back in black tour 1980

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July 1, 1980 Setlist

AC/DC Setlist at Brielpoort, Deinze, Belgium

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Tour: Back in Black Tour statistics Add setlist

Hells Bells ( No opening bell ) Play Video
Shot Down in Flames Play Video
Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be Play Video
Problem Child Play Video
Back in Black Play Video
Bad Boy Boogie Play Video
Highway to Hell Play Video
What Do You Do for Money Honey Play Video
High Voltage Play Video
Shoot to Thrill Play Video
Givin the Dog a Bone Play Video
Whole Lotta Rosie Play Video
Rocker Play Video
Let There Be Rock Play Video

Edits and Comments

16 activities (last edit by event_monkey , 30 Jun 2023, 21:59 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

Back in Black
Givin the Dog a Bone
Hells Bells
Shoot to Thrill
What Do You Do for Money Honey
Bad Boy Boogie
Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be
Let There Be Rock
Whole Lotta Rosie
Highway to Hell
Shot Down in Flames
High Voltage
Problem Child

Complete Album stats

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Ac/dc gig timeline.

Jun 29 1980 Palais des Expositions Namur, Belgium Add time Add time
Jun 30 1980 De Roma Borgerhout, Belgium Add time Add time
Jul 01 1980 Brielpoort This Setlist Deinze, Belgium Add time Add time
Jul 02 1980 Hall Polyvalant Arlon, Belgium Add time Add time
Jul 03 1980 Turfschip Breda, Netherlands Add time Add time

2 people were there

DirkfromBelgium

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The inside story of AC/DC's Back In Black, the biggest-selling rock album of all time

It was the record that resurrected a band in mourning. From tragedy to triumph, this is the story of AC/DC’s greatest victory...

(L-R) Brian Johnson, Malcolm Young, Angus Young and Cliff Williams of AC/DC

Back In Black is many things. With more than 50 million units shifted, it is the biggest selling rock album of all time. For many, it is also the greatest hard rock record ever made.

It was the album that turned AC/DC into superstars, and it has been inspiration to countless rock bands for 40 years, from Def Leppard to Metallica, Guns N’ Roses to The Darkness.

Most remarkable of all is what Back In Black represents on a human level, for AC/DC’s greatest success followed their darkest hour: the death of their singer Bon Scott.

Most bands would have been broken by such a loss. But with Back In Black - “our tribute to Bon,” as lead guitarist Angus Young called it - AC/DC pulled off the greatest comeback in rock history. It is, in the words of Slash, “One of the huge Cinderella stories of rock ’n’ roll.”

In January 1980, when Angus and his elder brother Malcolm, the band’s rhythm guitarist, first began work on the album with Bon Scott in London, they knew they were on to something big.

In the seven years since AC/DC had formed in Sydney, Australia - with Angus, dressed for the stage in his old schoolboy uniform, an unlikely looking guitar hero - they had built up a strong international following via relentless touring and a series of brilliant, balls-out albums, including Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Let There Be Rock and Powerage, the latter a favorite of Keith Richards.

But it was with 1979’s Highway To Hell that they had a major breakthrough, their first million-seller. And in the new songs they demoed in London, with Bon playing drums, as he had done as a young man in his first groups back in Australia, there was such potential that Bon had told his mother Isa in a phone call: “This one is going to be it!”

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It was only a few days after that call - on February 19, 1980 - that Bon Scott was found dead in East Dulwich, London. He had been out drinking with friends on the previous night.

Unsubstantiated rumors suggested that he might also have taken heroin. In the official inquest, the coroner cited ‘death by misadventure’. He was just 33 years old.

Angus spoke for the whole band when he said, “You feel immortal until something like this happens.” But at Bon’s funeral in his hometown of Fremantle in Western Australia, his father Chick urged Malcolm and Angus to carry on with the band. And on April 1st, Brian Johnson, then aged 32, formerly of glam rock act Geordie, was announced as AC/DC’s new singer.

Those were big shoes that Brian Johnson had to fill. Bon had had it all: a powerful voice, a witty turn of phrase in his lyrics, and a macho stage presence that was the epitome of rock ’n’ roll cool.

As drummer Phil Rudd said, “Bon was such a character.” Moreover, he was, for Malcolm Young, a talismanic figure. “He pulled us all together,” Malcolm said. “He had that real stick-it-to-’em attitude. Bon was the single biggest influence on the band.”

[Bon] pulled us all together. He had that real stick-it-to-’em attitude Malcolm Young

But in Brian Johnson, they found the right man for the job, and as it transpired, even Bon had been a fan of Brian’s. Back in the early '70s, Bon’s old band Fraternity had opened for Geordie on a UK tour and witnessed what he later described to Angus as the best Little Richard impersonation he’d ever seen from a singer rolling around on the stage and screaming his head off.

As Angus said of that conversation: “It was rare that Bon ever raved about anything.” What Bon hadn’t known was that Brian Johnson had been screaming in agony that night, and had subsequently been rushed to hospital suffering from appendicitis.

Compass Point Studios

(L-R) Brian Johnson and Angus Young of AC/DC

After Brian was broken in during rehearsals in London, the band travelled to the tropical island of Nassau in The Bahamas to record Back In Black at Compass Point Studios with producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, who had worked on Highway To Hell and would later produce multi-million selling albums for Def Leppard, Foreigner, Bryan Adams, Shania Twain and more.

In just five weeks, AC/DC had the whole album in the can, and it was the first song recorded, the album’s title track, which set the tone. It was also one of the numbers demoed with Bon back in London, with a funky, stop-start riff and a lyric that was both a statement of invincibility and a salute to Bon.

As Brian said, “The whole point of the album was to celebrate Bon’s life.” There were times, however, when Brian struggled. Firstly, when the band was working on Hells Bells, the mighty epic they had already marked as the first track on the album.

When I first heard it in all its glory, I thought, f*ck - it's magic! Angus Young

The riff - dubbed “ominous” by Malcolm and “mystical” by Angus - called for a heavy opening statement, but Brian just couldn’t find the words, until Mutt Lange said something that flicked a switch in Brian’s head. A storm was breaking over the island.

“Rolling thunder,” Mutt noted. Brian took the phrase and ran with it: “I’m a rollin’ thunder, pourin’ rain, I’m comin’ on like a hurricane.”

Brian also felt, at times, as if Bon was watching over him. “I was a little worried,” he said. “Like, who am I to try to follow in the footsteps of this great poet? Bon really was a kind of poet. And something happened to me - a good thing.” Angus had similar experiences.

“We still think Bon’s around,” he said. As Malcolm explained, “All these emotions were in play when we were recording.” The last song recorded ended up as the last song on the album. Malcolm and Angus wrote it in 15 minutes: a slow, swaggering boogie number they called Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution.

An anthem was born, and Back In Black was complete, save for one detail. In May, during the mixing of the album at Electric Lady studios in New York City, Malcolm had a flash of inspiration while taking a wee.

What was needed, he decided, was a tolling bell at the start of Hells Bells: a dramatic flourish. The engineer, Tony Platt, was dispatched across the Atlantic to record the bell at a grand old English church in Loughborough, only to find that he couldn’t get a clean sound because pigeons roosting in the bell-tower flew off noisily every time a note was struck.

As a result, Platt commissioned a custom-made bell from a specialist foundry in Leicestershire. And with that, the job, finally, was done.

Critical acclaim

Angus Young's guitar gear: everything you need to nail the AC/DC star's high-voltage tones

When Malcolm returned from New York with the finished album, his brother knew they’d nailed it. As Angus later recalled: “When I first heard it in all its glory, I thought, ‘F*ck - it’s magic!”

There was a dispute over the album’s cover. The suits at Atlantic Records felt that an all-black design would be bad for business, but the band would not yield. The black cover was in memory of Bon. There was no backing down on that.

Back In Black was released on July 21st, 1980 - five months and one day after Bon Scott had died. Rolling Stone writer David Fricke declared the album a masterpiece and a milestone in rock.

“Back in Black is not only the best of AC/DC’s six American albums,” Fricke wrote. “It’s the apex of heavy metal art: the first LP since Led Zeppelin II that captures all the blood, sweat and arrogance of the genre. In other words, Back In Black kicks like a mutha.”

The emotion on that record will be around forever Malcolm Young

In the UK, Record Mirror’s review - headlined: ‘POWER IS RESTORED’ - critic Robin Smith stated: “The resurrection shuffle starts here. Brian was the perfect choice, possessing an almost uncanny feel for the band’s songs.”

Back In Black was an immediate hit. Within two weeks of its release, the album was at number one in the UK.

The first single, You Shook Me All Night Long, made the top 40 in the UK and US, and the top ten in Australia. By early October, when the band finished touring in North America, the album was certified platinum in the US as it began an incredible thirteen-month residency in the Billboard top ten. At one point it was selling 10,000 copies a day.

Their legacy

Brian Johnson had been anxious before his first gig with the band in Belgium, one month before the album was released. According to Angus, “He was sh*tting himself!” But his fears had evaporated when he saw a banner held up in the audience: ‘R.I.P. Bon Scott, Good Luck Brian.’ “It just lifted me,” Brian said.

An even greater tribute followed when AC/DC returned home to Australia at the end of the Back In Black tour in February 1981. After their gig in Sydney, Bon Scott’s mother Isa told Brian, “Our Bon would have been proud of you, son.”

40 years on, Back In Black is still the benchmark for hard rock. As Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello said, unequivocally, no matter how good the newest rock or album is, “Back In Black will kick its ass.”

Back In Black put rock music back on the throne, where it belongs! Tom Morello

What AC/DC created, in the wake of tragedy, was as near to perfect as any rock album could be: ten tracks of electrifying rock ’n’ roll, all killer, no filler. Brian Johnson delivered, on debut, the performance of a lifetime.

In Phil Rudd and bassist Cliff Williams, there was the best rhythm section in the business, no frills, no fancy stuff , just driving it home. And at the heart of it all was the guitar power of Malcolm and Angus Young: Malcolm, wielding his Gretsch, all about the rhythm, a master of riffs; Angus, with his Gibson SG, playing off Mal, and conjuring up one killer solo after another.

The aftermath

In 1980, Back In Black was a triumph not just for Brian Johnson and AC/DC but for rock music, period. As Tom Morello recalled: “Disco was huge and punk and new wave were ascendant, and along came this AC/DC record which just destroyed everybody. It put hard rock music back on the throne, where it belongs!”

And as Slash saw it: “Back In Black saved rock ’n’ roll! It was the defining rock record that came during the biggest lull for rock music. It just exploded!”

Slash was just a kid of fifteen when he first heard Back In Black, and as he said of its impact: “AC/DC was always a great band, totally genuine. But the miracle of the whole thing was that Back In Black was just a great new record, it was still AC/DC. We all missed Bon, but we let him go and at the same time welcomed and embraced Brian.”

(L-R) Angus Young and Brian Johnson of AC/DC

In 1978, the NME writer Nick Kent described Thin Lizzy’s Live And Dangerous as “an album made by heroes.” So, in the truest sense, was Back In Black. As Malcolm Young once said of AC/DC’s music, in which Chuck Berry was a primary influence: “It’s just loud rock ’n’ roll - wham, bam, thank you ma’am!”

But there was something else in Back In Black, something deeper, and it was Malcolm, again, who defined it most clearly. “We meant it,” he said. “It’s real. It’s coming from within.

"That’s how that album was made - because of what we’d all gone through. And that emotion on that record – that will be around forever.”

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Content Editor at Total Guitar and freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q . He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis, and has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss. He lives in Bath, UK – of which David Coverdale recently said, “How very Roman of you!”

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Back in Black Tour

The Back in Black Tour was a concert tour by the Australian hard rock band AC/DC in support of their seventh studio album Back in Black , which was released on 25 July 1980.

Cancelled dates

Box office score data.

