Shortly after the band’s arrival in the UK. Bon’s shades conceal a fresh black eye . . .
It was a hot summer in England in 1976—a long, hot summer. It was the eve of the Queen’s 1977 Silver Jubilee, and the country was gearing up for a prolonged, jewel-encrusted celebration of royal irrelevance. It was simultaneously on the verge of a revolution.
To chic, would-be subversives, all the Jubilee did was provide a target for pot shots. Following their December 1976 debut single “Anarchy in the UK,” the Sex Pistols’ incendiary rewriting of “God Save the Queen’ caused the sensation it was designed to. In doing so, the Pistols sparked the world-wide cultural sea change called punk rock.
Bon had left Scotland with his family to come and live in Australia in 1952, the year Queen Elizabeth ascended to the throne. Now he was returning to Britain in time for her jubilee. He couldn’t have cared less. He didn’t care much for punk rock either.
Punk rock, British-style, liked to think it was a political movement, but it was first and foremost an aesthetic one. It was an aesthetic decision inspired negatively, by an unspeakable hatred for hippies and for practically all the music that then prevailed.
Its anger was well-directed; punk was a necessary and overdue flushing out of the stagnant waters rock’n’roll had become. Rock had never been in a worse state than it was in the mid-seventies; it was almost exclusively the corporate domain of boring old farts, to use the preferred punk term.
Punk ultimately changed the face of rock’n’roll, and more beyond. But like glam, punk was nothing so much as a return to rock’n’roll classicism: the traditional values of teen rebellion and hit-single songwriting. It was getting back to basics because rock’n’roll—if it could be dignified with the name—had lost touch with its underclass roots. It’s just that punk was packaged in apocalyptic urban-guerrilla garb.
When AC/DC arrived in London in April 1976, the storm was still brewing. The scene was still very sluggish. One of the first UK gigs that AC/DC played, later that month, was at the Nashville Rooms in Kensington, where the Sex Pistols had played their first-ever legitimate gig on the venue’s “new bands” night only weeks before.
“We got people like the Sex Pistols,” Angus recalls. “The Johnny Rottens would show up, cop a look—in fact, the guy looked like a clone of Bon the first time I saw him!”
“It’s hard to believe now, but AC/DC were sort of caught up in that punk thing,” said Richard Griffiths, AC/DC’s first agent in England, who booked that Nashville Rooms gig. “This was the very early days of punk. The Sex Pistols were playing, the Damned were playing, and AC/DC were playing. There was another band playing, called Eddie and the Hot Rods, who I was also agent for. So there were two things happening at the same time, and they got slightly intermeshed.”
Punk was largely a media-driven phenomenon. The British music press, which wielded even more power than Countdown did in Australia, latched onto punk and propagated it as the new anti-fashion. But if AC/DC couldn’t count on press support—because they failed to conform to the punk stereotypes—it wasn’t the end of the world. They’d never been critics’ darlings anyway. When they got to Britain, their strategy was simply to do exactly what they’d done in Australia: build it up from the grass roots on the live circuit.
It was precisely because of the climate that gave rise to punk that AC/DC also found an audience—and so quickly—in Britain. There were plenty of kids just as fed up with all the boring old farts as the punks were—as AC/DC were—but who couldn’t get into punk because it was so theoretical and confrontational that it was itself alienating. AC/DC had a lot in common with punk—an almost back-to-mono sensibility, a keenness to upset the applecart, and a hatred of hippies—but they were much more accessible because they had orthodox R&B roots.
MICHAEL BROWNING: “Building it up in the pubs wasn’t that difficult because there was good word of mouth for it. It was just purely down to the kids that liked that kind of music, and they really got off on it.”
“We went over to establish ourselves as a road band first of all,” Bon later told RAM, “and then work for a hit single. Sherbet, a few years ago, got the hit single but they couldn’t get anyone to concerts. Then they couldn’t get another hit and they couldn’t work at all. We didn’t want that.”
Angus concurred. “I think all the good bands are essentially live bands, the great ones, the ones that last, your Stones, Who, whatever. Your only gauge for AC/DC is if we play someplace and people come back to see us the next time we play there. You can’t trust the hype side of it.”
AC/DC’s initial British schedule was arranged long before the band left Australia. First up, they would embark on an April and May tour of Britain supporting Atlantic labelmates Back Street Crawler, the band fronted by former Free guitarist Paul Kossoff.
Then, in June, they would tour the country all over again as part of a roadshow put together in conjunction with Sounds magazine. Coral Browning, with her good connections, had convinced Sounds that such a package—boasting a hard rock disco and films, as well as AC/DC, all for the meager admission price of 50 pence—would serve both the magazine and the band well.
Of the big three music papers, Sounds was the new kid on the block (it had been launched in 1970), and consequently it was out to challenge the traditional supremacy of the New Musical Express and Melody Maker. The NME was the market leader, with its fickle, elitist and intellectual championship of punk. Sounds took a more down-to-earth approach. It threw itself behind punk too, but not to the exclusion, or denigration, of the heavy metal bands it already championed.
Not surprisingly, then, AC/DC was Sounds’ dream band. When the magazine compiled its “New Order Top 20” at the end of 1976 (in contrast to the “Boring Old Farts Top 20” led by the Stones, Led Zeppelin and Rod Stewart), AC/DC topped the list, ahead of Eddie and the Hot Rods, the Sex Pistols, the Damned, Iggy Pop (and the Stooges), Ted Nugent, Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Motorhead, Judas Priest and in equal tenth position, the Ramones and the Dictators.
AC/DC’s first UK single, released as soon as the band arrived in April, was “Long Way to the Top.” It would be followed in May by the High Voltage compilation album.
