Music

Fifty-one years ago, after trying out Zorro, Superman and gorilla costumes, Angus Young took a suggestion from his sister, borrowed her son’s school uniform and wore it onstage. Since then, like his band AC/DC, the lead guitarist’s live persona has been insanely consistent — he once told Billboard that he packs 12 schoolboy costumes for tours.
“We’ve never tried to do something we’re not or looked around to see what the other bands were doing,” Angus said in a 1996 interview. “An audience can tell when you’re phony or you don’t want to be onstage.”

High Voltage, AC/DC’s debut album, set the band’s consistent musical template in 1975 when the record arrived in the group’s home country of Australia. Twelve months later, it reached the United States and, after a few years, established the act as international rock stars.

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Every AC/DC album since, from classics such as 1980’s Back in Black to lesser-known gems like 1995’s Ballbreaker, has exemplified what Billboard declared in a 2014 review of the Rock or Bust album: “Neither trends, age nor the passing of many decades has altered the basic blueprint the band laid out on its 1975 debut, High Voltage.”

“Some people might say that you guys have made the same record over and over 10 times,” an interviewer once suggested to Angus.

“That’s a dirty lie!” he responded. “We’ve made the same record over and over 11 times!”

Of AC/DC’s 19 studio albums, seven have hit the top 10 of the Billboard 200, including two No. 1s, 1981’s For Those About To Rock (We Salute You) and 2008’s Black Ice.

Phillip Rudd, Angus Young, Mark Evans, Malcolm Young, and Bon Scott of AC/DC pose for an Atlantic Records publicity still in front of a graffiti-covered wall circa 1977.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Imag

Ten of the band’s tracks have earned more than 177 million streams, beginning with “Thunderstruck” at 1 billion, according to Luminate. AC/DC’s touring power has been similarly steady, from 1978, when it opened for Aerosmith for multiple sold-out arena dates, to 2010, when its four best-selling concerts ever grossed $11.7 million, $12.8 million, $24.6 million and $27 million, all in Australian stadiums, according to Billboard Boxscore.

Despite the loss of Angus’ brother, founding member and rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young, to dementia in 2017, AC/DC rocks on. The band opened its global Power Up tour on April 10 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.

CAA books AC/DC, with agency veterans Rob Light, Chris Dalston and Allison McGregor overseeing dates. The tour takes its name from the 2020 Power Up album. (The band’s repertoire is released by Columbia Records in the United States and by Sony worldwide.) Alvin Handwerker of Prager Metis handles management.

On record, AC/DC began its loud and mighty run 50 years ago, with the release of High Voltage. The album was created in “a very economical two weeks,” as Jeff Apter writes in the 2018 biography High Voltage: The Life of Angus Young. The second week focused on Angus’ guitar solos and the controlled night-prowler shrieks of frontman Bon Scott, who died in 1980.

Angus has said of Alberts, the band’s Sydney studio, “I would have liked to have taken the f–king walls with me and kept them. A guitar just came to life in there. It was a little downtrodden, but it had a great vibe, this energy to it.”

The group’s pathway through the music business began with Sydney publisher Ted Albert, who lived in a mansion called Boomerang and sailed with his father on a yacht of the same name. His company, Albert Productions, had signed Australian rock’n’roll band The Easybeats in 1965, putting out classics such as “Friday on My Mind” and “St. Louis” before it broke up four years later. That act’s rhythm guitarist, George Young, turned out to have talented younger brothers, Malcolm and Angus, and the Albert connection led to AC/DC signing with the company in 1974. George and bandmate Harry Vanda, who served as High Voltage’s co-producers, had a knack for drawing the screechy rock rawness out of Angus and Malcolm.

“That was our first real album,” Angus told Guitar Player in 2003, “and it was the one that defined our style.”

The album’s opening track, “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll),” began as a “jam,” Angus recalled in a 1992 interview, published many years later in Classic Rock. “We were just playing away, and my brother George left the tape rolling. After we finished, he was jumping up and down in the studio going, ‘Great, great, this is magic!’ And you’re thinking, ‘What’s he on about?’ And he played it back and there it was. It had that magic atmosphere.”

Although AC/DC became known for its lascivious vocals full of not-so-disguised euphemisms, “It’s a Long Way to the Top” is almost a folk ballad, lamenting endless hard work and “getting old, getting gray, getting ripped off, underpaid.” Country, folk and Americana singers including Lucinda Williams and Cody Jinks have covered it.