This was AC/DC's first tour with new vocalist Brian Johnson , who replaced Bon Scott after the latter's death in February 1980, making his first appearance on stage on 29 June 1980 in Namur, Belgium. [1] [2] The band transported their own one-ton "Hells Bell" on the road, which was lowered to the stage each night as the bell tolls of "Hells Bells" were heard. Johnson would finish it off with several hard hits, hammer in hand as the band commenced the show. [1]

During the North American and European legs, the band were supported by Humble Pie , Def Leppard , ZZ Top , Blackfoot , Whitesnake and Maggie Bell . [1]

The responses from the audience during the band's performances in the United Kingdom were described as near rabid with anticipation. [1]

Mike London from Billboard , however, had given the show he attended in New York a negative review - stating that while the band had established itself as a leader in heavy metal, the show lacked imagination and failed to live up to the band's sound, describing the stage theatrics as lifeless and overused. He noted that the fans attending the show had shown a general positive response, but later in the show grew tired of the poses and solos that Angus Young had given. Concluding his review, London stated his disappointment - saying that AC/DC's music deserved better treatment than what the band performed that night. [3]

" Hells Bells "
"Shot Down in Flames"
"Sin City" or "Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be"
" Back in Black "
"Bad Boy Boogie"
" Highway to Hell "
"What Do You Do for Money Honey"
" High Voltage "
" Shoot to Thrill " (played on occasions)
"Givin' the Dog a Bone" (played on occasions)
" Whole Lotta Rosie "
" You Shook Me All Night Long "
"Rocker" or "Problem Child" or "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" (played on occasions)
" T.N.T. " or "Shake a Leg" ("Shake a Leg" played once)
" Let There Be Rock "
Angus Young – lead guitar
Cliff Williams – bass guitar, backing vocals
Malcolm Young – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Phil Rudd – drums
Brian Johnson – lead vocals
↑ This concert was an unannounced club gig.
↑ Originally scheduled for 28 August 1980.
↑ Originally scheduled for 3 September 1980.
↑ Originally scheduled for 5 October 1980.
↑ Originally scheduled for 20 January 1981.
↑ Originally scheduled for 20 February 1981.

AC/DC: The epic inside story of Back In Black

How a washed-up rock star helped AC/DC overcome Bon Scott’s death and make their masterpiece

It was in March 1980 that Brian Johnson got the phone call that would change his life. A new decade had just begun, but Johnson had little cause for optimism. At 32 he was feeling washed up. Recently separated from his wife, Johnson was living at his parents’ house in Gateshead, running a small car-repair enterprise and struggling to get by. His days as a rock’n’roll star had long-since passed.

In the early 70s Johnson had lived the dream. As the singer with glam-rock band Geordie he was Newcastle’s answer to Noddy Holder, a working-class hero with a Jack The Lad charm and a voice like the foghorn on the Tyne ferry. Geordie had enjoyed a decent run: they were signed to EMI and had a Top 10 UK hit in 1973 with the foot-stomping anthem All Because Of You . But, unlike Holder and Slade, Geordie were never really cut out for the big league. The hits dried up, the band lost their record deal and, after some lean years playing working men’s clubs in the North East, they split up.

“When I left Geordie,” Johnson recalls, “I was completely broke. I had nothing. And I had two kids and a mortgage to pay. I was driving a VW Beetle that was 14 years old. I was fuckin’ skint.”

In the late 70s Johnson had scraped together just enough cash to start up his own business, fixing windshields and fitting vinyl roofs on fancy sports cars. It just about paid the bills, and was partly a labour of love: Johnson had been “nuts about cars” since he was a kid. He was also making a little money on the side – just beer money – with a new version of the old band, christened Geordie II. Only this time there were no delusions of grandeur.

“It was a cracking little band,” Johnson says, “but we were never gonna make it as a recording act.”

Brian Johnson was no fool. He knew there were few second chances in rock’n’roll, and so he treated Geordie II as merely “a bit of fun”. The band’s live show had a touch of cabaret about it – “We did a lot of comedy in there, cos the boys were very funny” – but they could rock too. And there was one song that was always guaranteed to get their audiences jumping – a song by an Australian rock band called AC/DC that was making a big noise in the late 70s.

“I didn’t know too much about AC/DC,” Johnson admits. “They were this cult band. But everybody was talking about them – I mean everybody. We used to play Whole Lotta Rosie . And we’d always save it for last, cos the place would go crazy!”

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Brian loved singing that song. He still loved being up on a stage. But he wasn’t kidding himself. “I was old. Shit, I was 32; I’d passed my sell-by date.”

Then came the phone call that would change everything. A woman with a German accent told Brian that a band was auditioning for a new singer, that he had been recommended, and that auditions were being held in London. Brian asked for the name of the band. He wasn’t going to travel all the way to London without knowing who he was auditioning for. When she said she wasn’t permitted to tell him, he suggested she gave him the initials of the band’s name. There was a pause.

“Okay… it’s A, C and D, C.”

Until the morning of February 20, 1980 AC/DC had seemed unstoppable. In the seven years since the band were formed in Sydney, they had built a huge following throughout the world. Led by guitar-playing brothers Malcolm and Angus Young, and fronted by boozy, charismatic singer Bon Scott, they were widely acknowledged as the most electrifying rock’n’roll band on the planet.

At the turn of the 80s, AC/DC were on a roll. Their album Highway To Hell was certified gold in the US with sales of half-a-million copies, and in the first week of February the single Touch Too Much became their first UK Top 30 hit.

Then on February 20, after a night out with friends in Camden, north London, Bon Scott was found dead, later declared “death by misadventure” by coroners. He was just 33. Bon’s death devastated his bandmates. Angus reflected: “When you’re young you always feel immortal. But after Bon died I felt horribly grown up.”

It was at Bon’s funeral (on February 29, in Fremantle, the suburb of Perth where he had grown up) that the surviving members of AC/DC decided their future. Bon’s father Chick took Malcolm Young to one side to offer some words of encouragement and to give his blessing for the band to carry on without his son. It gave them the lift they needed. “Bon would have done the same,” Angus said. “We felt we had his blessing too.”

After the funeral, Angus, Malcolm, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd flew back to London, where they lived apart in small rented flats. For a couple of weeks they remained in mourning. “We were still real low,” Malcolm said. “We weren’t snapping out of it.” Then, at Malcolm’s insistence, he and Angus began writing again. “It was the two of us,” Malcolm recalled. “Pick up the guitars, just for therapy. Maybe that’s the way to get through this.” At the very least, they wanted to finish what they had started with Bon.

A couple of new songs had been written just before Bon’s death. One was based on a stop-start riff that Malcolm had written during a soundcheck on the last tour. The other was recorded as a rough take with Bon on drums; Bon hadn’t finished any lyrics. But as soon as the new songs started coming together, in mid-March, Malcolm and Angus felt it was time to find a new singer.

It wasn’t going to be easy – for the band or for the singers who would be trying out. Bon was a one-off, a huge personality and the epitome of rock’n’roll cool. To Malcolm, Bon was a talismanic figure. “He pulled us all together. He had that real stick-it-to-’em attitude. Bon was the single biggest influence on the band.”

How would AC/DC replace a man considered by many to be irreplaceable? To Angus, the answer was simple. “Bon was a unique character,” he told Sounds magazine in March 1980, as auditions for a new singer began, “and we wouldn’t like to have someone who was a Bon imitator. We’re looking for something that little bit different.”

Angus also acknowledged the problems facing potential candidates: “It’s difficult for any guy to walk in knowing that Bon’s just died, and probably thinking that we’re all going to be a bit funny about a new guy singing his songs. That’s added pressure.”

But, as Angus indicated, there was a change of mood in the AC/DC camp. With strong new material written, and with auditions under way, AC/DC were looking forward, not back. “We’ll certainly do our best to put out a great album,” Angus said. “And if someone walked in tomorrow and clicked, we’d go straight in and record it, cos we’ve basically got all the ideas and songs. It just needs that one missing ingredient.”

Brian Johnson didn’t know it at the time, but he was always the favourite for the job. “My name was on the list up front, but they just couldn’t find me,” he explains. “I’d fallen off the end of the world, nobody knew where I was.”

It was Bon who first told the other guys in AC/DC about Brian, having seen a Geordie gig in the North East of England. He later told Angus that the singer in Geordie had done the best Little Richard impersonation he’d ever seen – he was rolling around on the stage, screaming his head off. “It was rare that Bon ever raved about anything,” Angus said. What Bon didn’t know was that after that show, Brian was rushed to hospital with appendicitis. He’d been screaming because he was in agony.

Following Bon’s death, an AC/DC fan contacted the band’s management to recommend Brian. “It was a guy from Cleveland,” Brian recalls. “He sent a Geordie album to them with a letter saying: ‘You’ve gotta listen to this guy.’” And, as Brian later discovered, the producer of Highway To Hell, Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, was also aware of Brian. “Mutt had said to the guys: ‘Listen, there’s one guy you should really listen to.’ And I think it was Mal who said: ‘That’s twice his name’s come up.’”

AC/DC’s management were instructed to trace Brian. But when they made the call, he remained hesitant. He admits: “I’d been bitten once by the music industry, and I didn’t want it to happen again.” In the end, he only agreed to audition for AC/DC when another job in London, for a jingle, fell into his lap. “I wasn’t gonna do it,” he shrugs, “but a friend of mine, Andre, phoned us and said: ‘Brian, I have an advert I think would suit you fine. It’s £350.’ That was a big lump of money. It was a proper job, for Hoover. And I thought, hang on, I could probably go down and do the AC/DC thing on the same day. I just thought, I hope I get this ad thing. Because Andre did tell us: ‘There’s this big, black soul woman, it’s going to be you or her that gets it.’ I went: ‘Oh Christ!’”

The day Brian travelled to London, the omens were not good. Fearing that his clapped-out Beetle wouldn’t make the trip, he borrowed a friend’s car, a Toyota Crown. Just a few miles outside Newcastle he got a puncture. “I just went: ‘Oh, fuck!’ But the strength you had then…” He worked like a maniac to fix the flat tyre, then floored the Toyota down the M1, arriving just in time to meet Andre at the studio in North London. Brian sang the jingle – ‘The new high-powered mover from Hoover, it’s a little groover!’ – and the £350 was in the bag.

But when he got back in the car and headed across London for his appointment with AC/DC at Vanilla Studios in Pimlico, his confidence evaporated. “I was sitting in this little café just across from the studios and, God, it was miserable. I wanted to go home. I was too nervous to go over there. I just thought I hadn’t got a chance of getting the gig, because they don’t know me, really. I thought, gosh, they’ll be looking for somebody with the long hair, it’s not gonna work. Plus they’re a young band. I remember getting this pie and a cup of tea, and I couldn’t eat the pie cos the fuckin’ crust was too hard! I was starving. And I just went: ‘Oh, bollocks, better make a move.’ I got up and walked across the street. And that was it. That was me changed after that…

“I just remember the lads had been waiting there for quite a while for us, they’d been in that studio a long time, auditioning singers. They were just great. I’d never met such a bunch of non-prats! They were just regular guys. As soon as I walked in I just felt comfortable. Malcolm came over and said: ‘There you go, mate’ – and gave me a bottle of brown ale. He said: ‘You must be thirsty.’ I went: ‘You know what? I could just kill this right now!’ And I did – boy, did I!”

Once the formalities were out of the way, the band asked Brian what song he’d like to sing first. Brian suggested Nutbush City Limits , the early-70s rock/soul classic by Ike And Tina Turner. “It was brilliant!” he says. “After we did it I was smiling, and they said: ‘That was a breath of fresh air, mate!’ Everybody that had come in before me had gone: ‘ Smoke On The Water ?’ And the boys were like: ‘No, not again!’” Then came the real test, the clincher. They tried Whole Lotta Rosie . “I got tingles singing …Rosie ,” Brian says. “I had a lucky day, you know?”

Phil Rudd would later state that after that first audition they were sure they’d got their man. But Brian returned to Newcastle none the wiser. Even when he was summoned back to London for a second time he was still uncertain. “They asked us down again and I said: ‘Guys, I cannae be doing this. I got a shop full of cars up here.’ And I did! But I went down in the end.” The second audition passed smoothly, but again the band remained tight-lipped. “I stayed at a hotel overnight with Keith Evans, one of their roadies,” Brian recalls. “Keith was going: ‘I think you’ve got it, mate.’ I said: ‘Nah, I think they’re just making their mind up.’”

