came back later and said ‘Would you like to do the score?’ and we ended up doing everything, all the horror noises and things. All the Hollywood stuff!”

Makes a change from Tangerine Dream. But did they surprise themselve, that they could come out with twiddly bits as well as four-minute stomps?

“Ah, well, it really wasn’t that hard," Angus shrugs it off. “I don’t find that sort of stuff hard at all. I think it’s much harder writing actual songs. But that background stuff is easy.”

So easy they didn’t even see the film to write the score—“he just gave us the script and the title song was a song we sort of had anyhow—you know we’ve always got bits and pieces of songs hanging around doing nothing!”—and Angus hasn’t, for that matter, seen it since. Although he’ll admit to having seen The Shining and read Salem’s Lot, Angus, the softie, prefers old-time romance to modern-day horror.

“Myself, as far as movies go, when Humphrey Bogart died, that was about my lot! I’m a fan of all the old black-andwhite movies. All of the stuff they’re churning out of Hollywood now, I don’t think they’re made to last, like the classics. There’s nothing creative. Usually it's just to see how much money they can make.” This is a man who cried during Bambi\

“When he first asked us, we were very dubious. We’re always careful about these things, especially with film stuff, because you never know what’s going to come out. You get these things every now and again—and you find, especially on the American side, a lot of people tend to conjure things up out of mid-air, they come up to you and say ‘Blah blah blah, will you do this? Will you do that?’ and they sort of make it up as they go along and usually end up using Henry Mancini or someone!

“And you get ridiculous things thrown at you as well. Like, ‘Would you like to be a vampire in our movie?’” And they wouldn’t; they turned down starring roles in some glorious-sounding Dracula affair not so long back. “How many bad vampire movies have you seen?” laughs Angus. Not enough, I reply.

AC/DC’s old blood-dripping image, the Satan’s schoolchildren bit, is long behind them—except in America, where they still get the Bible-thumpers who aren’t busy pestering Ozzy picketing their gigs. I’ve seen Angus cornered in a hotel elevator before, politely listening to 13 floors of a “God-squad” posse trying to convert him from Evil. Angus Young doesn’t drink (we won’t mention the tea addiction!), doesn’t do drugs and doesn’t have a thing to do with the floozies who hang around the backstage door (“What, me? A 3, x symbol? You’re having me on!”). He calls his wife in Australia every night when they’re on the road. He puts it down to “a lot of people really tuned into this National Enquirer type stuff” and—veering dangerously near a Grand Statement— ‘‘religion being made big dollars...

‘‘This thing of banning records—it’s a bit selfish on their part. Just because this guy here has different taste doesn’t mean they’re bad. There are so many crimes held against AC/DC it’s a wonder we’re not blamed for everything,” he laughs. “Dropping bombs on Libya or anything!”

“I think it’s mainly from when we first started and I think it just stuck in their heads because we were one of the first to put it right in front of them. I think it was the Moral Majority who first came up with the idea: ‘Oh, let’s play the record backward.’ And of course we never hid it! We’d call an album Highway To Hell and you didn’t need to play it backwards because there it was on the title!”

More than anything, AC/DC’s songs have been about sex, almost music-hall tradition sex: buxom women, large equipment, knickers and spanking and clap. Not devils, just naughty boys. But sex, to some people’s minds, is bad as violence. Angus nods. “And I don’t think they're being quite honest. Every town we ever went into, you always found prostitutes and you always found strip clubs. And just look at some of their TV shows..A”

But let’s get down to the serious issue here. Bum-baring. I was talking to Blackie Lawless the other day and he said they’d stopped with the woman-on-the-rack onstage because he’d hate to become like Angus, having to pull his pants down night after night, town after town, for the rest of his life. Does Angus feel he has to do it? Does he enjoy it? What does his wife think of it?

Angus laughs. ‘‘I don’t know! Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes I don’t. I’ve stopped doing it a lot, actually. It’s the same as anything we do—if the occasion comes about and it feels right we usually do it. We try, even onstage, to keep it fun. And if I have to get naked to have fun, I’ll get naked! I’ll keep on doing it!”

And in 10 years time will he get a bumlift? “A bum-lift? OK!

“I think when you get down to having a jog five miles every morning just to be able to face going onstage and everything, then it’s more like a gruelling thing—which is what some bands are like. With us, we try and keep it a bit more light. Or in-between. We don’t go overthe-top and we’re not lazy. Whatever we do, we try and keep the fun in it. I think, with us, if you take it too serious you start to get hung-up about going out on the road. I don’t know, I think it’s just luck, but we always try to keep it as exciting as possible.”

