Credit: Alamy
Tue 6 October 2026 16:30, UK
The entire point of most AC/DC riffs was to never overcomplicate things.
As much as the band could play their asses off whenever they performed, anything that Angus Young ever did was about serving the song before anything else, even if the tune only needed three chords at the end of the day. But for all of the great tunes that they have written, there was never a moment where they sat and willingly tried to write a pop song like everyone else, rock and roll hopefuls, that’s hashing out their first tunes.
Angus and Malcolm were making tunes that came from the heart, and if their bluesy take on rock and roll wasn’t what was doing major numbers at the moment, that wasn’t all that important to them. They found their niche and were going to stick with it, and you can really hear that in the way that they put a lot of their first tunes together. It’s not all that ambitious all the time, but there’s hardly anyone who could deny the groove they had.
Because, really, the groove is the art behind any great AC/DC song. The biggest tunes that they ever wrote usually came from them making the best with what they had, but hearing Malcolm lock in with Phil Rudd on those early records was all that the band ever needed to sell millions of records. But when someone like Bon Scott ends up dying midway through their career, it’s not like they were going to shrug that kind of thing off.
Scott was every bit the frontman that they wanted when they first started out, and you can hear his hunger for wanting to be a star from the first time he sang. He was the perfect foil to their riffs, but when the band were hashing out the beginnings of what would become Back in Black before Scott had passed away, they were still wondering if they had anything to work on to follow up Highway to Hell.
That record took everything great about the band and distilled it into one album, so how the hell are you supposed to do the same thing all over again? It wasn’t an easy job, but the fact that Malcolm had a song like ‘Back in Black’ under his belt proved that everything was going to be just fine if they kept the engines running and put their nose to the grindstone with Brian Johnson as their new frontman.
But when Angus first heard Malcolm playing the tune, he remembered that his older brother was actually planning on throwing the whole thing out after thinking that it was no good, saying, “Malcolm had the main riff for about three weeks. He came in one night and said, ‘Can I put this down? It’s driving me mad. I won’t be getting any sleep until I put it on cassette.’ The funniest thing is, he said to me, ‘What do you think? I don’t know if it’s crap or not. I don’t know.’”
Further reading: From The Vault
Given what would happen only a few months later, Malcolm would have missed one of the biggest opportunities of his career if he threw that tune away. It’s not much to play if you’re just starting out, but even with those three chords, Malcolm captured the essence of rock and roll, and considering they had just lost their frontman, this was practically them showing everyone that they were the kind of phoenix that was going to rise from the ashes of any problem that came their way.
It wasn’t going to be easy to muscle through the next round of rock bombast, but if they had the right tunes at their disposal, anything was possible. Because when you’ve reached the point where you can make just a few chords sound like the most important thing in the world, you’ve entered a much higher level of songwriter that no one else can reach.