It was a few days later that Brian received a call from Malcolm Young. “I’ll never forget it,” Brian smiles. “It was my father’s birthday and I’d been playing pool at The Crown pub. I went back home but there was nobody in the house, mum and pop had gone out somewhere. And the phone rang and it was Mal. He said: ‘We got an album to do, we gotta leave in a couple of weeks, so… if you’re set for it…’ I said: ‘Are you telling me I’ve got the job?’ And he went, ‘Oh yeah.’ I said: ‘I tell you what, mate, I’m gonna put the phone down. Could you ring again in 10 minutes just so I’m sure that it’s not somebody takin’ the piss?’ And he went: ‘Yeah, sure.’ And he phoned back, on the dot, and says: ‘So, are you comin’?’ He still wouldn’t say it! Mal’s not like that. ‘Well, are you comin’ or what?’ And I’m like: ‘Shit, yeah!’ I put the phone down – I didn’t want him to hear this – and I went: ‘Whoah! Fuck!’ I’d bought me pop a bottle of whisky for his birthday present and I just opened it up and took a big swig of it. I was so excited, but I didn’t know who to tell. There wasn’t anybody to tell!”

On April 1, 1980 – six weeks after Bon Scott’s death – AC/DC announced Brian Johnson as their new singer. Brian had been itching to tell his younger brother, but when he did his brother just laughed. He thought it was an April Fool’s joke.

“The worst thing was to tell the band I was in,” Brian admits. “After I got back from the first audition, we were doing a show one night and I told them I went down to London and I had a sing – that’s what I called it, ‘a sing’ – with AC/DC. They went: ‘Did you?’ I said: ‘Aye, they were in the studio and they’re auditioning down there and I went and had a sing.’ And they went: ‘Oh, right. Anyway, what are we doing first tonight?’ They never thought anything of it. So later, when I knew I’d got the job, we were playing just west of Newcastle in a working men’s club, and afterwards I said: ‘Guys, I’ve got some news. I hope you’re happy for us, but I’ve been offered this gig with AC/DC.’”

Brian’s first press interview as AC/DC singer was with Sounds . He spoke candidly about his hopes and fears. “I still don’t know quite where I am,” he confessed. “All I know is there’s a stack of work to do and the rest of the band have still got to find out about me. I’m still scared shitless, really!”

Brian wasn’t the only one feeling the pressure. As he explains: “The band weren’t in the best financial state at the time, cos the album before, Highway To Hell , had cost so much money.”

In London, the new-look AC/DC worked quickly to finish writing the new album. “When I went in, the guys had some titles for songs but no lyrics,” Brian says. “A couple of titles came from the lyrics I wrote later on. But it’s hard to remember, because it was a blur. They didn’t even know what my lyrics were gonna be like. Literally, they said: ‘Can you write some lyrics for us?’ I said: ‘I’ll give it a shot!’”

In late April, with nine tracks completed, the band and producer Mutt Lange flew to the island of Nassau in the Bahamas to record the new album at Compass Point studios. As engineer Tony Platt explained, living and working on a remote island helped to “bring everyone together”.

The first song recorded set the tone for the album. The funky riff that Malcolm had been playing around with on the Highway To Hell tour had been fashioned into a crunching anthem titled Back In Black. The lyrics were a statement of invincibility and a salute to Bon. Back In Black , said Malcolm, was AC/DC remembering “the good times” they’d had with Bon. It was a theme they picked up on again with Have A Drink On Me , the song they’d cut as a demo with Bon on drums. The lyrics ( ‘Whisky, gin and brandy/With a glass I’m pretty handy’ ) were a drunken toast from Brian to his predecessor. And Brian also proved that, like Bon, he had a way with a double-entendre: on You Shook Me All Night Long he joked: ‘She told me to come but I was already there.’ He says now: “I thought I’d gone too far with that, I must admit, but nobody seemed to mind. There’s a lot of lovely ways you can do things.”

There were times, however, when Brian struggled with lyrics, notably on Hells Bells , the mighty epic that ended up as the first track on the album. The riff – dubbed “ominous” by Malcolm and “mystical” by Angus – called for a heavy opening statement, but Brian just couldn’t find the words until he experienced something akin to divine inspiration.

“I was just sitting on my bed one night,” Brian recalls, “and these bedrooms were just breeze-block cells with a bed and a table with a light on it and a toilet. That was it. I was sitting there wondering how good it had been. Cos we were doing it so quick, Mutt would never let me listen to what I’d done because we had to get the guys in straight away. There was no luxury of sitting around thinking, nothing like that. Then Mutt came in and said: ‘Are you all right?’ He was a wonderful man; he knew the pressure I was feeling. I thought: ‘Phew!’ I’d already written three songs and it was day after day. I’m going: ‘I’m fucking running out of ideas here…’

“Mutt says: ‘Tonight we’re gonna do Hells Bells , Brian.’ I’m thinking: Hmm… Hells Bells , right. I’d just done Back In Black, so I thought: ‘Can it get any moodier?’ And then, right at that moment, there was a tropical thunderstorm the likes of which I’d never seen before. Mutt said: ‘Listen… thunder!’ And I said: ‘That’s rolling thunder, that’s what they call it in England.’ He says: ‘Rolling thunder – write that down.’ And this is true – it went ‘boom!’ The fucking rain came down in torrents, you couldn’t hear yourself. And I just went: ‘Pourin’ rain!’ And the wind whipped up – ‘I’m comin’ on like a hurricane!’ I was gone. The song was ready that night. I hadn’t even heard the track cos they were busy doing it. It was whacked down in the greatest haste.”

At the end of their fifth week the band had nine tracks were in the can. They needed one more to finish the album. Malcolm and Angus wrote it in 15 minutes.

“I thought it was just gonna be a boozy chuck-away,” Brian admits. “Mal came up with the title, saying: ‘’Ere, Jonno, we’ll call it Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution .’ I thought: ‘Eh?’ There’s a great one to fucking rhyme with!

“I’ll never forget the start of it. I went into the recording booth, the intro starts and I hear: ‘Brian, it’s Mutt. Could you say something over that? Just talk.’ I was smoking a tab at the time and you can hear it. I was going: ‘Yeah, all you middle men.’ I just did this southern preacher thing. Honestly, it was one take. I never ever thought that it was gonna be on the record.”

With recording completed, Malcolm Young travelled to New York with Mutt Lange and Tony Platt to mix the album while the rest of the band headed back to London. “I never heard the finished album ’til two months later,” Brian says. “But when I did I was knocked out. I couldn’t believe it was that good… A wonderful album, full of surprises.”

Most surprising of all was the first sound on the album, added at the eleventh hour: the portentous tolling bell for Hells Bells . The idea had come to Malcolm when he’d nipped out for a piss during mixing at New York’s Electric Lady studios. Tony Platt dashed across the Atlantic to record a bell at a church in Loughborough. But the bell tower was home to dozens of pigeons that flew noisily from their roost each time the bell was struck, thus ruining Platt’s recording. Thinking on his feet, Platt commissioned a custom-made bell from a specialist foundry in Leicestershire and recorded that.

But the end result was worth the trouble. The slow tolling of the bell – spookily, it strikes 13 times – added to the dramatic effect. In addition, the album’s all-black cover design fitted the mood of a band that was emerging from the darkest times. In some quarters at AC/DC’s record label, Atlantic Records, there was resistance to the black cover, but the band wouldn’t yield. The cover was a memorial to Bon. And that was that.

Back In Black was released on July 21, 1980, five months and one day after Bon Scott had died. Within two weeks it topped the UK chart. And in the US, after a slow start, the album was certified platinum in October, when it began an incredible 13-month residency in the Billboard Top 10.

Back In Black not only resurrected AC/DC, it took them to a new level, elevating the band to superstar status and transforming Brian Johnson from has-been to hero.

For Brian, the greatest tribute came when AC/DC returned to Australia at the end of the Back In Black tour in February 1981. After their gig in Sydney, Bon Scott’s mother, Isa, told him: “Our Bon would have been proud of you, son.” And when he got home to Newcastle there was another moment to savour. After years of driving old bangers, he finally got himself a flashy motor.

“I treated myself to a Chevy Blazer,” he laughs. “It was an SUV – four-wheel drive. It was black-and-white – I was in Newcastle, after all. I’ll never forget, my next door neighbour, he always used to smirk at what I did; he got a new Cortina every four years. And my Chevy was gorgeous! I remember him going: ‘That’s a big, daft, stupid bloody thing, isn’t it?’ I went: ‘You jealous, mate?’ I was dead pleased. It was a big, daft, stupid thing, but I didn’t care. I knew I’d made it.”

Thirty years on, Back In Black is the biggest-selling rock album of all time, with worldwide sales now at a staggering 49 million. Its success is all the more amazing given the circumstances in which it was made. But as Malcolm Young said: “We meant it. It’s real. It’s coming from within and was made from what we’d all gone through. That emotion on that record… that will be around forever.”

“It’s funny,” Brian says. “My daughter phoned me and said: ‘Dad, I just wanted to say I’m so proud of you.’ I said: ‘What?’ She said: ‘All these years you’ve just been my dad’ – she’s never been an AC/DC fan, she’s just a regular good girl and all that. But she said: ‘I just didn’t realise how brilliant this album is!’ She said her new favourite songs are Shoot To Thrill and Let Me Put My Love Into You . I said: ‘I’m pleased you finally got it! How old are ya?’ She says: ‘I’m 36 now, dad!’ I said: ‘You’re older than I was when I did it!’”

Back In Black was the album that saved AC/DC’s career. Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash even went so far as to say it “saved rock’n’roll”. Not only is it the greatest comeback album of all time, it’s also arguably the greatest rock album ever made.

“The whole point of that album was to celebrate Bon’s life,” Brian says. “The boys had lost a great friend and a great singer – a pal. They’d gone through all their shit together. He wasn’t just a singer in the band, Bon, he was their best pal.”

During the making of Back In Black there were times when Brian felt Bon’s spirit with him. “I feel soft saying it,” he admits, “but I was worried. Like, who am I to try to follow in the footsteps of this great poet? Cos Bon really was a kind of poet. And something happened to me – a good thing.”

What Brian Johnson and AC/DC achieved with Back In Black was little short of miraculous. But as this most unassuming of rock stars concludes: “I don’t think I could have done it unless it was those particular four boys. If it had been four other gentlemen I don’t think it could’ve happened. This is a special band. They do something to you.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 141 .

AC/DC Albums Ranked From Worst To Best – The Ultimate Guide

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q . He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar . He lives in Bath - of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

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In April 1980, just two months after lead singer Bon Scott’s death from a night of heavy drinking at a London club had prompted heavy metal pioneers AC/DC to consider disbanding, lead guitarist Angus Young, his rhythm guitarist brother Malcolm Young, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd were back in the studio. Alongside them was Scott’s replacement, Brian Johnson, helping record a follow–up to the group’s breakthrough album, Highway To Hell. Titled Back In Black, AC/DC’s seventh studio LP took its name from the track that, penned as a tribute to the recently deceased frontman, featured Johnson’s defiantly upbeat lyrics in addition to an opening guitar riff that would help make the song one of the band’s signature tunes.

Johnson was recruited that March, Scott having previously sung his praises to Angus Young after watching him perform with Newcastle glam rockers Geordie. He stated in a 2009 Mojo magazine interview that his new bandmates told him the song’s words should be celebratory rather than morbid. This, in turn, prompted him to think, “Well, no pressure there, then.”

Welcome to Brian Johnson’s first project with AC/DC; taking over the spotlight from an iconic vocalist while performing numbers that certainly tested his own talents.

Highway To Highway To Hell

“Hitting some of those notes was a real challenge,” says Tony Platt who engineered Back In Black alongside producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange after having mixed Highway To Hell and overdubbed a Scott vocal. “There was a massive amount of pressure on Brian’s shoulders, but everyone was very sympathetic and supportive of him. We were all completely in awe of what he was doing and there were lots of positive vibes. So, whenever he had a moment of ‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ there were plenty of people around to tell him quite clearly that he could.

“Recording a band like AC/DC, the main thing I had to do was avoid screwing up. They were constantly providing the goods and I therefore had to be there to catch them at the right moment. Well, that was even more important with regard to Brian, because if I didn’t capture some of his performances the first time around it would have been a really steep climb for him to get back to that same place. Those vocals were absolutely incredible and what he achieved was quite extraordinary. He and Bon were totally different types of singer. Whereas Bon’s voice was extremely quirky, Brian’s was sheer power.”