The deal the band had with Atlantic Records was far from generous—a one-album trial, with an option for Atlantic beyond that—but since they had been the only interested party, Michael Browning was pleased to sign anything. And the band was chuffed just to be labelmates with the likes of Led Zeppelin.
Atlantic is one of the most celebrated labels in rock’n’roll history. Formed in New York in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun, the son of a Turkish diplomat, it was one of rock’n’roll’s midwives, making its name with classic R&B. The label survived by adapting to changing trends. By the early seventies, its roster boasted two of the biggest white rock acts in the world—Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. With England further providing it with successful acts like art rockers Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Atlantic stepped up its English presence, opening a London office. The label’s first direct British signing was the Heavy Metal Kids in 1974, followed by Back Street Crawler.
Atlantic UK Managing Director Phil Carson was sold on AC/DC from the moment Coral Browning walked into his office in 1975. He asked label manager Dave Dee what he thought, and he was just as keen. Dee thought AC/DC sounded like a cross between Zeppelin and Slade. Maybe they would succeed for Atlantic where the Heavy Metal Kids, a similarly street urchin–style outfit, had failed.
RICHARD GRIFFITHS: “I was at the Virgin Agency in London in 1975, and Michael Browning came in with one of those things—which actually I’ve only ever seen in Australia—it was like a suitcase, and you pulled it up and there was a screen, a machine, and it played a video. And it played a video of a live concert, in Melbourne, it would have been on the High Voltage record, and they were just amazing.”
Griffiths left Virgin to form his own agency called Headline Artists, taking with him his own charge, Paul Kossoff, and, among others, AC/DC. It was only natural, then, that the two acts would tour together.
GRIFFITHS: “Then, the way I’ve always told it was that in between AC/DC leaving Australia and arriving in London, Paul died.”
Paul Kossoff had maintained a heroin habit for the latter days of Free. He kicked it in 1974, but related ill health caught up with him by 1976. Bon said in an open letter to RAM back home, “That cunt Paul Kossoff fucked up our first tour (wait till Angus gets hold of him).”
BROWNING: “We were suddenly stuck in England with no work. We had to adopt the stance of doing what any English group would do, and that was just play around all the little pubs and clubs.”
Coral Browning had an office at Atlantic. Often, a record company appoints a liaison officer to an act, and even though Coral wasn’t officially on the Atlantic payroll, she served as that and more. She coordinated the band’s publicity, and was its mother hen as well.
Although “Long Way to the Top’ didn’t dent the charts, it made a reasonably favorable impression. It was Hit Pick of the Week on Radio Luxembourg; and at least late night Radio One DJ, John Peel—the oldest hipster in the world, the man who discovered T Rex—would give it a spin. That was a good start. Record Mirror & Disc’s James Hamilton commented, “These Aussie youngsters boogie Stones/Elton John-style [huh?] with bagpipe noises yes!’ Writing in Melody Maker, Caroline Coon was equivocal: “Up there with the likes of Kiss and Angel . . . mind-boggling,” she began, but concluded cryptically, “Getting ripped off? Keep laughing.”
Michael Browning and Phil Carson kept chipping away at America. Atlantic over there was not entirely convinced.
The band stayed briefly at a house in the West End, just around the corner from Coral Browning’s place, before moving to more permanent digs in Barnes. Michael Browning had calculated it would cost around 600 quid a week just to keep the band; this was a bill footed by Alberts, albeit in the form of moneys advanced against royalties. The members of the band received the quite generous wage of 50 quid a week.
But they were champing at the bit just to play. To pass time, Mark and Malcolm would go down the local—the Bridge Hotel—to shoot pool. Bon went out on an extended pub and club crawl to check out the competition. Of course, give Bon an idle moment . . . He decided to pay a visit to the pub in Finchley where he used to work during Fraternity’s last days in London. He came home with a dislocated jaw.
MARK EVANS: “He walked in and, he said, he’d only been in the place ten or fifteen seconds—he went on his own—and he got hit in the face with a pint mug! And this is like three or four years since he’d been in the place!’
No decent explanation was ever offered for the incident. When Bon wrote later to Pat Pickett, all he said was, “It wasn’t even my fight. I didn’t see what hit me.”
The band had a photo session to do, so Bon donned a pair of wraparound shades to obscure the welts. It was excuse enough though to finally finish work on his teeth. Eight hundred quid spent in Harley Street bought him a new set of dentures.
GRIFFITHS: “I dug [AC/DC] up a gig at the Red Cow in Hammersmith. This show was probably the greatest show I’ve ever seen in my life. There was no advertising. They came on, they were doing two sets, and to start with there were probably ten people in the pub. They did one set and they did the whole number, Angus on Bon’s shoulders, everything, I’d never seen anything like it. Then the place emptied. About half an hour later, they came out to do the second set, and the place was packed. Everyone had run off and said, You have got to see this band. It was packed, it was incredible; I’ll never, ever forget it.”
EVANS: “It was a real battle in London first off, I really had doubts that it was going to work. The Red Cow was, well, it wasn’t a regular gig; it had bands on but there was no vibe out on it. People would say, You’re playing where? But the reaction was pretty instantaneous. Browning and Coral were excellent at beating stuff up.”
Among the Australians at the Red Cow that night was Silver (née Margaret) Smith, with whom Bon had had a brief affair in 1971. She had left her husband in Adelaide at about the same time Fraternity returned from England, and set off around the world, ending up in London. “I’d been away for a couple of years then, so seeing the name AC/DC meant nothing to me. I hated the Red Cow, but I had a friend drop in and say, Why don’t you come and see this band, they’re great; and it was free to get in, so I went down. The place was packed, everybody was really getting off on it, so I weaseled my way to the front, and I got there, and it was Bon! So I went and said hello afterwards. He didn’t go home that night, it was all on again.”