The droning track required a droning instrument — bagpipes — as its crucial final touch, the producers’ idea.

“Bagpipes!” exclaimed Steve Leeds, head of album promotion for AC/DC’s longtime U.S. label, Atlantic Records, as reported in Jesse Fink’s 2013 book The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC. “There are no bagpipes on the radio, even today. George and Harry were f–king geniuses. They figured it out. Conventional wisdom says, ‘You guys are crazy.’ ”

George knew how to communicate with musicians, and he recognized that the band’s imperfect quality in the studio could lead to spontaneous excitement on its recordings. At one point, while recording the title track, drummer Phil Rudd thought he had “messed up” during a fill, Angus recalled in 1992. “And George is signaling: ‘Keep going. Keep going.’ And we finish that take and we come in and go, ‘OK, we better try again.’ And he goes, ‘No. That was the take.’ And that was the one we used.” The track wound up closing the album.

From Australia to the United States, where it was released in 1976, High Voltage received almost no attention — other than negative attention. Critics were merciless. Rolling Stone’s infamous pan called the band “Australian gross-out champions,” declared hard rock “has unquestionably hit its all-time low,” referred to its rhythm section as “goose-stepping” and concluded the whole operation added up to “calculated stupidity.” A short feature two years later — written by Ira Kaplan, later frontman of Yo La Tengo — concluded, “There’s nothing new going on musically, but AC/DC attacks the old clichés with overwhelming exuberance.”

Many critics back then blooped over Malcolm’s steel-beam rhythms and Angus’ devotional reinterpretations of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and stripped-down arrangements that distilled The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith and The Stooges into riffs that gained power with repetition.

“At that time, Rolling Stone was really into the punk genre and were matching up everything to what was the current flavor of the day,” Angus told Vulture in 2020. “What we did was rock’n’roll and we weren’t going to change anything.”

Malcolm Young, Bon Scott, and Angus Young of AC/DC performing at The Nashville Rooms on April 26, 1976 in London.

Dick Barnatt/Redferns

The vision paid off — eventually. Angus would criticize “really soft” Australian radio for being overobsessed with Air Supply and worse. But in the United States, programmers for a small San Antonio rock station picked up High Voltage and aired it immediately. This led to a show at Austin’s 1,500-capacity Armadillo World Headquarters and, later, airplay in the Bay Area and Boston.

“Up until that point, all we had really done was a lot of touring around Australia, so it was great to get into a studio and really hear how we sounded,” Angus recalled in 2003. “What was impressive about that album was that it sold on word-of-mouth alone.”

The band also played at CBGB, the New York punk fixture where the Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie and Talking Heads first became famous. When Atlantic co-founder Ahmet Ertegun saw that gig, he agreed to sign AC/DC, steering the band at first to the label’s Atco imprint. “I’m not sure I would have signed them when I first heard them,” the late Ertegun told Billboard in 1998. “They were very modern; they were pushing the envelope. They were very young-looking then and very ratty-looking. A lot of those bands had disdain for anything that resembled authority.”

Angus responded, sort of. In a 2020 interview with Billboard, he said, “Some people would say, ‘Well, you have a very juvenile approach to what you’re singing.’ But good rock’n’roll is juvenile, in a sense.”

At first, High Voltage was hardly a blockbuster, neither in its native Australia nor the United States. Not even “T.N.T.” charted on the Billboard Hot 100. But it since has become one of the band’s most beloved tracks, with 436 million U.S. streams, as well as 826 million Spotify plays internationally.

AC/DC’s first track to hit the Hot 100 was “Highway to Hell,” in October 1979, at a modest No. 47. And its debut album didn’t crack the Billboard 200 until 1981, long after Highway to Hell broke into the top 20 and Back in Black followed by reaching No. 4. Album-oriented rock, indeed. High Voltage took five years to go gold in the United States in 1981, according to the RIAA, and hit quadruple-platinum in July 2024.

As it turns out, consistency is exactly half of AC/DC’s formula for commercial success. The other half is a combination of songs that sound perfect no matter how many times they’re played on the radio and onstage. Like the song goes, “If you think it’s easy doing one-night stands/Try playing in a rock-roll band.”

James Hetfield of Metallica put it a different way, describing the live Angus experience to Billboard in 2016: “That guy sweats so much every night. I can’t believe his head is still on his body.”

This story appears in the April 19, 2025, issue of Billboard.