The producer and/or engineer of anyone from Bob Marley, Toots & the Maytals, Aswad and Jazz Jamaica All Stars to Free, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, the Cult, Cheap Trick and Buddy Guy, Tony Platt moved from the Yorkshire town of Barnsley to the Oxfordshire town of Henley–on–Thames when he was seven–years–old and secured his first job as a tea boy and makeshift tape machine operator at Central London’s independent Trident Studios in 1969. Six months later, he then became a fully fledged tape op at Basing Street Studios, owned by Island Records founder Chris Blackwell.

These included assisting on 1971 sessions for Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Traffic, the Who, Paul McCartney and Jethro Tull. That same year, Platt engineered a record by Spooky Tooth guitarist Luther Grosvenor, as well as a New Age album by Henry Wolff and Nancy Hennings that was the first to feature singing bowls and Tibetan bells. Soon the engineering credits were gathering pace with Toots & the Maytals’ Funky Kingston, the Wailers’ Catch A Fire and Burnin’ and Sparks’ Kimono My House before Platt went freelance in 1974.

A couple of years later, he made his debut as a producer on Aswad’s self–titled first album, and thereafter he also served as chief engineer at a West Sussex studio named Pebble Beach Sound Recorders for his best friend, guitarist–producer Adam Sieff. Here he recorded demos for the Stranglers and Thin Lizzy while also working with UK reggae artists the Cimarons.

“After I left Pebble Beach, I spent about 10 months running the fantastic Eastlake/Westlake–designed Stone Castle Studios in Carimate, Italy, just north of Milan,” Platt recalls. “Then, when I returned to England, Adam Sieff introduced me to Mutt Lange. He had been producing AC/DC’s Highway To Hell at London’s Roundhouse Studios with Mark Dearnley engineering, and wanted to have it mixed by someone who could give it the vintage British Free–type rock sound. The mix took place at Island’s Basing Street Studios where I also recorded a few overdubs: some backing vocals on ‘Highway To Hell’ and the lead vocal on ‘Night Prowler’.

“We had to do a few things to get the sound the way Mutt was hearing it. Roundhouse was a very dead studio and he wanted to have it sound like everything was played in the same room at the same time. As there wasn’t a lot of ambience, I had to feed stuff out through speakers in the room at Island [Basing Street] to give it ambience and a sense of space. A lot of the guitars on the recording were very separated, there wasn’t a lot of leakage and there were quite a few overdubs. So, I also stated very clearly, ‘The next time you record, guys, the best thing to do is record some ambience along the way and try to do it all in one room.’”

It was during the afternoon of 19th February 1980, while Mutt Lange and Tony Platt were working together at London’s Battery Studios on an album by a band named Broken Home, that Lange received a phone call informing him Bon Scott had passed away.

Compass Point

That April, when the sessions for Back In Black were about to commence at Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point Studios in Nassau, there was a slight delay due to AC/DC’s equipment briefly being held by customs while a hurricane messed with the facility’s electrical system which, being on a Caribbean island, was already erratic. Still, none of this prevented Tony Platt from making the necessary preparations.

“Compass Point was a wonderful place,” he asserts. “Everything about it pointed towards music. We were in a part of the world where music was a part of everybody’s life, so the studio staff there were great. We were all there for the same reason, there was a terrific camaraderie, and often the biggest problem we’d have was getting people in off the beach when it was time to record.

“The studio itself was fairly dead–sounding with quite a low ceiling. So, I took a bit of time working out how to set everybody up, wandering around while hitting a snare drum. There was one place where the snare sounded a lot louder and much fuller than everywhere else — which, I later discovered, was because of space above the ceiling there — and that’s where we set up the drum kit before positioning the guitars around it.”

Looking through the control room window towards the live area, the producer and engineer saw the band members in largely the same format as they used on stage. While Phil Rudd’s drums were in the sweet spot that Platt had discovered (halfway back in the room, slightly left of centre) Malcolm Young’s guitar rig was screened off nearer the window and further to the left; his brother’s was screened off to the right; and Cliff Williams, standing next to the drums, had his bass rig inside a tiny area that, according to the engineer, “people laughingly referred to as the vocal booth... As there weren’t any guide vocals, Brian just hung around in the control room.”

Modelled on Basing Street, the Compass Point control room was equipped with a 48–channel MCI console, 24–track MCI tape machine and monitors comprising Tannoy Red drivers inside Lockwood cabinets, as well as a then–standard array of outboard gear and good selection of microphones.

That Guitar Sound

“The miking of the guitars changed for each song,” Platt explains. “We had a number of different Marshall heads and cabinets, and we used a different combination on each song. Sometimes it would be a 50 Watt head and the appropriate cabinet, sometimes it would be a 100 Watt head, and there were a couple of different 100 Watt heads that had their own textures. Generally speaking, we only ever turned up the amplifiers as far as we needed to — it wasn’t a matter of starting on 11 and then turning them down. We’d turn them up until the cabinets were biting the right amount and the space around the cabinets was lighting up in the right way. Of course, the timbre of the amps would change according to the chords being played. So, while the guitars were each recorded with either a couple of Neumann U67 microphones or a U67 and U87 — sometimes cardioid, sometimes figure of eight, sometimes omni, placed on different speakers of the cabinet — I would move them around depending on the combination of amps being used for songs that were recorded as individual pieces. As such, I’d never do these things the same way twice.

“I know this is of great interest to a lot of people, but it honestly wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference if somebody recreated the exact same combination. There have been so many times when people have asked me to get them a sound like Angus, and I’ve generally said, ‘We’ll need a Marshall head, we’ll need a Marshall 4x12, we’ll need a Gibson SG and we’ll need Angus. Without them we just won’t have the right combination.’ Then again, the guitars would also change from song to song based on the ones that the players were feeling most comfortable with. As we’d start to zone in on the sound, those players would respond to what they were hearing by playing better. As they played better, the sound would improve, and this might prompt me to change the mic positions a little bit; moving them in or out to advance the sound in small increments. Meanwhile, Mutt would be listening to the song and discussing the arrangement with the guys, making changes that would also impact the sound.

“Angus used a radio transmitter when doing the solos. His guitar was the only overdub and he would then play rhythm after the solo, all the way to the end so the dynamics didn’t drop. However, the sound that his radio transmitter gave the guitar was quite different. In fact, unhappy with the solo on ‘Shoot To Thrill’, he replaced it when we were at Electric Lady to do the mix and, as we didn’t have the radios with us, I had a lot of trouble matching the sound.

“When it came to the drums, I miked them with two U87 overheads, a U47 and/or an AKG D20 on the bass drum, an AKG 414 on the hi–hat and a Neumann KM86 on the snare with a Shure SM57 underneath. The miking of the tom–toms — if we were using them — depended on their role. Sennheiser MD421s got used quite a bit, but sometimes I might even put 87s on the tom–toms if I wanted them to be very specific. In the room there were at least a couple of ambience microphones, including a Neumann stereo mic which I moved around sometimes over the top of the drums and sometimes more towards the guitars. Meanwhile, the bass guitar was recorded with a D20 and possibly a 414 on the Ampeg Portaflex amp along with a DI.”

Vocal Debut

The Young brothers composed all of the music for Back In Black while, in the tradition of Bon Scott, Brian Johnson penned his own lyrics.

“AC/DC went about their songwriting in a very particular way,” says Tony Platt. “Angus and Malcolm put the riffs together and the songs were already in pretty reasonable shape by the time we entered the studio, even though the lyrics still needed to be written. In fact, most of the numbers had titles that ended up being used. At the same time, the songs on Back In Black all had backing tracks consisting of two guitars, bass and drums, recorded in complete takes with some edits. Editing has always been one of my strong points. So, if we had a couple of takes that sounded like they might go together well, I’d do a rough mix and test edit on quarter–inch tape. Then, if everybody was happy with the result, I’d do the same on the two–inch.”

After all of the backing tracks had been recorded, it was time for Brian Johnson to make his AC/DC debut. Accordingly, the studio was cleared and he then stood at the back of the live area to perform his vocals.

“We put screens around Brian as he wanted to have some privacy and didn’t like the idea of everybody staring at him,” Platt recalls. “He also didn’t want the air–conditioning to be too cold after he’d warmed up his voice. So, once he went in to record a vocal he had to stay there, because returning to the control room would have meant a change of temperature and humidity that wouldn’t have been at all good for his voice. This meant getting as much out of him while he was in there, captured with a U87 to handle the power of his voice.

“A reasonable amount of comping was done with Brian’s vocals, but not a vast amount. I learned so much from Mutt in that regard, including how you try to get three or four performances that would be perfectly acceptable as a master vocal and then compile the best of the best, taking things to a higher level every time.”

Mixing & Mastering

With Johnson’s performances all committed to tape, Mutt Lange, Malcolm Young and Cliff Williams then took care of the backing vocals, including a few that were overdubbed during the mix. This took place at New York’s Electric Lady in May of 1980 as Tony Platt far preferred the idea of using the Neve 8078 console there than Compass Point’s MCI.

“It was always difficult to find a studio where Mutt liked the monitors,” he explains. “I hadn’t worked at Electric Lady before, but I’d always been quite a fan of Westlake rooms and the one in Studio A was really good. I’m not crazy about horn–loaded monitors, but something about the way Westlake rooms were balanced really appealed to me. Eastlake rooms were largely about dampening everything down and controlling the sound as much as possible, whereas Westlake tuned the room to its characteristics. You weren’t trying to make the room do something it didn’t want to do. You were actually taking its good attributes and enabling them to be the most prominent ones.

Maintaining quality control, both Tony Platt — who would also engineer AC/DC’s 1983 album Flick Of The Switch — and Mutt Lange were involved in the Back In Black mastering by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk in New York. They then checked the test pressings before the record was released on 25th July 1980. This would go on to sell more than 50 million copies worldwide while becoming the second-highest–selling album of all time after Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Peaking at number four in the US, it topped the charts in the UK while spawning four singles: ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, which was a Top 40 hit on both sides of the Atlantic; the aforementioned ‘Hells Bells’; the title track, which went Top 40 in America; and ‘Rock & Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’, which climbed to number 15 in the UK.

Birds In The Belfry

‘Hells Bells’, the opening track on AC/DC’s first album without Bon Scott, commences with the slow, funereal–sounding tolling of a 2000–pound bronze bell. Manufactured by John Taylor Bellfounders in the Leicestershire town of Loughborough, this was recorded by Tony Platt using Ronnie Laine’s mobile studio following the completion of the Back In Black tracking sessions at Compass Point in the Bahamas.

“The bell that AC/DC had ordered to take out on tour with them still hadn’t come out of the mould when I arrived in Loughborough,” Platt recalls. “So, the people who were making it arranged for me to record another bell of the same size and key that was hanging in a nearby church. However, after placing microphones in the belfry I discovered that what no one had considered were the birds living inside there. As soon as the bell was hit, the first thing we’d hear was this mad fluttering of wings as pigeons flew away. Then, by the time the bell stopped ringing enough for us to hit it again, all of the birds had returned. We therefore had to abort that whole idea while the bell foundry people hurried up the process of getting the other bell out of the mold.

“As I couldn’t get the Rolling Stones’ mobile, I used Ronnie Laine’s mobile, which was in an Airstream caravan. At that time it was being run by a mate of mine, so we towed it up to Loughborough and actually parked it inside the bell foundry. The bell itself weighed one ton because that was the largest feasible size to take on tour, but the pitch of the bell as you hear it on the record is an octave lower than the actual bell; it was slowed down to half–speed to replicate the sound of a two–ton bell that would have been impossible for the band to take on the road with them or to hang in the venues. As a result, when that bell was hit on stage, it was an octave higher than on the record.

“The guy who made the bell was the guy who hit the bell on the record. We hung it on a block and tackle in the foundry and there was a specific spot, painted red, where he had to hit it. Being that I had a short time in which to record this before flying to New York to do the mix, I put up 15 or 16 microphones all around in different places, and recorded across 24 tracks using lots of Neumann U87s and some AKG 451s. As a bell’s sound is mostly harmonic, it’s very difficult to record. So, I went all the way from having Shure SM57s at the dynamic end to using B&Ks at the top end, covering all the bases. That was the only way to do it because I had to consider what we were going to mix and slow it down to half–speed. When you do that, all sorts of things you didn’t know were there suddenly appear.

“At Electric Lady when we were doing the mix, Mutt and I chose a combination of the close and distant microphones that produced the best sound, made a mix to half–inch at 30ips and then slowed that down to 15ips. Out of the takes that we had, we chose the best one and, because there were no samplers in those days, spun it in. We had quarter–inch and two–inch tape machines, I started the two–inch and dropped it in, and Mutt started the quarter–inch at the appropriate moment.”

