The most fun AC/DC had making a record: “It turned out wonderful”

Posted On January 26, 2025January 26, 2025

If you just listened to the music, being in AC/DC sounds like a total blast. You make the same music for decades. You tour the world and play at the biggest venues on the planet. Multiple generations of bands hold you up as the gold standard of rock. You hang out with a septuagenarian dressed as a schoolboy. Ok, so maybe not everything about being in AC/DC is rad, and if you look at the band’s history, you’ll see that statement is a lot more true than you’d think.

After all, this is a band that suffered arguably the ultimate loss a band can suffer. Original singer Bon Scott died in the backseat of a car in Camden literally one year after the release their commercial breakthrough album Highway To Hell. Nearly every other band who suffers a loss like this understandably calls it quits, but not AC/DC. They simply found another singer, in the form of Geordie frontman (both the band and the region) Brian Johnson, and got back to work.

The work they got back to ended up not just eclipsing their previous commercial peak, but made them one of the biggest bands in the world. Their tribute to Scott, 1980’s Back In Black has sold a cool 50million copies worldwide at the time of writing. You may have heard of it already. However, no matter how effortless the music sounds, it was still took a whole lot of hard work to write.

Which sounds absurd, right? Surely you write an AC/DC song by sinking a few, turning your amps up to twelve, jam until you stumble on a riff Chuck Berry would kill for and then howl something about girls or cars over the top of it? Apparently, not quite. In fact, it got to the point that Brian Johnson himself once rhapsodised in a radio interview about Angus and Malcolm Young taking over the lyric writing duties for AC/DC because he’d “ran out of words”.

I suppose there are only so many ways of saying the word “fight”. However, there is a man who has seemingly brought the joy back into making AC/DC records very recently. The band’s last three records have been helmed by the famed producer Brendan O’Brien, who has helmed recent records by everyone from Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young to Mastodon and Pearl Jam.

In an interview on BBC Radio 6, Johnson talked about the ways in which O’Brien kept everything feeling fresh while making the records. He said, “Seven days a week, he kept the adrenaline pumped all the time, and he calls everybody by both their names. He never says ‘Brian’ or ‘Angus’. He’s, like, ‘Angus Young. C’mon! I want you in here now. Let me get that magic from you. What do you got for me? Brian Johnson, downstairs now. Sing, baby, sing.’ And it turned out wonderful…’cause it comes through in songs. If you sing a song 12 times to get it right, you can tell. If you sing a song just a couple of times, like I did, you can tell it’s fresh and it’s new. And it was the same for Ang, and it was the same for everyone.”

Trust a producer as experienced as Brendan O’Brien to know that when it comes to AC/DC, precision is the enemy. If you keep everything loose, spontaneous, and above all, exciting? Then you’ve got three of the most celebrated AC/DC records in decades.

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