AC/DC: 45 years of “Back in Black”. Phil Sutcliffe tells

On March 29, 1980 Malcolm Young called Brian Johnson to announce that the band’s place of singer was his for 170 pounds a week, plus an indemnity to geordias II for the work they would lose while looking for a new singer. Time a few days and they were in the Bahamas, taking advantage of a hole in the Nassau Coming Point Studio calendar owned by the founder of Island Chris Blackwell.
They settled in “Cubiculus of concrete” illuminated by candles in a place “managed by an old and large -colored old -fashioned old man who supplied them with fishing smokes to defend themselves from Haitiani’s mice. To put it with Johnson, “It was not Newcastle” (Susan Marino, “Let There Be Rock”). The band and the technicians, in all good account, as Johnson told Chatain in 1980, adopted the newcomer, “a very important fact for me”.
Malcolm recalls that the singer was worried because he lacked the “finesse” by the author of Scott (Knac.com). On the other hand, he faced the vocal parts with a roaring power by touching improbable high notes. He discovered that he could not sing beach dress and converted to work clothes: jeans and coppola. Despite being less original than Scott, he wrote texts full of boiling sex, truculent images, double senses typical of blues and ingenious rhymes. It was all flour of his sack, in spite of the mischievous voices that turned. Twenty -five years later, speaking with “Classic Rock”, Angus responded to gossip vigorously: “We did not take anything from the bon’s notebook … his things ended directly in the hands of his mother and the family … it would not have been right to draw from there. It was not our stuff”.
Rock did not dominate the six weeks passed to compass points. Malcolm’s wife, O’Lilda, gave birth to their firstborn dear and Angus the auction swallowed some whiskey, just before being brought to bed weight by others. Meanwhile, in England Jeffery tried unnecessarily to record the “bells of hell” that had to be held for Scott at the beginning of the album. It was not practical to use those choices initially to the war memorial
of Loughborough, Leicestershire, so they had to wait for a foundry to end up forging a smaller reply, the one they would use in concert. Malcolm reported to Simmons that only after listening to the recordings in the New York Mix room did the band realized that it was “a monstrous album”. In his biography of Bon Scott, Walker defines “Back in Black” “the best resurrection of the history of rock”. The numbers say it is the peak of their career. After the release in Great Britain in late July, the album arrived straight at number 1. In America it stopped in fourth place, remaining among the top 10 for five months. And continue to sell. The 2010 estimate speaks of worldwide sales of 50 million
Copies, the best seller ever after Michael Jackson’s “thriller”.

The AC/DC claimed their decision to move forward. They honored Bon Scott. They passed the rest of the year to prove it on the stages.
Johnson had all the time to acclimatize: the AC/DC embarked in a series of 120 shows over six months starting calmly with some European dates in small clubs. He needed it. He made his debut on June 29 at the Palais des Exposations in Namur, in Belgium: when the band played “Shot Down in Flames”, he sang the words of “Highway to Hell” by mistake. Yet he managed to suck energy from the generosity of the fans. He said to Robin Smith of the British weekly “Record Mirror”: “That poor boy (Scott) was loved by thousands of people all over the world. We made a heating concert in Holland (on 3 or 5 July). A guy approaches me with a bon tattoo on his arm and says: ‘This guy was my hero, but I went away. I wish you all the luck of the world’. Tremebondo.
If Johnson became stronger, Rudd was weakening. Engleheart and Durieux say that in Lincoln, Nebraska, around September 10, in the middle of the four months of American tours, Rudd called Jeffery at 4 in the morning asking him to help him make a lot of people out of his room. Jeffery found the drummer, alone, hallucinated and in tears who asked him to “do not say it in Malcolm”. On October 8 in Uniondale, New York, Rudd arrived late for the delivery of a gold disc before the concert and during the set he fell from the stool. In the dressing room, Malcolm punched him.
Despite everything, Angus particularly wanted to emphasize the positive sides. Speaking with “rock & folk” Chatain he said that “people were very kind to us. I think … people like us don’t get down from fate. We are practically left from scratch … in a certain sense the bon accident has strengthened the internal ties to the group”

The text is taken from “AC/DC, high voltage rock – The illustrated history” by Phil Sutcliffe, published in Italy by Il Castello, courtesy of the publisher.