Live Review: AC/DC
Reviewed by David Keenan
Publication Date: Dec 10 2000

AC/DC
SECC, Glasgow

"Perfect. Not a brain cell to spare." That was how Joe Carducci, America's heaviest rock theoretician, described AC/DC in his epochal study of pop/rock friction Rock And The Pop Narcotic. He was bang on the money; AC/DC are so mindless they're pure Zen.

Over the space of 27 years they have created one of rock's most enduringly righteous myths through a combination of three power chords (the same ones, every time), one dead lead singer (Ronald "Bon" Scott - born Kirriemuir, Scotland, 1946; choked on his own vomit in the back of a car, London, 1980) and a demoniacal lead guitarist dressed as a schoolboy. That something so unencumbered by such cultural tat as relevance, social value or any notion of taste can still thrive in today's anaemic music scene is truly heartening.

Tonight's sold-out show is a sort of homecoming - guitarists Angus and Malcolm Young were also born in Scotland before their parents decided to emigrate to Australia - and it's testament to AC/DC's agelessly enduring appeal that the audience is drawn from right across the (anti) social spectrum. The atmosphere is charged with a benign sense of unselfconscious celebration, as all of that pent-up id energy finds glorious release in a set of songs that affirm the only things that really matter - partyin' and goin' crazy.

Scholars are still divided over the merits of vocalist Brian Johnson, Bon Scott's replacement, but if the muscular beauty of Back In Black, his heavyweight debut, failed to convince these squares then nothing will. Johnson may boast none of the wasted grace of his predecessor but he is a fantastic frontman all the same, punching the air triumphantly at the end of every single number as if, even after 20 years, he still can't quite believe just how much fun it is to be in AC/DC.

However, it's Angus that everyone's here to see, a little ball of electricity buzzing and bobbing beneath a wall of Marshall amps. Whether duck-walking the stage or flailing in circles on the floor he never misses a note - and what a gut-punching sound he makes. AC/DC have nothing to do with the generic metal losers they're often bunched alongside (Iron Maiden, Metallica, whoever) and much more in common with the electric blues that lit up the tenement walls of downtown Chicago or the rockin' interstate motion of Chuck Berry. As they blast into Let There Be Rock, which posits a God whose final act of inspired creation was to invent rock, everyone is on their feet in a moment of genuinely ecstatic communion.

Stone-cold classics like the swaggering You Shook Me All Night Long and Shot Down In Flames line up against a couple of choice cuts from the latest Stiff Upper Lip LP but - as ever - it's the Wagnerian splendour of For Those About To Rock (We Salute You) that brings the house down. It's a sentiment of such absolute purity - genuine faith in the ultimately redemptive powers of mainlined rock'n' roll - that when the lights go up there's barely a dry eye left in the house.

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