How does he keep it light and fun and down-to-earth when he’s a rich and famous superstar, I ask?

“That’s easy! You haven’t met my wife, have you? She keeps me in line!

“I don’t play a lot of music when I’m off the road, and when I do, it’s mainly stuff like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, the Yardbirds. ”

“I think the easiest way to stay downto-earth—for me, anyway—is whenever I get off the road, I get away from the whole thing. In other words, I don’t converge on New York or Hollywood and all the trendy nightclubs. I keep myself out of mischief!” he chuckles. ‘‘You just get away and clear your head and get back to being normal.”

Doing what? “I do a bit of fishing. If it’s good weather”—and it usually is, seeing he’s smart enough to live in Sydney, Australia most of the year—‘‘I’ll go snorkelling, do a bit of swimming, splashing around. Nothing rockstarry.’

When he’s not working, he’s not the sort to think about work too much. They spent a long time coming out with their Fly On The Wall album, but not because they were twiddling knobs in the studio for months on end. They wrote the songs, went out and played some dates, and fitted the recording in between. ‘‘We don’t like to spend more than six weeks on an album,” says Angus. ‘‘We don’t want to lose the freshness of the whole thing.” And, besides, ‘‘you get bored that way.” They recorded the new stuff on Who Made Who that way, and by all accounts plan to do the next studio album the same in the middle of a European tour.

Angus and Malcolm’s big brother, George Young, and Harry Vanda—the two ex-Easybeats, who were the original production team on classics like Let There Be Rock, produced Maximum Overdrive and might well be back at the helm on the next album. ‘‘It was like going back,” says Angus. ‘‘George is probably the best we’ve worked with anyhow; he’s just interested in making it rock, you know, rock ’n’ roll, not whether it will appeal to ‘the American market’ or whatever. Whenever you work with George, you know it’s going to be good.”

Then why spend all that money on superstar producers like Mutt Lange?

“Well, orginally, when we first worked with Mutt, he wasn’t really all that wellknown. He’d done the occasional track, but he’d never really made his name in America and he was hoping to get there. He was shocked himself that it happened with our album rather than anyone else!” Angus chortles.

“But Mutt learned just as much from us as we learned from him! We’re not totally useless! We’ve been at it for 12 years!”

We talk a bit about what music we’ve been listening to lately. Angus is as outof-touch on the subject of new metal bands as a missionary in the Aussie outback. The last record he bought was by—Little Richard\ The entire Young family apparently listens to old rock ’n’ roll or nothing at all. Only vocalist Brian Johnson is forced into keeping his ears up-to-date what with having a 13-year-old daughter who’s threatening to get into the music biz soon herself.

“It sounds bad,” says Angus, “but I don’t play a lot of music when I’m off the road, and when I do, it’s mainly stuff like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, the Yardbirds. Occasionally I’ll hear something I like on the road and go and buy it, but not very often.”

Like they say, what’s the point of buying a dog and barking yourself? So I ask if he’s run into ex-AC/DC Phil Rudd lately and he says, “He’s not the sort of person you run into! He’s always been very much into boats and things, cars and helicopters. The last I heard, he was flying a helicopter. He just gets these things into his head and they dominate his life for a while and he just goes for it!” Angus says he’s not that adventurous himself these days. Was he ever, I ask?

“When I was a schoolboy,” a real schoolboy, “I never went to school half the time. I used to get up, walk out the door at home and go, ‘Oh no; I think I’ll go do something else. I was forever in trouble with the welfare and truancy people—they’d always come after me and drag me back to school!

“Art was about the only thing I used to turn up for. I was never any good with any other subject, except maybe English.”

What about music?

“Oh, music,” he guffaws. “In music, they passed out a violin one day and it never got returned. And that was the end of the music class.” As for the violin, it was later found in pieces. If AC/DC don’t get into the music history books for any other reason, at least they’ve beaten the Who at being the first to smash up instruments. Angus simply says he’d like to be remembered for being “a good rock ’n’ roll band.”

So, I ask before I left him get' back to his day off, does he have any dreams left yet to be fullfilled?

“Well, I haven’t had all our dough yet...! Maybe if Brian Johnson comes up with some good songs...!” Another Angus chuckle. “That’s a hard one. You’re talking to a man who rarely dreams...!”