There Was A Ninety-Two Decibel Rocking Band

Music cassettes. Dear God! Much as it is difficult to imagine having only a flint hand-axe to skin a cat with, one can hardly begin to explain the near-uselessness of the pre-recorded music cassette. No skipping tracks, fast forward to the end of the damned thing to start side 2, and the fragile snap-happy nature of the frequently chewed up tape itself. But I had to make do, as CD’s were still far off in the horizon and my vinyl was to precious and bulky to take to school. Besides, user-friendliness was a foreign concept in the Wimpey burgered early eighties.

First year Boys didn’t have a study to retire to, and the Third Years’ had a monopoly on The Quiet Room. I had my ghetto blaster, a seriously large pair of headphones, and a draughty vestibule with a threadbare granddad chair as a location for my plebby metal solitude. And I had one of the greatest albums of all time to listen to.

Of course I had no idea at the time. All I knew was that AC/DC were a heavy band, and that this live album was pretty fucking exciting to listen to. The cover was a bit hardcore too, Angus plunging his Gibson into his stomach whilst Bon Scott warbled away. It took a little while to get used to the lead singer’s screaming and growling, but the rest of the band, well, it was the simple sound of brilliantly excessive rock and fucking roll.

There’s no reason for anyone reading this to be unaware of the three-pint excitement of the opening to Riff Raff, nor of Bon Scott’s brief ‘hot in here’ intro to Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be. And of course by the time ‘Bad Boy Boogie’ is rattling your eardrums you’ll know that this is something very special indeed. The swallow dive down to the obligatory Angus Young solo showcase is only to be expected at an Acca Dacca show, but it’s the skillful easing through the gears back up to Bon Scott’s triumphant declaration that ‘I wanna tell you no story, tell you no lie’ that separates AC/DC from any other chancers selling three chord songs about loose women. There’s all the light and shade of monochrome here, the swell of bravado and the bloodrush of confessional from five men with a shady past and an uncertain future, there’s the knowledge that this is what life is really like when you’re in AC/DC.

After all that there is the discovery that Side Two is where all the real hits are hiding. The ‘Angus’ chant that heralds Whole Lotta Rosie, and then the likes of High Voltage and Let There Be Rock, this album is riddled with absolute genius. It never failed to take a pale young boy away from a lonely life in windswept Suffolk to the boozy chaos of an April night at the Apollo.

Bon Scott was dead just over a year after that night in Glasgow. AC/DC went on somehow to find success on a worldwide stage but, especially for those of us that never saw Bon Scott in the flesh, 'If You Want Blood...' was their finest hour.