Bon was still officially living with the band in Barnes, but he started spending time at Silver’s flat in ritzy Kensington.
From the Red Cow, the band graduated to the Nashville. Coral managed to woo a couple of important journalists down to see the show—Caroline Coon and the NME’s Phil NcNeill.
Under the headline I WALLABY YOUR MAN, the NME ran Phil McNeill’s assessment. “In the middle of the great British Punk Rock Explosion, a quintet of similarly ruthless Ozzies has just swaggered like a cat among London’s surly, self-consciously paranoid pigeons . . . and with a sense of what sells rather than what’s cool, they could well clean up.” Faint praise indeed. The taste-makers at the NME decreed that AC/DC were unfashionable.
Even though punk was in one sense very traditional, in another sense, it was almost avant-garde—and this was where AC/DC and punk most distinctly digressed. If, as is often suggested, the Rolling Stones’ great worth was as an advertisement for the blues/R&B artists they ripped off, then the same could be said of punk and the Velvet Underground, the Stooges and the New York Dolls. Today, these three bands are acknowledged as seminal forces in rock’s history; but at a time in 1976 when they were still regarded with contempt—if they were recognized at all—punk discovered them and absorbed their ground-breaking influences. With its do-it-yourself ethic, punk turned to its advantage a rudimentary or minimalist, even inept, technique. AC/DC, who wore their proficiency and strictly orthodox blues-based roots so obviously on their sleeves, seemed old-fashioned next to something so apparently modern. Besides, they had long hair and tattoos. Punk was rude and crude, but it was never gauche. But it was precisely because AC/DC bridged the gap between the old and the new, the traditional and the iconoclastic, that they would be so successful.
By now, Back Street Crawler had found a new guitarist, and a handful of gigs were arranged for May, to pay tribute to Kossoff if nothing else. AC/DC would still support. A showcase was held at the Marquee, the famed London club where bands like the Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin and Yes had all paid their dues.
Sounds magazine’s Phil Sutcliffe reviewed the show and was so taken by the resurrected Back Street Crawler—who subsequently imploded—that he feared, “the mere wildly exciting excellence of AC/DC could be forgotten. It shouldn’t be. They are heavy, will be huge.” Sutcliffe would go on to be one of the band’s most stalwart critical supporters.
The album was released on May 14. The British version of High Voltage was actually mostly the Australian TNT album, minus two tracks (“School Days” and “Rocker”), and in their place “Little Lover” and “She’s Got Balls” from the original Australian High Voltage album.
The NME did not deign to review the album, but Sounds’ Geoff Barton awarded it four stars out of five. He called it “a tonic in the midst of the all-too serious, poker-faced groups of today.” Melody Maker’s Mike Oldfield, on the other hand, commented, “It’s the same old boogie . . . Still, there’s hope. The lyrics have a brashness and lack of sophistication that’s always useful in the heavy brand of rock.”
In late May/early June, as “Jailbreak” was released as a single in Australia—it would reach number five—AC/DC were playing occasional pub and club gigs in England. Alberts crowed that the band had passed the million dollar sales mark, with TNT still shifting 3-4,000 units weekly. The release of Dirty Deeds was delayed for that reason.
On June 11, the band embarked on the 20-date tour for Sounds, which had been prophetically dubbed “Lock up your daughters.” The band got around in a Transit van, which most of the time was driven by Phil, a full-scale car buff and petrolhead who wasn’t really comfortable unless he was behind the wheel. Long-time Australian roadies Ralph and Herc traveled in another van with the gear.
MICHAEL BROWNING: “That was incredibly significant in terms of raising the profile of the group. I mean, we were on the front cover of Sounds—for a group that was totally unknown, that had just come from Australia, that was a pretty good score.”
The shows were like a revue. After a DJ had regaled the crowd with tracks by Led Zeppelin, Kiss, the Pretty Things, Black Oak Arkansas, Alex Harvey, the Who, Free, Status Quo and Alice Cooper, and some Stones filmclips had been screened, AC/DC played a 50-minute set.
MARK EVANS: “That was playing some weird places, it was really breaking the ice. We were booked into some weird little clubs. One place was called the Club 76, I’m sure because it could only hold 76 people! Another place we played in Wales, called Mumbles, in Swansea—five people turned up.”
The dates in Scotland, though, were treated as a homecoming by the band and audience alike. Said Bon, “You can imagine what that was like . . . hoots, with an “H”, mon!”
The Ardrossan Herald commented, “One fault with Scott’s voice is whereas it might be undistinguished most of the time, it does, at others, sound rather like Alex Harvey. This may prove unpopular with Glasgow crowds who might feel that he is imitating their idol.”
But Glasgow was obviously flattered. A Sounds review of the gig was glowing. “The audience even at this early stage,” it began, “have nearly demolished the staid City Hall. Bon, halfheartedly and mischievously, asks us all to sit down, ‘or else the management will turn off the power.’ Nobody attempts to find their seat.”
This minor act of civil disobedience was reported back home as a “riot.” “As in Australia,” the RAM news item went, “the group are attracting a young, volatile working class audience.”
While Malcolm and Angus spent a couple of days off visiting long-lost relatives in Glasgow, Bon hired a car with Phil to go sightseeing. Scotland was his birthplace, after all, and so he thought he might try to find some of his roots. The pair made a circuit of Loch Lomond. But the highlight of the trip, as Bon wrote to old mate Pat Pickett, was coming across two bears shagging in the woods. Phil, the camera buff, filmed the occasion for posterity.