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Watch AC/DC’s Stunning ‘Back in Black’ Tour Footage

This unmissable concert film captures the band’s raw energy at a pivotal moment in rock and roll history

If there is a message to be taken from AC/DC , it’s simply “Don’t give up.”

In early 1980, the band were on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough. Highway to Hell , their 1979 album, had been a Top-20 record in the U.S., putting the Australian group in a make-or-break position to barrel its way to the highest reaches of the charts the next time around.

They had already begun working on their follow-up release. But the band’s dreams seemed to meet an abrupt end on February 19, when its frontman, Bon Scott, died after a night out in London.

Over the next month, the dispirited group considered disbanding. It was Scott’s own parents who convinced them not to give up.

After auditioning singers, they recruited Brian Johnson, the frontman for an English glam-rock act called Geordie, who had been one of Scott’s favorite vocalists.

Returning to the album they’d been making, the group transformed it into a tribute to their fallen singer – not a sorrowful record but a celebration of his spirit through the high-powered rock and roll that had inspired all of them to become musicians in the first place.

The result was not only AC/DC’s commercial breakthrough but also an album that has gone on to become the best-selling rock and roll record of all time: Back in Black .

“I guess at the time you don’t know,” lead guitarist Angus Young told Classic Rock . “So it was kind of ‘go for broke.'”

“It was a force of nature,” added Johnson. “I remember putting the first song on and just going, ‘Wow.’ I couldn’t believe it was that good. But nobody thought it was going to do what it did.”

Second only to Michael Jackson's Thriller on the best-selling albums list, Back in Black has sold an estimated 50 million copies to date.

Far from calling it a day, AC/DC went on to enjoy a long, thriving career.

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Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World , a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World , Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar . Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.

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AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black': A Track-by-Track Guide

AC/DC 's Back in Black is one of the biggest-selling albums in rock history, and many of its 10 songs have become classics. Below we take a deeper look into each track.

The LP came at a turning point for the band. Singer Bon Scott died in his car on Feb. 19, 1980, after a night of drinking with friends. Within two months, AC/DC found a replacement in Brian Johnson , previously of the band Geordie, and set up shop with producer Mutt Lange in Compass Point Studios in Nassau, the Bahamas.

The band always wrote the same way: Guitarist brothers Angus and Malcolm Young composed music based on riffs, then the singer would add melodies and lyrics. That process didn't change with Johnson, who stuck to a reliable mix of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and juvenile delinquency. But he also added another layer, one that celebrated Scott's legacy with the title track.

Far from sinking the group, whose popularity peaked in 1979 with the release of Highway to Hell , Back in Black elevated AC/DC to even greater heights. Below we outline the songs that helped take them there.

1. "Hells Bells"

The bell that kicks off Back in Black 's opening track didn't come from a sound effects disc, but was created specifically for AC/DC by John Taylor Bellfounders in Loughborough, England, to take on tour. But, as engineer Tony Platt told Sound on Sound , the one-ton bell wasn't finished by the time he pulled up in Ronnie Lane 's mobile studio, so a two-ton bell found in a nearby church was slated as a substitute. But there was a problem: The birds in the belfry made too much noise as they flew away after the bell was struck. So the bell-makers sped up the process to complete AC/DC's homemade model. Platt placed more than a dozen microphones in various locations in the foundry to capture all of its harmonics. Then he and Lange combined all the sounds they recorded and slowed down the tape to deepen the tone. As for the lyrics, Johnson was stuck for ideas until Lange came into his Nassau room to tell the singer they'd be working on the song later that night. At that very moment, Johnson told Louder Sound , a thunderstorm began. "And I said, ‘That’s rolling thunder, that’s what they call it in England,'" he recalled. "He says, ‘Rolling thunder – write that down.’ And this is true – it went ‘boom!’ The fucking rain came down in torrents, you couldn’t hear yourself. And I just went, ‘Pourin’ rain!’ And the wind whipped up – ‘I’m comin’ on like a hurricane!’ I was gone. The song was ready that night."

2. "Shoot to Thrill"

For all of the sexual leanings in "Shoot to Thrill," Johnson revealed in The Story of Back in Black documentary series that the song was inspired more by a phenomenon sweeping his home country at the time: What I was thinking of at the time in England, it was more housewives on Valium, because the National Health System was overloaded with women who were just depressed, despondent and all that. So the doctor, just to get them out of the bloody office, would just say, 'Here, take some Valium.' And these women were dependent on it. 'Too many women with too many pills,' you know?" "Shoot to Thrill" was resurrected in the 2000s by Marvel for use in both Iron Man 2 and The Avengers .

3. "What Do You Do for Money Honey"

According AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll by Murray Engleheart with Arnaud Durieux, "What Do You Do for Money Honey" was a title that the Youngs' older brother, George Young, in his head since the Powerage sessions, which he co-produced. Johnson took the title and fashioned a lyric in which he accuses a woman of carving out a fancy lifestyle for herself by accepting gifts from men in exchange for sexual favors.

4. "Givin' the Dog a Bone"

Johnson's penchant for double-entendre, something he shared with Scott, was evident from his second audition with AC/DC. Engleheart and Durieux write that the singer came up with some of the lyrics to "Givin' the Dog a Bone" on the spot after hearing the riff. But Johnson was two hours late for the March 25, 1980, session because he was double-booked. Earlier that day, he recorded the jingle for a vacuum cleaner , for which he received approximately $445; the band was worried his tardiness meant he didn't want the job. A week later, on April 1, Brian Johnson was announced as AC/DC's new frontman.

5. "Let Me Put My Love Into You"

AC/DC have many songs about sex. But only one was special enough to make it on the PMRC's " Filthy Fifteen " list in 1985: "Let Me Put My Love Into You." Even so, Maximum Rock & Roll notes, the chorus' last line had to be changed because it was too explicit. Scott recorded two Back in Black demos with Angus and Malcolm Young a week before his death; this was one of them. But instead of singing the lyrics he had, Scott sat behind the drum kit. "He said, 'Let me bash away,'" Angus recalled in Maximum Rock & Roll . "Which was great for me and Mal, because every now and then it would help."

6. "Back in Black"

"Back in Black" started with an old riff Malcolm Young used to warmed up to, but the song didn't come together until after Scott's death. In a 2009 interview with Mojo , Johnson recalled that the Young brothers told him they wanted the song to be a tribute to their late singer, but that "it can't be morbid – it has to be for Bon, and it has to be a celebration." Johnson thought, "Well, no pressure there then!" He wrote "whatever came into my head, and at the time it seemed like mumbo jumbo." But, as it turned out, they loved how the lyrics about living fast and cheating death perfectly summed up Scott.

7. "You Shook Me All Night Long"

In the first installment of the video series The Story of Back in Black , Johnson recalled that after tracking his vocals for "You Shook Me All Night Long," someone in the band's camp suggested there were too many words and he should try breaking up the lines so the verses had more room to breathe. "I did it like that," he said. "And then Mal heard it and went, 'Stop, man. What the fuck is this?' He said, 'No, no, no, no, no. Do it back the old way. It rocks." Angus Young added that "it sounded kinda folky."

8. "Have a Drink on Me"

Scott also cut a demo in which he played drums for "Have a Drink on Me." He was the drummer in his first band, the Spektors, and lobbied for the job in AC/DC. "He said, 'I want to play drums,'" Angus Young remembered . "And we said, 'Well, Bon, we've already got a drummer. Your talents lie elsewhere.' But he was a good drummer. It showed in his character, because he saw himself as just another member of the band. He didn't have this lead-singer attitude of 'I have to be at the front all the time. I'm the singer. I'm the star. I get the chicks.'"

9. "Shake a Leg"

An ode to a juvenile delinquent, "Shake a Leg" offers a classic example of what Johnson brought to the band. Platt noted in Maximum Rock & Roll that the singer's ability to match his new bandmates was key to the album's success: "When you're singing in a band that's got Angus playing guitar, you've got to make your vocals as exciting as his guitar playing, and that's a real mountain to climb for anybody! ... By the same token, from [Johnson's] point of view, every single note of that is right at the edge of anybody's range. And it isn't just that it's sung up high, it's sung up high with all of that power and excitement at the same time."

10. "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution"

Back in Black 's closing track was also the last song written for the album. Needing one more cut, Angus and Malcolm Young threw the music together in about 15 minutes; Johnson told Louder Sound that he "thought it was just gonna be a boozy chuck-away.” Then there was the title, which didn't exactly offer itself to easy rhyming. Still, the recording was as fast as the writing. "I’ll never forget the start of it," Johnson recalled. "I went into the recording booth, the intro starts and I hear, ‘Brian, it’s Mutt. Could you say something over that? Just talk.’ I was smoking a tab at the time and you can hear it. I was going, ‘ Yeah, all you middle men .’ I just did this Southern-preacher thing. Honestly, it was one take. I never ever thought that it was gonna be on the record.”

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Back in Black

By Steve Kandell

Leidseplein Presse B.V.

June 16, 2019

For many bands, the sudden and horrific death of their lead singer at the peak of their popularity would be a career-ender. AC/DC took a few weeks to regroup and then recorded one of the biggest albums of all time.

Back in Black is claimed in equal measure by the jocks, the stoners, the nerds, the delinquents, and the teachers. Nashville studios used it to test their acoustics. The title track boasts nothing less than one of the most gloriously elemental riffs ever devised—the perfection of the form, the ne plus ultra of jock jams, destined to be clumsily chunked out for eternity by teens testing fuzz pedals in God’s own Guitar Center. It might not necessarily be AC/DC’s best—if their career can even be measured in units of particular albums rather than one long, loud, continuous mid-tempo guitar riff spanning five decades. But it is their most album—most accessible, most successful, most enduring, most emblematic, and, given its genesis, most unlikely.

In 1979, AC/DC had made the leap from workingman Australian hard-rock band, opening arena tours for the likes of Cheap Trick and UFO, to bona fide headliners in their own right. Highway to Hell —their seventh album in five years—had gone platinum in the U.S., thanks in large part to producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, whose kitchen-sink ethos would define the sound of rock radio for the next decade. (Previous AC/DC albums had been produced by the legendary Australian songwriting duo of Harry Vanda and George Young, the latter of whom happened to also be the older brother of AC/DC guitarists Malcolm and Angus Young.) The success of the album cemented the image of the band as libidinous but harmless dirtbags, perfecting carnal anthems tuneful enough to attract normies seeking an edge and heavy enough to keep the metal faithful in line. Angus was as much mascot as musical director, a perpetual motion machine decked out in a schoolboy uniform, but ultimately less threatening than an actual teenager.

Though not necessarily the band’s focal point, their lead singer was 33-year-old Bon Scott, a hard-partying, Scottish-born, impossible-voiced dynamo for whom the word impish was invented. He died alone in the passenger seat of a car on a freezing February night in London in 1980 following a night of drinking, having asphyxiated on his own vomit; authorities ruled it “death by misadventure.” The Young brothers retreated doing the only thing they knew how—coming up with shitloads of guitar riffs—then kicked off a search for Scott’s replacement in earnest almost immediately.

Among the candidates to join the band were Australian rock mainstays like Jimmy Barnes and John Swan, as well as Stevie Wright, who’d been in George Young and Vanda’s band the Easybeats in the ’60s. It was Mutt Lange who recommended Brian Johnson, lead singer of British glam band Geordie and owner of a cat-in-heat vocal register that was unlike anyone’s other than, as luck would have it, Bon Scott’s.

Johnson was 32 and living with his parents in Newcastle, in northern England, and running his own shop repairing the vinyl roofs of classic cars when he got the call to meet the band. “In the rehearsal room sat the boys of AC/DC, looking quite bored—they’d been auditioning singers for a month,” Johnson wrote in his 2009 memoir Rockers and Rollers . “When I walked in, I introduced myself and Malcolm said, ‘Ah, you’re the Newcastle lad,’ and promptly gave me a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. He said, ‘Well, what do you wanna sing.’ I told him ‘Nutbush City Limits’ by Tina Turner.” The next afternoon, Johnson got a call asking him to return, and that was that. AC/DC decamped to record their eighth album in the Bahamas, again with Lange, and were finished seven weeks later. By July, the album was out, nearly a year to the date after Highway to Hell, and about five months after Scott’s death. This would prove to be the most acrobatic mid-career personnel change in pop history.

