LET THERE BE ROCK!

The hardest working heavy metal band prefers to think of themselves as good old rock and rollers. Nigel Williamson gets down and dirty with AC/DC

- Nigel Williamson

On AC/DC’s album Let There Be Rock there’s a track called Bad Boy Boogie. In truth, it’s not the greatest song the band ever recorded, but as Bon Scott yelps: “All you women, come along with me/And I’ll show how good a bad boy can be” its testosterone-fuelled thunder seemed to perfectly sum them up.

Few bands have ever done the priapic hard-rocking bad-boy boogie with more salacious glee than AC/DC. Their debut album was appropriately titled High Voltage and they have kept the current flowing at a level fit to blow every fuse ever since.

Next year AC/DC celebrate the 50th anniversary of their first club gigs in Sydney, Australia in 1973. Along the way they have sold more than 200-million albums with 1980’s Back In Black becoming the third-highest-selling album ever, behind only Dark Side Of The Moon and Thriller.

Hailed as heavy metal heroes, they have always preferred to call themselves simply: “a rock and roll band” in the time-honoured, down-and-dirty tradition. AC/DC’s raucous power riffing has seldom been on speaking terms with those sirens of tastefulness known as subtlety and nuance. “People can go and hear REM if they want deep lyrics, but at the end of the night, they want to go home and get laid,” the band’s Malcolm Young once noted. “That’s where AC/DC comes into it.”