The tour wrapped up in London at the Lyceum on July 7, two days before Bon’s birthday. Save for the fact that lighting engineer Herc had an accident at the soundcheck, falling from the rigging (and having to be sent home as a result), the show was highly successful. MC’d by John Peel, it featured a competition for the “Schoolgirl we’d most like to . . .” The winner was one Jayne Haynes from Harrow, Middlesex, who went home with the first prize of an Epiphone Caballero folk guitar, plus a bonus, bassist Mark Evans—much to Bon’s chagrin, mock or otherwise. “She was beautiful . . .” he rued, “really sexy. Garters, suspenders. I was really lusting for her myself . . . we all were. But Mark won out. He’s just too handsome for me to compete.”
Against all his own forecasts, Bon had made it to the Big 3-0. The band threw him a party, which was missing only one vital ingredient—the birthday boy himself. Bon, as was his wont, had gone AWOL.
One of the few birthday cards he got from Australia was from Mary Walton. He replied, “Thank you for remembering my B. Day. Not many did. I wrote myself off for about three days and even managed to miss my own party.”
Bon told Anthony O’Grady, who interviewed him over the phone a few days later, “Y’know what I did last night? I fucked my birthday in . . . started at 11.50 and finished at 12:15 . . . It’s the first birthday I’ve done that.”
The band sat around the table at the Russell Hotel waiting for the guest of honor, getting drunk. All except Angus, of course. Bon never did show that night, and he wouldn’t do so for a couple of days to come. The band could only surmise he was off with Silver. At that stage, he still hadn’t actually moved in with her.
MARK EVANS: “The basic thing about the band—it was very insular. There was no real camaraderie, and so being on the road, it could get lonely. And Bon, being a very outgoing person, and older, I don’t think there was enough within the band to satisfy his social needs.
“Bon very much needed that space away from the band. So he could do what he wanted to do without having to worry about what we were going to say. Because we used to call him an old hippie. I mean, Bon used to wear his leather jacket and all that, but he was always wearing a kaftan and sandals underneath.”
For one thing, Bon was a self-confessed pothead. This was a hippie crime which Angus barely tolerated. But Bon would still go off, to be with Silver. He also became friendly with Coral Browning, who like Silver was nearer his own age.
Bon and Silver had lost time to make up for. They say you can never go back, but in this instance, Bon was picking up where he’d left off. The cynical view was that Bon and Silver’s relationship was mutually beneficial, in that Silver provided Bon with an entree to the London scene, and he provided her with a ready-made rock’n’roll star. While this may be true, the fact remains that Bon fell passionately in love with Silver.
SILVER: “He never made any friends of his own, which is sad. Like, he had friends in Australia; but in London, because of the pressure of everything, he never really got a chance to do that. But then, he had a ready-made assortment of my friends . . .”
When Silver had first arrived in London a year earlier, she lived in a house with, among others, a guy who worked for Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood, as his percy. A percy is a personal assistant, a common appendage to most big rock stars—a minder and a gofer, who is often little more than a drug supplier. Silver met Ron Wood and became friendly with him. She met a few other bands on the scene too, like Thin Lizzy and UFO. If it’s not exactly fair to say Silver was on the game at the time, certainly she was supported by sugar daddies.
SILVER: “They weren’t older so much as guys with money. There was a few rich men hovering, I wasn’t short of rich men, I traveled around on the strength of that. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”
Silver lived comfortably in a flat of her own in the West End. She was a bit of an old hippie, an intelligent woman, a reader, who introduced Bon to books, and no shrinking violet. Like Bon, she enjoyed a smoke; where they differed was that while she didn’t really drink, she had a growing taste for heroin.
MARK EVANS: “Everyone was very wary of her. Malcolm would have sussed she was involved with drugs. And once again, that was the band mentality, if Malcolm decided . . . And Angus, he was very possessive of people, he was funny. Like, when we were living in Barnes, I ended up matey with a few of the guys down the pub, the local garbagemen actually, and you know, it took Angus a while to warm to the idea of that.”
Malcolm and Angus would have felt threatened by anyone who wasn’t on their own payroll, let alone a strong woman.
SILVER: “I think part of it is that they feel inadequate. They’re suspicious of anyone that might be in the least bit intellectual. Although they were always very good to me; my personal relationship with them was good.”
They were also two-faced.
SILVER: “I think it was just that they were young boys that got very successful very quickly, and so they were like fish out of water. They didn’t have time to enjoy themselves, I mean, that lifestyle, there was just so much happening. In all the years I’ve been around, I’ve never known a band that worked like that band worked.”
To Bon, Silver was his refuge.
By the time Bon returned from his few dirty days off celebrating his birthday, the band was due back on deck.
RICHARD GRIFFITHS: “We then started booking them around London. I made sure Jack Barry, who booked the Marquee, saw them, and they were incredible. Jack said—it’s a famous quote, but I don’t remember it exactly—”The most exciting band I’ve seen play at the Marquee since Led Zeppelin.” So we then sat down and worked out a strategy with Jack to basically break AC/DC out of the Marquee.
“This was the summer of ’76, a very exciting time in London, incredibly hot summer, and we worked out that they’d do this residency at the Marquee, every Monday night, and then they would get a great slot on the Reading Festival. And somehow, during all this, we went to Sweden too.”
MICHAEL BROWNING: We were just totally unfashionable, and so it was hard work, persevering, trying not to worry about the criticism.”
The band recorded a 20-minute segment for Mike Mansfield’s Super-pop TV program, which also featured T Rex, and then headed off to Sweden.
GRIFFITHS: “They went off to Sweden for some time, because Tomas Johansen, the promoter there, represented Abba, and he couldn’t get Abba into Australia, so we did this sort of exchange. He took AC/DC to Sweden, and Abba went to Australia!”
MARK EVANS: “We played what they call folk parks, which were like these outdoor barbecue areas with swings and all that, like recreation areas. It was weird because there was a lot of young kids there, but they had blackjack tables and beer, and they were selling beer to 14- and 15-year-olds.