Although sketches of some songs had begun with Scott, Johnson was given free rein to write his own lyrics. Nothing strayed from the band’s tried and true formula of meditations on rocking and/or rolling. The first new song they did together would prove to be their biggest: “ You Shook Me All Night Long ” was a Top 40 hit, something that had eluded Scott-era AC/DC. While Back in Black is largely an extension of the things that worked on Highway to Hell , “You Shook Me All Night Long” was as close as the band could come to an outlier, yet never felt like pandering. It was a pure, melodic sing-along, and possibly the best to ever compare a vigorous sexual encounter to a car, a meal, and a boxing match all in three and a half minutes. The single’s success may have been thanks to beginner’s luck and inspired songwriting, or possibly an assist from beyond the grave.

“I remember sitting in my room writing that and I had this blank sheet of paper and this title and I was thinking, ‘Oh, what have I started?’” Johnson said in 2000. “I don’t give a fuck if people believe me or not, but something washed through me and went, it’s alright son, it’s alright . This kind of calm. I’d like to think it was Bon, but I can’t because I’m too cynical and I don’t want people getting carried away.”

But that was as far as Johnson would color outside AC/DC’s pre-drawn lines. He did not try and will the band into some sort of new direction or bend them to his taste. The degree to which the transition felt seamless was a triumph of branding as much as human resources: The idea of AC/DC prevails over any one song or album, but Back in Black happens to be the moment when that idea found its purest form and its widest purchase. If someone says “AC/DC,” you will think of the logo before you think of anything else, and Johnson’s fast acceptance and immersion, without any appearance of ghoulishness or greed, was the ultimate validation. His omnipresent tweed newsboy cap quickly became as central to the band’s iconography as Angus’ schoolboy getup. His voice may have lacked Scott’s nuance and character—a belt sander with one less speed—but there is no way of knowing how many people who embraced Back in Black in 1980 didn’t even realize there was a new singer. It definitely wasn’t zero.

Back in Black doesn’t ignore Scott’s passing but isn’t maudlin or cautionary— you can’t spell death by misadventure without adventure. “Hells Bells” opens the album with the clanging of the one-ton iron bell the band had custom-made to bring on tour, but that is as mournful as things get. Johnson howls, “You’re only young but you’re gonna die,” more as permission than warning before genially big-upping Satan and coming down squarely on the side of tempting fate in the name of a good time, of celebrating the abyss rather than stepping away from it.

Five tracks later, “Back in Black” is similarly defiant—“Forget the hearse ’cause I never die”—but that is pretty much it for discussion of mortality beyond the tacit assumption that the bereaved want to fuck, too. “Have a Drink on Me,” a gleeful ode to getting absolutely hammered, might be an odd choice for a band whose previous singer just drank himself to death, but Back in Black was not meant to be a reckoning, it was meant to be a reaffirmation.

Helping matters was the fact that AC/DC were funny, almost always intentionally. “Givin’ the Dog a Bone” is half an entendre short of a double entendre but thanks to its big, fat chorus of layered background vocals, you laugh even if you think you know better. AC/DC seemed to invite absurdity: The T-shirts sent to be sold at the North American tour’s first stop in Edmonton were all misprinted as “BACK AND BLACK.” They didn’t walk the fine line between stupid and clever, they drew it.

A year later, the one-ton “Hell’s Bells” bell was replaced by the “ For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) ” cannon, keeping the streak of acquiring heavy antique iron totemic metaphors alive. Lange returned for a third and final time and 1981’s For Those About to Rock hit No. 1, something that Back in Black did not do. Their 1976 album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap , which had not been released in the U.S., was, finally, in the wake of Back in Black ’s success, giving Bon Scott a proper posthumous bow at the considerable risk of confusing new fans. A band that was on the brink of oblivion instead became the paragon of consistency and longevity for another four decades.

There is no such thing as a bad AC/DC song. You can certainly not like an AC/DC song, which would then mean you probably don’t like any AC/DC songs, which is fine. But none of them really fail at what they intend to do and they all intend to do more or less the same thing. Some turns of phrase are less dunderheaded than others, some riffs make their point more indelibly than others. They didn’t really have an experimental phase unless you count the bagpipes in “It’s a Long Way to the Top,” but that wasn’t really an experiment because it totally worked. There were no ballads, no curveballs, no symphonies, no DJ remixes, no synths or pianos, no unplugged sessions, no cute covers, no BIG HAIR. Their greatest hit features the line, “You told me to come but I was already there” and may have been co-written by a ghost. They were the Ramones chopped and screwed, and similarly frozen in amber, eternally wearing their teenage uniforms.

Beyond the tens of millions of copies sold, it is easy to overlook the legacy of something like Back in Black . The album didn’t signify any sort of change or cultural marker; it instead proved the power of stasis, of doing something well, then doing it again but louder and with more money. In a sense, the success of Back in Black helped predict the current reboot moment: Give the people what they want, but more. The music does not feel of any time or place; it means now what it meant then. The record’s ultimate legacy comes less from the artists it influenced or even the songs that remain staples of whatever is left of commercial rock radio than in its confirmation that evolution can be an overrated quality. And, as ever, AC/DC were their own best messengers for this simple idea, laid bare in the final moments of their most famous work: “Rock’n’roll ain't no riddle, man.”

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AC/DC: 25 Essential Songs

The aussie legends’ rude and raucous best, from “big balls” to “back in black”.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of 'Back in Black,' we look back at 25 of AC/DC's greatest songs.

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Bulldozing rock-hard riffs, more double entendres than you can shake a stick at, and one comically snug schoolboy uniform: These are just a few of the ingredients that have made AC/DC one of the most iconic rock & roll bands of the past 45 years. Songs like “Highway to Hell” and “You Shook Me All Night Long” are classic-rock radio staples, and their 1980 LP, Back in Black , would be the bestselling album of all time if Thriller didn’t exist.

The secret to their success has always been their authenticity. When they exploded out of Sydney in the mid-Seventies, AC/DC’s scrappy original frontman Bon Scott sang about the group’s personal holy trinity — sex, drinking, and rock & roll — and ever since gravelly voiced Brian Johnson took the reins after Scott’s death, they’ve kept right on worshipping at the same altar. “We’ve been accused of making the same album over and over 12 times,” guitarist Angus Young once said . “The truth is, we’ve made the same album over and over 15 times.”

The best AC/DC songs overdose on crude, raucous riffs and offensive turns of phrase, whether its Scott bragging about his “Big Balls” or Young speeding down the “ Highway to Hell ” spewing out bluesy, high-voltage solos. As a band, they’re unrelenting and freewheeling; nobody has ever had to wonder if AC/DC were having a good time. So in recognition of Back in Black ‘ s 40th anniversary, we look back at 25 of their greatest songs. For those about to rock, we salute you.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

“It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll)” (1975)

It’s been covered by everyone from Lemmy Kilmister to Lucinda Williams, Jack Black to Pat Boone. But the first song on AC/DC’s first U.S.-issued album will always belong to Bon Scott. Indeed, Brian Johnson refrained from performing it during his more than a quarter century with AC/DC out of respect for his predecessor. And for sure, despite its rock-hard riff, “It’s a Long Way to the Top” is a Scott tour de force, from the brilliantly blunt lyric that telegraphs the glory and grime of the rock & roll lifestyle (“Gettin’ had/Gettin’ took/I tell ya folks/It’s harder than it looks”), to his exuberant vocal delivery, to, of course, his not-so-skilled bagpipes playing. “Bon actually could play flute, not bagpipes,” Malcolm Young once admitted to Billboard . “So he played the melody, and then we did the drones separate and put it on and it sounded fantastic.” — R.B.

Martyn Goddard/Corbis/Getty Images

“T.N.T.” (1975)

The title track of the band’s second Australian album (which was also included on the international version of High Voltage , and later featured in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby ) is AC/DC boiled down to its rawest essence: The band thumps and grunts away on the song’s three-chord riff like cavemen hacking up a wooly mammoth, while Bon Scott paints a hilariously tongue-in-cheek portrait of himself as a “dirty, mean, and mighty unclean” villain with explosive tendencies. When producer George Young heard Angus Young quietly chanting along to the song in the studio, he suggested that his little brother add his “Oi!” chants to the track. “I was never the greatest background singer in the world,” Angus recalled in Murray Englehart and Arnaud Derieux’s AC/DC: Maximum Rock & Roll . “So George said, ‘Hey, this is more your cup of tea.’” — D.E.

Ron Pownall/Getty Images

“Live Wire” (1975)

This 1975 track from the Australia-only T.N.T. (released on High Voltage overseas the following year) was never a single, but it had such a killer groove and and a strong dose of Bon Scott’s madcap personality that it became the band’s standard set opener until the singer’s 1980 death. “It was loud, clean, deep, menacing, and full of rhythm,” said bassist Mark Evans of the song. AC/DC dropped “Live Wire” from its repertoire in 1982, but as soon as Axl Rose stepped in as frontman in the summer of 2016, the song made its glorious return. — A.G.

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“Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap” (1976)

Despite the lascivious, violent, and even murderous services Bon Scott offers to commit for a reasonable fee on this stomping title track from AC/DC’s third Australian album — which would finally become a U.S. hit five years after its original release — the song actually began as something of an homage to the animated children’s TV series Beany and Cecil . “It was a cartoon when I was a kid,” Angus Young told Guitar World in 2009. “There’s a character in it called Dishonest John. He used to carry this card with ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap — Special Rates, Holidays’ written on it. I stored up a lot of these things in my brain. I picked out the things I liked best.” — D.E.

Michael Putland/Getty Images

“Big Balls” (1976)

Ever the generous host, Bon Scott, sounding both stately and smashed, boasts about his event-planning expertise in “Big Balls.” Or is he talking about something else? The tune, which first appeared on 1976’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap and subsequently became a classic-rock radio staple, was the Scotsman’s cheekiest (or perhaps ballsiest) display of double entendre. “My balls are always bouncing/My ballroom’s always full/And everybody comes and comes again,” goes one line, while another explains, “Some balls are held for charity/And some for fancy dress/But when they’re held for pleasure, they’re the balls that I like best.” Best of all, Scott says he’s “just itching” to tell you about his big balls. But even he couldn’t keep wordplay going for too long: In a 1976 interview with Rock Australia Magazine , Scott pierced the veil of irony by retorting to an interviewer, “I have too [got big balls] … I just checked.” — K.G.

“Jailbreak” (1976)

First released in Australia in 1976, “Jailbreak” was not readily available on these shores until eight years later, when it kicked off the odds-‘n’-sods EP ’74 Jailbreak , a compilation issued to capitalize on AC/DC’s newfound American success. Since then, it’s become one of the band’s most beloved songs, and it’s not hard to see why. Starting with a clanging, endlessly repeating riff and Bon Scott drawling, “There was a friend of mine on murder,” “Jailbreak” embarks on a slow build until it hits the chorus and explodes into a full-on outlaw anthem — albeit one where the outlaw ends up “with a bullet in his back.” According to Angus Young, the idea for the lyric came to Scott after he was arrested at a pre-AC/DC gig in Perth. “He was singing about somebody he met while a guest of her majesty’s prison,” the guitarist recounted with a laugh. — R.B.

“Let There Be Rock” (1977)

The title track to AC/DC’s fourth studio album is pure statement of purpose: Bon Scott casts rock & roll as something passed down from the heavens (“Let there be light … sound … drums … geetah! “), and the rest of the band members tear into the hopped-up boogie-blues riffs and rhythms as if they are indeed doing God’s work. It’s a thrilling and, in true AC/DC fashion, often amusing six-minute roller-coaster ride that telegraphs the magic, mythology, and electricity of rock & roll as well as any song before or since. “Let There Be Rock” is also a show-stopping staple of the band’s live sets, with Angus Young’s solo spot often stretching upwards of 10 minutes as he thrashes his guitar and body around the stage. Things were seemingly just as intense in the studio, where, reportedly, Angus’ amp exploded during the recording of the song. But, recalled older brother and Let There Be Rock co-producer George Young, “There was no way we were going to stop a shit-hot performance for a technical reason like amps blowing up!” — R.B.

