{"id":722864,"date":"2026-08-01T14:05:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T14:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/722864\/"},"modified":"2026-08-01T14:05:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T14:05:12","slug":"the-1960s-legends-angus-young-could-never-listen-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/722864\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1960s legends Angus Young could never listen to"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <img width=\"1140\" height=\"855\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Angus-Young-Musician-ACDC-1980s-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\" class=\"attachment-single-feature size-single-feature wp-post-image\" alt=\"Angus Young - Musician - ACDC - 1980's\" layout=\"fill\"  style=\"object-position: 50% 20%\" loading=\"eager\" fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Credit: Far Out \/ Joan Sorolla<\/p>\n<p> Sat 1 August 2026 10:00, UK <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/tags\/angus-young\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">Angus Young<\/a> was usually very simple when it came to his music taste. <\/p>\n<p>As long as it had a decent riff and had a lot of swing to it, it didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>Granted, it\u2019s 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\u2019s exactly what they were going to do.<\/p>\n<p>But long before rock and roll had even existed, Young was just as interested in what the blues players had been doing. <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/genre-angus-young-said-he-would-love-all-his-lif\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">Blues is the most natural predecessor<\/a> of rock that there is, and even when Young was listening to people like Elvis Presley sing for the first time, he wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>Angus and Malcolm were both looking to create tunes that had the same swagger that they heard on those records, but that didn\u2019t 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/angus-young-ac-dc-owe-their-existence-to-chuck-berry\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">the time of Presley and Chuck Berry<\/a>, so hearing songs by Brian Wilson felt like a huge step backwards when he heard their trademark harmonies.<\/p>\n<p>Wilson was a musical genius in every sense of the word, but there was always going to be a caveat around the band\u2019s vocal tone. They sounded absolutely chipper when they were singing about fun in the sun, and while Mike Love\u2019s nasal delivery was going to be an acquired taste, Angus had more of a problem with the fact that the band didn\u2019t sound anything like the version of rock and roll that he heard in his head.<\/p>\n<p>He wanted music with more muscle behind it, and The Beach Boys was practically the sound of music getting neutered in his opinion, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.guitarworld.com\/artists\/bands\/ac-dc-live-retrospective\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">saying<\/a>, \u201cI was never a lover of the harmony-type stuff. For some reason that seemed too\u2026 eeuuuewww\u2026 it brought in that sweetness. When I heard the Beach Boys, I just thought it was an older version of the Chipmunks. I\u2019d never seen a surfboard in my life. But they\u2019ve all got these bits of wood, and they\u2019re all going, \u2018Surrrfun Yew Ess Ayy.\u2019 I went home to my mother and said, \u2018Mum, I think they put us on another planet.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n<p>There was a lot more that Wilson had to offer when he was behind the piano, but it\u2019s not hard to see why his version of rock and roll wouldn\u2019t appeal to Angus. AC\/DC shoots straight every single time they play any of their songs, and they weren\u2019t going to be distracted by any of Wilson\u2019s masterpieces, no matter how many beautiful chords were layered <a href=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/the-album-brian-wilson-said-was-as-good-as-pet-sounds\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\" title=\"\">on top of classics like Pet Sounds<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>That kind of music definitely had a time and place, but it just wasn\u2019t on Angus\u2019s wavelength. He needed something that was a bit more feral than songs about surfing the day away, and he wasn\u2019t going to be wowed by a bunch of kids singing like they were in a barbershop quartet and claiming to be rock and roll.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>  <a class=\"fw\" href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/preferences\/source?q=https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" style=\"\"> ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"28\" height=\"28\" src=\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/wp-content\/themes\/far-out-magazine\/img\/google-discover.svg\" alt=\"\"\/> <\/a>   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Joan Sorolla Sat 1 August 2026 10:00, UK Angus Young was usually very simple&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[19405,27575,27576,29764,96,128,3584,15745,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-722864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-1960s","tag-ac-dc","tag-angus-young","tag-brian-wilson","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-rock","tag-the-beach-boys","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}