“But it was enough for the hype to start, and we took hold very quickly in those places.”
Bon was under instructions to keep the Australian media informed, and so in another open letter, this time to the Melbourne Herald’s Debbie Sharpe, he wrote:
They love rock’n’roll bands because all the Scandinavian bands are real cabaret. People dance to jigs and polkas, and the bands play Swedish beer drinking (oom-pah-pah) folk songs. The beaches and swimming pools have topless bathing (and I’m a great swimmer!).
AC/DC, however, kept their heads down, unimpressed by travelling to new places, seeing new things, meeting new people.
EVANS: “It was business as usual. There was never any excitement about anything at all. What was happening to us was taken for granted. Like, there was no difference to us in going from Australia and playing the Red Cow in England, to six months later headlining the Hammersmith Odeon. Having this meteoric rise didn’t faze anyone at all, it was what was meant to happen. It was this tunnel vision that Malcolm and Angus had: this is what is going to happen.
“You could be driving through Switzerland, through the Alps, the most magnificent scenery you’ve ever seen, and Angus would have his nose buried in a comic. There was nothing that could surprise us, it was just work. The attitude was just, We don’t give a fuck, what time do we go on?
“If someone interesting came backstage and wanted to party, Bon would be the one who’d go off with them.”
But if there was an element of joylessness to life with AC/DC, the hour or so spent on stage every night made up for it. Most bands say that going on the road is an excruciatingly tedious exercise, only ever relieved or justified by the actual time on stage itself. The other 23 hours in the day are wasted. You spend a lot of time sitting around waiting: you wait to board vehicles, and then you travel; and then when you get where you’re going, you sit around and wait till showtime.
EVANS: “That was the good thing about the band, whatever happened off stage—and there was always a lot of shit going down—as soon as we got on stage, it was just easy. Angus and I could have a screaming match five minutes before we went on, but then we’d go on, and it was, Bang! I’m biased, you know, but I think that line-up of the band—we just had this ultimate confidence, we had no sense of insecurity whatsoever; we would have played with anyone, we just didn’t believe we could be beaten.”
Richard Griffiths remembers being on the road with the band in Sweden: “It was clear to me it was Malcolm’s band. Bon was just a great guy. But even then, I sensed, off Michael [Browning], that he wasn’t sure Bon was the singer to take the band all the way. I didn’t get that from the band, I got it from Michael. It sounds terrible to say it, but I think that if Bon hadn’t died . . .
“I suppose it was true, he always was sort of separate from the rest. Phil, he was off on his own, he was actually pretty obnoxious. Angus and Malcolm were thick, obviously. And then Mark, you knew Mark wasn’t going to last, he was too much of a nice guy. I mean, these were tough guys, they were pretty tough on each other.
“Bon did have an ability to get into trouble. But I’ve been around some pretty nasty drunks, and I definitely wouldn’t put him in that category. I just remember he used to get pretty . . . drunk!”
EVANS: “They would dispute this, but I think they viewed Bon to be ultimately disposable. In hindsight, it seems preposterous, but at the time, he was always in the firing line. And there was a lot of pressure, mainly from George, and record companies. I think within that camp, there’s been a certain rewriting of history, about how they felt about the guy—no, that’s wrong, how they felt about the guy professionally. Because there was no way you could spend more than 30 seconds in a room with Bon and not be completely and utterly charmed. The guy was captivating; he was gentlemanly, but he had the rough side to him, and he was funny.”
MOLLY MELDRUM: “When I was in England, AC/DC were breaking there, and breaking in Europe, and I remember Michael taking me aside, and telling me he had this great dilemma on his hands. The Americans wanted to release this group, but what they said was, You’ve got to find another lead singer. Because they couldn’t understand Bon Scott. So Michael was going . . . But I mean, he was never going to get rid of Bon.”
Back in England, the band relocated into new digs, a house opposite the cemetery in West Brompton, which was chosen because it came equipped with a piano. Bon instead moved in with Silver.
With the Marquee residency kicking off on July 26, “Jailbreak” was released as the band’s second single. Caroline Coon, wrongly referring to it as “Jail Bait,” described it as “a muscle-flexing fine blast of rock’n’roll,” but as Charles Shaar Murray observed in theNME, “it will not be helped one whit by the fact that “Jailbreak” is also the title of Thin Lizzy’s current album and next single.”
The Marquee residency was heralded by full-page ads in the music papers, which reprinted Jack Barry’s famous Led Zeppelin comparison and pictured Angus holding up a reproduction of a letter Atlantic had received from the City of Glasgow District Council, which read, “We have been advised that the audience in attendance at the recent concert featuring AC/DC which you produced were for the most of the performance entirely out of control and were actually standing up on the seats. This has caused some damage to the upholstery and has also resulted in a back being broken off one of the seats.”
It goes to show just how dull most British bands were, unable to generate even this modest amount of excitement. Punk was really still waiting in the wings. The “Lock up your daughters” tour had set the wheels in motion. Playing the Marquee residency, every Monday night through August—and playing other gigs in and around London—AC/DC really caught fire.
Recalls Dave Jarrett, an Atlantic Records promotion man who worked with AC/DC, “Monday night in London is called Swede Night, because they’re the only people who go out, Swedes. The first Marquee show, there was about 18 people there. So what we did, the record company just took everybody we could down to the gig, it was an unlimited guest list. I mean, I used to go down to my local pub, say to the guys, Who wants to go out, and they’d say, How much is it going to cost? They had no idea who they were going to see. But it built up very quickly, to the point where you couldn’t get in the door.”
MICHAEL BROWNING: “There was another group called Eddie and the Hot Rods that were happening in London at the time, both of them had a residency at the Marquee, and it was very much like a competition between the two groups to see who could break each other’s record. I think AC/DC to this day still hold the record for the most people in the Marquee. It was quite a small room, and I think we had something like 1,400 people there. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything as hot and sweaty as that.”