“Whole Lotta Rosie” (1977)

One of AC/DC’s seediest songs was inspired by an encounter Bon Scott had with what he once described as a Tasmanian devil — an Aussie groupie named Rosie whom he estimated was about six-foot-two, weighed 305 pounds, and had measurements he made famous: “42-39-56.” “She was so big, she sort of closed the door and put it on your body, and she was too big to say no to,” he once said. “So I had to succumb. I had to do it. My god. I wish I hadn’t.” The band had been playing a song called “Dirty Eyes” that they’d been tooling around with, and after meeting Rosie, Scott threw out the lyrics he had and wrote new ones about the tryst (admitting he liked it) for what became “Whole Lotta Rosie.” Musically, Malcolm Young said the band was going for “a feel like Little Richard, a good old steamin’ rock feel,” which they achieved — the song became a concert staple for the band, bolstered in recent years by a supersize inflatable Rosie. And like Rosie, its legend has continued to grow as artists from Guns N’ Roses to Kenny Chesney have covered it. — K.G.

Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images

“Sin City” (1978)

One of the standout tracks from 1978’s underrated Powerage , “Sin City” is built around one of AC/DC’s most dramatic three-chord riffs, and surges into overdrive thanks to one of Angus Young’s most unhinged guitar solos. It also features some of Bon Scott’s most venomous lyrics, vividly painting a fantasy of the riches and luxuries that await big winners in Las Vegas (or any other high-rolling town), while simultaneously acknowledging that the deck is inevitably stacked against the hapless gambler. “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,” he growls during the song’s breakdown, “ain’t got a hope in hell, that’s my belief.” —D.E.

“Down Payment Blues” (1978)

Bon Scott had been playing in bands for almost a decade before he joined AC/DC, and by the time of 1978’s Powerage , despite doing some touring with Black Sabbath in Europe and in the U.S. on their own, the band still hadn’t truly broken through. So the struggle of “rock & roller welfare” that the singer details on “Down Payment Blues” was likely all too real to him. What made Scott truly a great lyricist, however, is how vivid, and at times funny, all the depressing imagery is — “Can’t even feed my cat,” he spits at one point. Behind him, meanwhile, Angus and Malcolm Young bash out one of their most simplistic yet cathartic riffs to date, essentially a two-chord pattern that travels around the fretboard, consistently building tension until abruptly stopping as Scott howls the title phrase. Being a “50-cent millionaire” never sounded so good. — R.B.

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“Riff Raff” (1978)

The opening 40 seconds of “Riff Raff,” filled primarily with Angus Young’s largely unaccompanied guitar, are some of the most tension-filled and anticipatory in all of rock & roll. Once the rest of the band comes slamming in, the song rockets off in an explosion of truly awesome force and energy — from Angus’ slinky, finger-twisting riffing to then-new bassist Cliff Williams’ propulsive, metronomic bass, Malcolm Young and drummer Phil Rudd’s head-bashing guitar-and-cymbal accents, and Bon Scott’s fevered howling. A song seemingly built for the stage (as exemplified by the particularly hot 1978 performance seen above), “Riff Raff” was brought back into live sets when AC/DC hit the road with Axl Rose in 2016, reportedly reinstated at the request of the superfan Guns N’ Roses singer himself. — R.B.

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“Highway to Hell” (1979)

With its Satan-hailing lyrics and rowdy air of incorrigible blasphemy, the title track of AC/DC’s sixth studio album (along with Angus Young’s devilish appearance on the cover) offended self-appointed guardians of morality everywhere, despite the fact that the crowd-pleasing anthem was actually about life on a tour bus. “When you’re sleeping with the singer’s socks two inches from your nose,” Angus told Guitar World in 1993, “that’s pretty close to hell.” Sadly, the first U.S. hit for the band would also become an epitaph for Bon Scott, who died just two months after it peaked at Number 47 on the Billboard singles chart. — D.E.

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“If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” (1979)

As AC/DC proved with “High Voltage,” if you have a great album title, why not turn it into a song? The track “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” appeared on Highway to Hell a year after it served as the title of AC/DC’s first live album. “The title came from a gig we did in America, Day on the Green festival, 80,000 people turned up,” Angus Young once recalled. “We were on at 10:30 in the morning, and most of us hadn’t even been to bed. This guy from a film crew got hold of me and Bon and asked what kind of show it was gonna be. Bon said, ‘You remember when the Christians went to the lions? Well, we’re the Christians.’ Then he asked me and I said, ‘If they want blood they’re gonna get it.’” The song delivered on both musicians’ promises with a shit-kicking Angus riff, a danceable beat, and Scott bleating about “feeling like a Christian locked in a cage, thrown to the lions.” It had been a self-fulfilling prophecy. — K.G.

“Touch Too Much” (1979)

Axl Rose has called “Touch Too Much” his favorite AC/DC song, and it’s easy to hear why — between its slinky verses, explosive choruses, Angus Young’s stabbing guitar solo, and Bon Scott’s comically leering lyrics about a night of romance with a woman who had “a body of Venus … with arms ,” this Highway to Hell cut delivers on every level. Oddly, aside from a lip-synched performance on Britain’s Top of the Pops less than two weeks before Bon’s death, the band never performed it live until Axl came on board for their 2016 tour. — D.E.

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“You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)

According to Brian Johnson, AC/DC were recording Back in Black in the Bahamas when he saw a couple of beautiful American women on the television. “I’d always wanted to fuck one!” he said. “They just looked fab. Everything pointed north on them.” It inspired him to write some of the most memorable lyrics in AC/DC’s catalog, including “knocking me out with those American thighs” and “she told me to come, but I was already there.” (Some AC/DC conspiracy theorists have speculated that some of these came from one of Bon Scott’s notebooks.) Whatever the truth, the song became the first single from Back in Black and remains perhaps AC/DC’s best-known song to this day. — A.G.

“Hells Bells” (1980)

Released just five months after Bon Scott’s untimely death, Back in Black features two overt references to the deceased frontman — the all-black album cover and the series of massive tolls (courtesy of a custom-made bell) that kick off the opening track. Angus Young’s iconic descending guitar lick, which eventually joins those knells, is similarly ominous and elegiac. But from there, “Hells Bells” (no apostrophe required) becomes a chugging, anthemic rocker — onstage, Brian Johnson would often swing from a rope as the giant, AC/DC-emblazoned bell tolled throughout the arena and crowds went wild. As for the iconic opening line, “I’m rolling thunder/Pouring rain,” Johnson recalled that during the recording sessions in the Bahamas, “the weather was shite and there was this huge clap of thunder across the sky, and [producer] Mutt [Lange] came in and went, ‘I’ve got an idea for you, Brian.…’” —R.B.

“Back in Black” (1980)

Sung by Brian Johnson and recorded in tribute to the fallen Bon Scott, the title track of AC/DC’s seventh studio album has become one of the band’s signature anthems. But according to Angus Young, his brother Malcolm was initially unsure of whether the song’s bluesy, swaggering guitar riff — which has since been sampled by everyone from the Beastie Boys to Eminem — was actually any good. “Malcolm had that riff for about three weeks,” Angus told Classic Rock in 2000. “He came in one night and said, ‘You got your cassette here? Can I put this down? It’s been driving me mad. I won’t be getting any sleep until I put it on cassette.’ He sat down and played it all. The funniest thing is he said to me, ‘What do you think? I don’t know if it’s crap or not.’” — D.E.

“Shoot to Thrill” (1980)

It speaks to the hit-packed strength of Back in Black that the studio version of “Shoot to Thrill” — a song so badass that most hard-rock bands of the era would have happily traded their leather and studs for a tune half as killer — was never released as a single. A textbook example of Angus and Malcolm Young’s water-tight guitar partnership, “Shoot” swings like the Rolling Stones in hyperdrive, with Angus pulling the trigger on not one but two ferocious solos. A staple of the band’s live sets since 1980, the song was introduced to a new audience in 2010, thanks to its inclusion on the Iron Man 2 soundtrack. — D.E.

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“Let’s Get It Up” (1981)

AC/DC had the attention of the entire rock world in December 1981 when they released “Let’s Get It Up,” the first single from Back in Black follow-up For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) . They decided to use the occasion to showcase a song about the glories of erections. “Loose wires cause fires,” growls Brian Johnson. “Getting tangled in my desires/So, screw him up and plug him in.” He didn’t even try to hide the inspiration for the words. “ Feelth , pure feelth! ” he said in 1982. “We’re a filthy band.” — A.G.

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“For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” (1981)

How do you top an album-opening song that begins with tolling bells? Start the next record with one that climaxes with blasting cannons. That artillery-firing song is also one of AC/DC’s most epic and gargantuan compositions; whereas the majority of the band’s tunes throttle the listener with bone-breaking riffs and boogie-rock rhythms, “For Those About to Rock” seems to slither over and smother everything in its sight like an enormous serpent. Its deliberate pacing would seem to make it an unusual choice for not just an album opener but also a show closer; yet, it’s been proven to work perfectly in both slots. “For Those About to Rock” has been AC/DC’s live finale almost since the day it was released, with a battalion of onstage cannons providing the closing salvo. As for the appeal of that firepower? “I just wanted something strong,” Angus Young recalled . “Something masculine, and rock & roll. And what’s more masculine than a cannon, you know? I mean, it gets loaded, it fires, and it destroys.” — R.B.

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“Sink the Pink” (1985)

Admittedly, even for a band that titled a song “Given the Dog a Bone,” “Sink the Pink” is pretty clunky and crude sexual innuendo. But damn if the song isn’t one of AC/DC’s most rowdy and rocking anthems, all crash-‘n’-bash rhythms and singalong, gang-vocal–assisted choruses, with some tasty fingerpicked guitar lines and a smoking solo from Angus to boot. Fly on the Wall , and the mid-Eighties overall, are generally seen as a low point in AC/DC’s career. And indeed, “Sink the Pink” evidences some (unusual for AC/DC) concessions to the era’s trends, such as heavily reverbed drums and a ridiculous, dance-off–themed music video. But the song also demonstrates that AC/DC still, as the chorus goes, knew how to “show you a good time” better than pretty much any rock & roll band in existence. — R.B.

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“Who Made Who” (1986)

Given that their lyrical concerns were usually a little earthier than dystopian visions of machines rising up to subjugate their human creators, AC/DC seemed an odd choice to write the theme song for Stephen King’s 1986 gore-camp classic Maximum Overdrive . But King — who supposedly proved his fandom to the band by serenading them with an a cappella rendition of “Ain’t No Fun Waiting Round to Be a Millionaire” — insisted that they provide the film’s soundtrack, and the band repaid the writer-director’s faith in them by penning one of their strongest songs of the Eighties. A hard-marching singalong spiked with some of Angus Young’s Van Halen–style tapping flourishes, “Who Made Who” also gave the band its first radio hit since 1983’s “Flick of the Switch.” — D.E.

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“Thunderstruck” (1990)

In the middle of a tour supporting Blow Up Your Video in 1988, Angus Young decided to visit his wife’s parents in Holland. Afterward, he boarded a small plane to take him to a Berlin gig, and the aircraft was struck by lightning midflight. Young thought he was going to die, and when he didn’t, he decided to write “Thunderstruck.” “It started off from a little trick that I had on guitar,” Young once recalled. “I played it to Mal and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a good rhythm idea that will sit well in the back.’ We built the song up from that.… We came up with this thunder thing, and it seemed to have a good ring to it. AC/DC = power. That’s the basic idea.” They did several takes of the song in the studio, but mixer Mike Fraser says the one that made the cut featured Angus playing the tune’s iconic lightning-speed guitar lead in one take, the whole way through the song. It was so catchy it became a staple of the band’s concerts for years to come. — K.G.

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“Big Gun” (1993)

AC/DC’s brilliant contribution to the soundtrack for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lackluster Last Action Hero movie was a muscular blues rocker that owed a debt to AC/DC’s early days, thanks to a boogie-woogie verse riff and a swinging Angus Young lead throughout the chorus. It was the band’s first attempt at working with producer Rick Rubin, and it went well enough that he worked with them again on 1995’s Ballbreaker . Although the Schwarzenegger film underperformed at the box office, the future Governator gave the song a boost by appearing in its video dressed like Angus and even doing the guitarist’s duck walk next to him, capping it off by telling the camera, “Now that’s what I call action.” — K.G.

