(Credits: Far Out / Joan Sorolla)
Sat 20 December 2025 15:00, UK
Anyone slightly interested in rock and roll could practically follow AC/DC to the letter whenever they start making their own tunes.
Angus Young may not have thought he was paving the way for what guitar players were going to sound like whenever he played, but seeing him strut across the stage is the epitome of what every little kid thinks of when they want to break the rules and turn amplifiers up as loud as they can. But Angus figured that the best rock and rollers came generations before him.
If anything, the rock and roll of old seemed to go downhill ever since Angus grew up. He and his brother Malcolm were all about the swing in the music, and outside of bands like The Rolling Stones, they didn’t see too many artists that he could even hope to match, true rock and roll was supposed to sound like. Led Zeppelin might have been fun, but it was more about showing off for them at that point.
Because AC/DC were never going to be the kind of band that took long stretches of solos or go unplugged for a tune. They had already tried to make a love song once, and since that went over horribly, Angus figured the best way to move forward was to turn up the amplifiers and play the kind of tunes that Keith Richards would have been proud to call his own whenever they walked into the studio.
Which probably explains why they never missed a beat when Brian Johnson came into the fold. Anyone would have thought that they were dead in the water after Bon Scott passed away, but when working on their later material, their career was the ultimate example of why one-trick pony bands can work sometimes. As long as you’re really good at your one trick, what’s the point of stopping?
Then again, Angus would be the first one to say that they paled in comparison to what Chuck Berry was doing at the dawn of rock and roll. All music at that point was still relying on the blues most of the time, and when Berry started adding a bit more energy to tunes like ‘Maybellene’, he was on the verge of a new genre of music that Bill Haley and the Comets had only briefly suggested when ‘Rock Around the Clock’ came out.
And even years after their first record, Angus still insisted that Berry was the foundation of rock and roll for them, saying, “Rock music has been around since the days when Chuck Berry put it all together. He combined the blues and the country and rockabilly and put his own poetry on top, and that became rock and roll. And it’s been hanging in. Our whole career has been playing rock and roll.” But the influence goes much further than the traditional guitar solos on every AC/DC tune.
Berry was yet another example of someone finding that perfect musical sweet spot and sticking with it throughout his whole career and given that Angus had stolen his signature duck walk, it was about much more than a simple influence. Berry was the standard by which all rock and roll was measured, and it was up to people like Angus and Malcolm to carry on what he had started.
Not every one of their albums had something as strong as ‘Johnny B Goode’ on it, but when they did reach the level of a Back in Black or Highway to Hell, they were more than a bunch of kids rocking out. They had learned from the greatest musical scribes of all time and were giving that shot of adrenaline to a whole new generation.
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