It was a stinking summer in 1976. With the fetid aroma of punk in the air, it was no summer of love; but London when it sizzles is worlds apart from London at any other time of the year—people go out, and get crazy. Hot August nights, indeed.
“You wouldn’t believe the weather,” Bon wrote to Debbie Sharpe. “It’s been a hotter summer than we had in Australia early this year. It’s particularly bad ’cause we’re 60 miles from the nearest beach and if you happen to fall in the Thames they treat you for a week with tetanus injections.”
AC/DC were one of a hot summer’s hottest items. Molly Meldrum flew in to shoot a segment at the Marquee for Countdown. Phil Sutcliffe reported from deep in the club’s mosh pit, “The heat is beyond belief... Guys take their shirts off and within half a minute they look as though they’ve stepped out of the shower. The girls say they wish they could do the same . . . And that’s just for the disco!
“AC/DC stroll on unassumingly, Bon grins an evil grin and says, This one’s just to warm you up.”
Angus was making a ritual of the flashing routine he’d unveiled initially at the Lifesaver back in Sydney in March; and even that spotty visage, in—or rather out of—soiled jocks, didn’t turn people off.
“E’s the best fing I’ve seen since Pete Townshend,” a punter said to Meldrum, who was down there in the mosh-pit with everyone else.
MOLLY: “It was just this tiny room, and there were all these kids dressed in school uniforms there—which was pretty exciting to me, I can tell you right now! But the thing was, AC/DC weren’t doing anything different to what they ever had, and they never have. It was the same as the first time I saw them. They’ve never had to alter their music.”
The Marquee established AC/DC as the only band in London getting anywhere who weren’t a punk band. That they were swarmed by female fans backstage was proof of the fact—and welcome relief for the band after a veritable drought of feminine attention.
MOLLY: “By that stage, Bon was certainly drinking a lot. Because it was just part of rock’n’roll, it was part of getting to the next gig, doing the gig . . . Bon would be there, and he would have his bottle of whisky, and so we were soul mates in that respect, I guess, because I was into whisky then too, and so we’d be going arrgghh, you know . . . In those days, quite frankly, you didn’t have to worry about it catching up with you. Why would you? You weren’t hurting anyone, you were having a lot of fun, and you were doing your job.”
SILVER: “He was drinking a bottle of Scotch a day, even back in those early days of success. I mean, what he was getting in wages wouldn’t have covered his Scotch bill.”
High Voltage may not have cracked the charts—if only because its sales, which totaled 50,000 by year’s end, were spread over several months—but with the vibe the Marquee generated, even the mass-circulation tabloid Sun (despite being outraged by bare bottoms and bad language) had to admit that “AC/DC are a band we will learn to live with.”
RICHARD GRIFFITHS: “What was happening was that AC/DC were playing at the Marquee, and just up the road in Wardour Street at the 100 Club, the Sex Pistols were playing, so they sort of got caught up in the whole thing. But what they were, they were a rock band who were different to what had been going on.”
“The Sex Pistols, and bands like the Clash and the Damned, are important because they have brought rock down to earth again,” Caroline Coon wrote in Melody Maker. “The musicians, unimpressed by the trappings of stardom, are as close to their audience as rock’n’rollers have ever been.
“Their lyrics, eschewing the cultural irrelevancies of American R&B, are committed, searching comments about the new morality and tough environment they grew up in. Their music is fast, intensely emotional, fierce and devoid of presence.”
Just like AC/DC. “The trouble with these bloody punk bands,” Bon told Juke’s Christie Eliezer, “is they try and look tough but musically they’ve got nothing, not even a hint of originality.”
The punks also liked to claim they were working class, but if they were that at all, they were—like Pete Townshend and Keith Richards before them—art school dropouts. The real working-class kids, the punters, didn’t know what they were supposed to like, they just knew what they liked. And it became emphatically clear that what they liked was AC/DC. This was especially true outside trendy London, in the industrial wastelands of the North—not just in Scotland but in cities like Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool, where the London-based music papers held less sway. AC/DC, in turn, didn’t condescend to their audience.
GRIFFITHS: When you compare them to what was going on in England at the time . . . They came over, and they were so great, because they’d been playing all these gigs, and English bands hadn’t been playing. So you had the raw excitement of the Sex Pistols or the Clash or the Jam or whatever else was going on, but you just had this real rock’n’roll band, with this extraordinary guitarist, showman, and Bon who was just great. Kids just loved Bon.”
It probably had a lot to do simply with musicianship. AC/DC, with their greater prowess, got across aggression so much more effectively. With even a measure of flash. AC/DC also attracted older fans—like bikers, who always liked their rock’n’roll loud, hard and fast.
Not only that, they had genuine character and they put on a show. Malcolm, Mark and Phil at the back line—a rhythm section as tight as any—looked like any real, ordinary young blokes. Out front, Angus was pure vaudeville—the errant schoolboy imagery stretching all the way back to comic-book character Billy Bunter—but the thing was, he was a freak, he could really play that guitar. And Bon—Bon was simply larger than life; but at the core he too was all real. If the band mostly copped stick from the press, it didn’t matter, because the kids knew what was what.
GRIFFITHS: “It was all word of mouth, the record wasn’t doing much; Sounds was supportive, nobody else, and they were just touring all over. But they were building an incredible live following. Funnily enough, everything was building towards a peak, because by then we were about to come in with the second album, and we thought they were going to explode from the Reading Festival. But in fact, they played Reading and they didn’t do very well, and I’ve never really understood why, because they had a great slot—the Saturday or Sunday afternoon—and they played well, but they really didn’t go down very well.”
