(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 12 December 2025 17:30, UK
“Meat and potatoes.” That’s the way Ozzy Osbourne described AC/DC when he was talking about how much of a fan he was.
“Angus is like a machine that never stops. He keeps going and going. He still got the fucking energy, man, they are a really great bunch of guys,” said the Black Sabbath singer. “They are my friends, are real people. I love them all, God bless them. (…) There is no other band in the world like them. (They) are a meat and potatoes band. There is no bollocks, there is no fucking around. Whether you like them or you don’t and I’m proud to say I love them.”
While some people might reject the idea of being called “meat and potatoes,” Angus Young well and truly embraced it. He thought that Osbourne had a point and acknowledged the fact that AC/DC made a style of rock music that was relatively straightforward, but the very best version of straightforward rock that you’re ever going to come across. Angus Young and Malcolm Young got into the guitar because of heavy blues music, and so that’s the sound they championed. Angus was never one for playing the guitar in a way that he didn’t enjoy.
“I play guitar when I feel like playing guitar. That’s how I learned to play,” he said, “It was a never, ‘You must do that’. It was a case of you wanted to do that and you felt like doing it. The music has a lot of power. It’s simple, but it’s also kind of complex.”
The guitar music that they made was simple, but it was easy to love. You were hearing excellent guitarists utilise rhythm and simplicity to create an entire discography of songs that followed the same pattern and yet were easy to distinguish from one another. You always know what you’re getting with an AC/DC album, and opinion on this fact is divided.
You have opinion one, which consists of people like Frank Zappa, who loved the band because of their commitment to rock music and their ability as musicians. While Zappa was a complicated musician who is widely considered a behemoth in all things prog rock and complex, he loved AC/DC because he recognised how much they loved guitar music and how much they equally loved perfecting their style of guitar playing.
Zappa was such a massive fan of the band that he once attempted to sign them, but was unsuccessful in doing so, given that they eventually headed to Atlantic.
One of the people who grew tired of the band’s simplistic approach towards rock was Pete Townshend. He subscribed to the mindset that the band’s repetition was goddamn boring and wasn’t something he could relate to as a musician. As someone who makes complex concept albums, he criticised AC/DC because “all their albums were the same”.
Townshend concluded, “It wasn’t the way The Who worked […] We were an ideas band… We’re not making Coca-Cola, where every can has to taste the same.”
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