Credit: Far Out / Joan Sorolla
Sat 1 August 2026 10:00, UK
Angus Young was usually very simple when it came to his music taste.
As long as it had a decent riff and had a lot of swing to it, it didn’t take long for him to get behind it, and every single AC/DC song has abided by those principles since the days when they were first making their tunes in Australia. But even though they were influenced by all kinds of rock and roll, Young knew that there were certain songs that were practically off limits for him whenever he heard them on the radio.
Granted, it’s not like Young always wanted to play the same thing every time AC/DC made a new record. They practically fell into the reputation of being a one-trick pony, but when you look through a lot of their best work, it all came from them trying their best to make tunes that they would want to hear, and if that meant making variations of the same riff and still sounding badass, that’s exactly what they were going to do.
But long before rock and roll had even existed, Young was just as interested in what the blues players had been doing. Blues is the most natural predecessor of rock that there is, and even when Young was listening to people like Elvis Presley sing for the first time, he wasn’t doing anything that some of the old blues rockers had been doing years before him. This was just another variation on what everyone from Muddy Waters to Buddy Guy was doing, and the same rules applied to his music.
Angus and Malcolm were both looking to create tunes that had the same swagger that they heard on those records, but that didn’t tell the full story of what rock and roll was all about in the 1960s. For Angus, rock and roll had seemed to peak around the time of Presley and Chuck Berry, so hearing songs by Brian Wilson felt like a huge step backwards when he heard their trademark harmonies.
Wilson was a musical genius in every sense of the word, but there was always going to be a caveat around the band’s vocal tone. They sounded absolutely chipper when they were singing about fun in the sun, and while Mike Love’s nasal delivery was going to be an acquired taste, Angus had more of a problem with the fact that the band didn’t sound anything like the version of rock and roll that he heard in his head.
He wanted music with more muscle behind it, and The Beach Boys was practically the sound of music getting neutered in his opinion, saying, “I was never a lover of the harmony-type stuff. For some reason that seemed too… eeuuuewww… it brought in that sweetness. When I heard the Beach Boys, I just thought it was an older version of the Chipmunks. I’d never seen a surfboard in my life. But they’ve all got these bits of wood, and they’re all going, ‘Surrrfun Yew Ess Ayy.’ I went home to my mother and said, ‘Mum, I think they put us on another planet.’”
Further reading: From The Vault
There was a lot more that Wilson had to offer when he was behind the piano, but it’s not hard to see why his version of rock and roll wouldn’t appeal to Angus. AC/DC shoots straight every single time they play any of their songs, and they weren’t going to be distracted by any of Wilson’s masterpieces, no matter how many beautiful chords were layered on top of classics like Pet Sounds.
That kind of music definitely had a time and place, but it just wasn’t on Angus’s wavelength. He needed something that was a bit more feral than songs about surfing the day away, and he wasn’t going to be wowed by a bunch of kids singing like they were in a barbershop quartet and claiming to be rock and roll.