The annual Reading Festival is an institution in British rock, a showcase that can make or break bands. Sharing a bill in 1976 with Brand X, Ted Nugent, the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, Black Oak Arkansas and Osibisa, AC/DC had the same hopes for Reading that they’d had for Sunbury back home in 1975. But before a crowd of nearly 50,000 they would again be thwarted.
An entourage accompanied the band to Reading, including Michael and Coral Browning, George and Harry, Richard Griffiths, Phil Carson, even Silver. On the way there, they stopped in at Richard Griffiths’ parents’ place for lunch and a quick game of croquet. Griffiths remembers that Bon, of course, utterly charmed his mother.
But as Melody Maker’s “Reading Report” put it: “If you think the Sex Pistols are a gang of untalented jerks, then prepare yourself . . .” John Peel admitted he slept through AC/DC’s set—“probably the first person ever to do so”—but somehow still managed to note, “Anticipation was high for AC/DC, and response was agitated—people seemed to think them either absolutely awful or great fun. The loutish element definitely dug them, as did I.”
MARK EVANS: “We drove back to London, and George at that stage had come over with Harry, and we had a pretty heavy meeting, because everyone had the shits. George came back, we were going to play cards, and Malcolm and Angus started arguing. I tried to split them up, and it was the first time George ever said anything more to me than, No worries, mate. He’d given Malcolm and Angus a blast, saying, Who the fuck do you think you are? I don’t think it was the band’s fault, I think it was the crowd, but George blamed us. And he turned to me, and said, And you! He kept calling me Dave, you know, that was the old singer, Dave Evans—and I said, At least you could get my name right. And then they all set on me.”
GRIFFITHS: “I didn’t like George at all. I felt that George was out to fuck with Michael. In fact, I got the sense that the Alberts people were out to fuck Michael off.
“But then Michael fucked me and took the band away from my agency! But you know, it was probably the right move. Because I was a small little agency, and he needed someone bigger.
“The last tour I booked for them would have been August/September. The first gigs we did with them in London they were getting ten pounds a night; by then we were getting £500 to £750 a night, which was pretty decent money in those days.”
Announcing that they’d joined the prestigious Cowbell Agency, which handled such top-line British acts as Jethro Tull, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart and Alex Harvey, AC/DC were “bought on” to a September European tour supporting Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. A buy-on is when a band pays for the privilege of playing on the bill with another, bigger band. It cost AC/DC a not inconsiderable sum to open on 19 dates for Ritchie Blackmore. The legendary status of the former Deep Purple axeman guaranteed AC/DC an audience which would be not only large, but also almost certainly the right audience.
Every territory has its distinctive likes and dislikes, and Germany, the third largest market for music in the world, next to producing its own avant-garde strain of rock, has always had a real fondness for the hardest of hard rock. To the Germans, AC/DC must have seemed made in heaven.
AC/DC had excited Germany even before they arrived there. The High Voltage album shifted 16,000 copies in its first week of release. Prior to the band’s joining the Blackmore tour, they played three gigs of their own, and a fourth—a major show for Bravo—in Duisburg. Bravo was the top rock magazine in the country, and every year it held its own hit-pick concert. Sharing the bill were Suzi Quatro, Slik and Shaun Cassidy.
The band arrived in Hamburg by ferry at 9:00 on the morning of September 15. They were greeted by George, who had made his own way over, and brother Alex, who was based there at the time. It was a family reunion. Bon checked into his hotel room where a letter was waiting for him from Atlantic’s German International Product Manager Killy Kumberger.
“Welcome to good old Germany,” it read. “May I tell you that we at WEA are sure you will be one of the major rock’n’roll bands in the future. Your sound seems to be perfect for our market. With your fantastic live appearances, you should soon be able to attract a wide audience. The first reactions to the single and the album have been very positive.”
Accompanying the letter was a schedule for the day, which was typical:
On tour in Germany, October 1976. Mark Evans: “Jeez, Bon was on the turps early that day.” (courtesy Mark Evans)
9:00 - Arrival harbor Hamburg
12:45 - Pick up at hotel by Hannelore Kring, promotion co-
ordinator
1:00 - Interview at Cafe Boheme with Martin Meister, journalist
for music magazine Joker
2:00 - Interview at Cafe Boheme for magazine Pop with Brigitte
Weckelmann
3:00 - Interview at Cafe Boheme for daily newspaper
Morgenpost with Mario Scheuermann
4:00 - Fabrik open for road manager
6:00 - Rehearsal
8:30 - Concert
11:30 - Dinner at Bratwurstglockle with journalists from
Sounds, Pop-Foto, Musikexpress, etc and WEA people
In Hamburg, the boys in the band indulged in the not-so illicit pleasures on offer in the world’s most notorious red-light district. All except Bon that is, who delighted as he was by window displays of real live naked ladies, had a date lined up with a fräulein he had met when Fraternity visited Germany.
Apart from an uncooperative stage prop—a huge model rainbow which, like Spinal Tap’s miniature Stonehenge, kept falling over—the tour was marred only by Blackmore’s bad temper.
AC/DC played with Rainbow in Geneva, Marseilles, Paris and Belgium before returning to England by mid-October. If the French have any particular predilections, it’s for the wild men of rock, its gutter poets; and so again, AC/DC must have seemed like a dream band.
Back in London, the band had barely a week off before it was due to go out on the road again, headlining, for the first time, their own British tour. The plan was to do that, and then in mid-November go to America en route to Australia.
A return tour of Australia was booked for December. RAM suggested that promoters Evans-Gudinksi had considered calling the tour, “The little c**nts have done it.” In America, at least two gigs at the Starwood in LA were on offer.
Meantime, High Voltage was released in the US, and both the Dirty Deeds album and single were released in Australia. Britain would see the release of the “High Voltage” single and the slightly amended Dirty Deeds album by the beginning of November.