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“Rock the Blues Away” (2014)

The third and final single from Rock or Bust is an ode to the simple pleasures of hanging out at a bar with your buddies. “Shootin’ pool with my friends,” Johnson sings. “Smokin’ cigarettes/Tellin’ jokes out loud/Laughin’ with the crowd.” But at the time, things were far from happy-go-lucky in the world of AC/DC, with drummer Phil Rudd under house arrest in New Zealand and rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young in a nursing facility due to premature dementia. Midway through the Rock or Bust tour, singer Brian Johnson left the band due to hearing problems. For a while it looked like “Rock the Blues” might be their final single, but there are credible reports that Johnson is back and a new album is in the works. If that’s true, expect another collection of songs not all that dissimilar to “Rock the Blues Away.” The fans would expect nothing less. — A.G.

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1980 "Back In Black" North American Tour

Thu. 31 jul. 1980 : philadelphia, pa usa (spectrum arena).

Coming soon.

Supported by: Humble Pie

Tickets: $5.50 / 6.50 / 7.50

Promoter: Electric Factory Concerts

Capacity: 18,380

Attendance: 9,647

Fan reviews:

By Roger , Stone Mountain,ga. : I was on the second level at the Spectrum dead center so I could see the stage well. The lights dimmed and you heard "The Bell" begin to ring. Bong...Bong.... Bong....The light came up all shining on the big brass bell center stage with the bell ringer swinging what looked like a sledge hammer. The bell is shimmering in a kaleidoscope of colors shining bright from the spot lights. He hits it one last time and twirls as he exits left off the stage. Angus is now walking on stage from the right spot light shining on him as he plays the intro for Hell's Bells and the big brass bell slowly ascends over head into the stage rigging. It was incredible to witness and a night in AC/DC I'll never forget. The show and showmanship was incredible!! RS

All AC/DC concerts in Philadelphia, PA

15 Jun. 1979: Philadelphia, Tower Theatre
5 Aug. 1979: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
31 Jul. 1980: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
7 Dec. 1981: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
8 Dec. 1981: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
14 Nov. 1983: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
15 Nov. 1983: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
7 Sep. 1985: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
15 Sep. 1986: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
9 May 1988: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
8 Oct. 1988: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
6 Nov. 1990: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
10 Jul. 1991: Philadelphia, Spectrum Arena
14 Mar. 1996: Philadelphia, CoreStates Spectrum
6 Sep. 1996: Philadelphia, CoreStates Spectrum
20 Aug. 2000: Philadelphia, First Union Spectrum
5 May 2001: Philadelphia, First Union Spectrum
17 Nov. 2008: Philadelphia, Wachovia Center
21 Oct. 2009: Philadelphia, Wachovia Center
20 Sep. 2016: Philadelphia, Wells Fargo Center

» Upload a review if you were at any of these shows!

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July 1980: AC/DC Releases The "Back in Black" Album

UNSPECIFIED - JANUARY 01: Photo of ACDC (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Australian band AC/DC had been in trenches for years, cranking out a series of high-voltage hard rock albums, and building a rabid audience of diehard fans that grew exponentially with each release.

RELATED: AC/DC Unearth Throwback 1981 "You Shook Me All Night Long" Live Video

The group finally broke through in a big way with 1979 LP, Highway to Hell . The album crashed the top 20 in America, and sold more than a million copies. Then, on February 19, 1980, tragedy struck. Bon Scott, the enigmatic AC/DC frontman, was found dead in East Dulwich, London after a night drinking with friends.

It was at Scott's funeral where the late singer's father, Chick, approached brothers Angus and Malcolm Young. He implored that that they carry on the band. The group set about trying to do the impossible: replace Bon Scott. Finally, they landed on a singer that Scott himself had raved about after his previous band, Fraternity, opened for an act called Geordie. The singer of that band: Brian Johnson. As Angus Young put it to Total Guitar , “It was rare that Bon ever raved about anything.”

Setting up shop at the famed Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas with producer Robert "Mutt" Lange, AC/DC began recording Back in Black . “The whole point of the album was to celebrate Bon’s life," is how Brian Johnson explained it. “I was a little worried. Like, who am I to try to follow in the footsteps of this great poet? Bon really was a kind of poet. And something happened to me - a good thing.”

Back in Black was released on July 25, 1980, just over five months after the death of Bon Scott. The album was an immediate hit both critically and commercially, with AC/DC receiving some of its best reviews in years. Copies were flying off store shelves across the country, with reports of the band moving 10,000 units of the album per day at one point.

The album bounced around the top 10 in America for an astonishing 13 months, but never reached #1. Back in Black peaked at #4 for the week of December 20, 1980. The #1 album that week: Kenny Rogers' Greatest Hits .

RELATED: AC/DC Releases "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap" to the World

AC/DC hit the road, taking the new lineup and songs on tour. The band hit the United States in late July, wrapping up the American leg in Boston on October 11, 1980. By then, Back in Black had already gone platinum. The record was such a success that the Atlantic label finally and officially released Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap in the U.S. The release did so well that it outperformed Back in Black on the U.S. album charts, peaking at #3.

The band even scored some hits on the Billboard Hot 100 with Back in Black . "You Shook Me All Night" reached #35. The title track peaked right behind it at #37.

The group finally made its triumphant return to Australia in February 1981, a full year after the death of Bon Scott. When AC/DC played in Sydney, Bon Scott's mother, Isabelle, approached Brian Johnson with the ultimate praise: “Our Bon would have been proud of you, son.”

“Disco was huge and punk and new wave were ascendant, and along came this AC/DC record which just destroyed everybody," explained Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morrello, summing up the incalculable importance and influence of Back in Black . "It put hard rock music back on the throne, where it belongs!”

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AC/DC Tour History
Melbourne, VIC Australia (Sidney Myer Music Bowl) 28 Feb. 1981 : Melbourne, VIC Australia (Sidney Myer Music Bowl) 22 Aug. 1981 : Castle-Donington, UK (Donington Park) AC/DC: 1980/81 "Back In Black" World Tour - Complete information on this tour, with all dates with setlist, reviews, photos, videos & more. Send YOUR review if you were there!
Back in Black Tour
AC/DC concert chronology. Highway to Hell Tour. (1979-1980) Back in Black Tour. (1980-1981) For Those About to Rock Tour. (1981-1982) The Back in Black Tour was a concert tour by the Australian hard rock band AC/DC in support of their seventh studio album Back in Black, which was released on 25 July 1980.
AC/DC
"Back In Black" by AC/DC live at The Capital CenterListen to AC/DC: https://ACDC.lnk.to/listen_YDSubscribe to the official AC/DC YouTube channel: https://ACD...
Back in Black
Back in Black is the seventh studio album by Australian rock band AC/DC, released by Albert Productions and Atlantic Records on 25 July 1980. It was the band's first album to feature Brian Johnson as lead singer, following the death of Bon Scott, their previous vocalist.. After the commercial breakthrough of their 1979 album Highway to Hell, AC/DC was planning to record a follow-up, but in ...
AC/DC Concert Setlist at Brielpoort, Deinze on July 1, 1980
Get the AC/DC Setlist of the concert at Brielpoort, Deinze, Belgium on July 1, 1980 from the Back in Black Tour and other AC/DC Setlists for free on setlist.fm!
The inside story of AC/DC's Back In Black, the biggest-selling rock
There was no backing down on that. Back In Black was released on July 21st, 1980 - five months and one day after Bon Scott had died. Rolling Stone writer David Fricke declared the album a masterpiece and a milestone in rock. "Back in Black is not only the best of AC/DC's six American albums," Fricke wrote.
Back in Black Tour
The Highway to Hell Tour was a concert tour by Australian rock band AC/DC in support of the group's seventh studio album, Highway to Hell, which was released on 27 July 1979.The tour had 3 legs around Europe and North America lasting 5 months starting on 17 August 1979 at Haffmans Park in Bilzen, Belgium, and concluded on 27 January 1980 at Southampton, England.
AC/DC: The epic inside story of Back In Black
Back In Black was released on July 21, 1980, five months and one day after Bon Scott had died. Within two weeks it topped the UK chart. And in the US, after a slow start, the album was certified platinum in October, when it began an incredible 13-month residency in the Billboard Top 10. ... AC/DC on the Back In Black tour (Image credit: Michael ...
Classic Tracks: AC/DC 'Back In Black'
AC/DC performing a typically understated live show during the Back In Black tour. In 1980 AC/DC were on a roll and nothing — not even the death of their lead singer — was going to stop them. In April 1980, just two months after lead singer Bon Scott's death from a night of heavy drinking at a London club had prompted heavy metal pioneers ...
OTD 1981
OTD 1981 - 'Back In Black' World Tour. OTD 1981: Originally scheduled on February 23rd, the last concert of the "Back In Black" World Tour took place on March 3rd at Brisbane Festival Hall in Australia. All News. AC/DC Official Site.
Watch AC/DC's Stunning 'Back in Black' Tour Footage
Watch AC/DC's Stunning 'Back in Black' Tour Footage. If there is a message to be taken from AC/DC, it's simply "Don't give up.". In early 1980, the band were on the cusp of a commercial breakthrough. Highway to Hell, their 1979 album, had been a Top-20 record in the U.S., putting the Australian group in a make-or-break position to ...
Brian Johnson Talks About 'Back In Black' Tour
Brian Johnson Talks About 'Back In Black' Tour. Brian Johnson "taking it all in" at the very beginning of the "Back In Black" World tour in North America in July 1980: All News.
April 1980
April 1980 - 'Back In Black' Begins. In April 1980, AC a DC started recording the album "Back In Black" in Nassau, Bahamas. Video unavailable. Watch on YouTube. All News. AC/DC Official Site.
AC/DC's 'Back in Black': A Track-by-Track Guide
A look inside all 10 songs on AC/DC's 1980 album 'Back in Black.' ... AC/DC Announces 2024 'Power Up' Tour Dates and New Lineup. AC/DC Announces 2024 'Power Up' Tour Dates and New Lineup.
AC/DC: Back in Black Album Review
AC/DC seemed to invite absurdity: The T-shirts sent to be sold at the North American tour's first stop in Edmonton were all misprinted as "BACK AND BLACK." They didn't walk the fine line ...
"Back in Black" (1980)
Songs like "Highway to Hell" and "You Shook Me All Night Long" are classic-rock radio staples, and their 1980 LP, Back in Black, would be the bestselling album of all time if Thriller didn't exist. ... In the middle of a tour supporting Blow Up Your Video in 1988, Angus Young decided to visit his wife's parents in Holland. Afterward ...
Back in Black
Back in Black is the seventh studio album by Australian rock band AC/DC, released by Albert Productions and Atlantic Records on 25 July 1980. It was the band's first album to feature Brian Johnson as lead singer, following the death of Bon Scott, their previous vocalist.
AC/DC Tour History
1980 "Back In Black" North American Tour. Thu. 31 Jul. 1980 : Philadelphia, PA USA (Spectrum Arena) Set List: Coming soon. Line Up. Angus Young - Lead Guitar Malcolm Young - Rhythm Guitar Brian Johnson - Lead Vocals Cliff Williams - Bass Phil Rudd - Drums. Info. Supported by: Humble Pie.
July 1980: AC/DC Releases The "Back in Black" Album
Back in Black was released on July 25, 1980, just over five months after the death of Bon Scott. The album was an immediate hit both critically and commercially, with AC/DC receiving some of its best reviews in years. Copies were flying off store shelves across the country, with reports of the band moving 10,000 units of the album per day at ...

AC/DC Setlist at Brielpoort, Deinze, Belgium

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“Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap” (1976)

“Big Balls” (1976)

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“Let There Be Rock” (1977)

“Whole Lotta Rosie” (1977)

“Sin City” (1978)

“Down Payment Blues” (1978)

“Riff Raff” (1978)

“Highway to Hell” (1979)

“If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” (1979)

“Touch Too Much” (1979)

“You Shook Me All Night Long” (1980)

“Hells Bells” (1980)

“Back in Black” (1980)

“Shoot to Thrill” (1980)

“Let’s Get It Up” (1981)

“For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)” (1981)

“Sink the Pink” (1985)

“Who Made Who” (1986)

“Thunderstruck” (1990)

“Big Gun” (1993)

“Rock the Blues Away” (2014)

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ac/dc tour history

1980 "Back In Black" North American Tour

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July 1980: AC/DC Releases The "Back in Black" Album

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