Reviewing Dirty Deeds, RAM suggested the band was simply repeating itself, though had to admit “they’ve shown positive signs of a NEW DIRECTION”—even if it came down only to “Ride On” and “Jailbreak.”
America bore both good and bad news. High Voltage—surprise—had polarized reaction. With new cover artwork yet again (Angus struck by a bolt of lightning), industry bible Billboard listed it in its “Recommended LPs” column: “Australia’s newest entry is a cross between Led Zeppelin and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. Lead singer has a very unique sounding voice and the twin guitars are front and center from the first cut. Expect airplay on progressive stations.”
Rolling Stone, on the other hand, was contemptuous. “Those concerned with the future of hard rock may take solace in knowing that with the release of the first US album by these Australian gross-out champions, the genre has unquestionably hit its all-time low,” said Billy Altman. “Lead singer Bon Scott spits out his vocals with a truly annoying aggression which, I suppose, is the only way to do it when all you seem to care about is being a star so that you can get laid every night. Stupidity bothers me. Calculated stupidity offends me.”
As it transpired, the band wouldn’t make it to America in 1976. Michael Browning was unable to arrange visas, since not only Bon but he himself had Australian criminal records for pot convictions. This certainly wouldn’t have impressed Atlantic—not so much having been busted in the first place, but not being able to get around it, and not coming to America to make some promotional appearances.
Critical reaction to Dirty Deeds in Britain echoed that in Australia. Comparing Dirty Deeds and High Voltage, Geoff Barton said, “So alike are they that tracks could be interchanged quite easily” (which was of course perfectly true). The single “Jailbreak” was inexplicably omitted, thus undermining the album’s killer ending; so too was “Rock in Peace.” Replacing them were “Rocker,” the TNT track dropped from the first English album, and “Love at First Feel,” a track the band had up its sleeve which would only see release in Australia as a single the following January. Dirty Deeds was more of the same, but in Britain, the groundswell of fans had only one previous album to go on, and so it was quite welcome.
Nevertheless, neither the album nor the “High Voltage” single went anywhere near the charts. AC/DC’s rise was a live phenomenon.
DAVE JARRETT: “AC/DC and Van Halen, who I also worked with, did a very similar thing. Van Halen did two tours of England, very, very quickly, one supporting Black Sabbath, and then headlined themselves. When they came over and supported Black Sabbath, we’d never heard of them. So it was the young turks with the old warhorses. And they were so exciting, I mean, Dave Lee Roth was in the band. The audience was very responsive. It was fantastic, and again, a very similar situation to AC/DC.
“What you had to do, you only had to do a good support or two, and you could cover the whole country, and kids would come out and see you the next time, you didn’t need hit records.”
On October 27, the band played the first gig of its headline tour at Southampton University. Oxford Polytechnic refused to grant them permission to perform because their repertoire contained “blatantly vulgar and cheap references to both sexes.”
Heading towards Scotland always brightened the band’s spirits.
“Glasgow would be our favorite place in Scotland, in the whole of Britain, because the kids are really mad—like, half of them are Angus and Malcolm’s relatives anyway,” Bon told RAM. “The first time we ever played down there, there were about two rows of seats just demolished. And so this time they had extra men inside and the riot squad outside. But if the cops had stopped the show and arrested Angus the kids would have gone mad. And no one goes mad like Glaswegians, believe me.”
Arriving back in London and playing the Hammersmith Odeon, even the NME had to admit AC/DC was here to stay: “The emcee only just ducks into the wings and out of the firing range when the Odeon stage explodes deafeningly. Bruised about the head, their breath stolen by the sheer impact of noise, the security men are caught off guard and trampled to the floor as the audience immediately besieges the front.
“And then this schoolboy brat up on the rostrum smirks maliciously as his opening power chord painfully rattles through our bones and makes the unnecessary triumphant gesture of wildly tossing his cap to the floor, as if to say: This is our day.
“The day, Gawd ’elp us all, AC/DC conquered London.”
Dave Dee and Phil Carson, and Michael Browning and Coral, and everybody, knew that they’d cracked it. The 4,000 seat theatre was only just over half full, but it wasn’t so much the quantity as the quality of the crowd that convinced them. It was clear then, with even a few kids in the audience dressed in school uniforms, that the band’s appeal extended beyond the merely musical. Particularly satisfying to the band itself was the fact that this success was achieved without having to alter its act.
Even the Times reviewed the show. Said rock critic Clive Bennett, “My objections are to their music, not their words, which simply express without inhibitions what most of us have discussed innumerable times with equal frankness in private. Music of any sort must surely require more from performers than just the capacity mindlessly to bash their instruments into oblivion. It is in this primal state that AC/DC exist.”
Any sort of acknowledgement by the Times was signal enough: AC/DC had arrived. It was, indeed, a meteoric rise. Their standing in Britain could certainly still be improved upon, but the new frontier now was America.
MICHAEL BROWNING: “There’s an amazing photograph of Bon from that first time they headlined a major venue in London. Bon said he’d make his own way to the gig, which of course, we were all a bit nervous about, but anyway . . . We were all there backstage worrying that Bon wasn’t going to turn up. In the meantime, because the band’s name was on the marquee out the front, I asked this photographer if he could go around and get a picture of it, you know, “Sold Out—AC/DC.” So he did that, and then Bon turned up and everything went fine.
“Anyway, this photographer brought the proofs in to show me the next week, and who should be walking past on his way to the gig in the picture but Bon! He was just casually walking to the gig. And that just really summed up Bon, you know, the first ever big headline gig, no lights or anything like that. He’s just casually strolling along. He would have just got off the tube at Hammersmith station.
“And to his credit, he would do things like that.”