On Wednesday afternoon, 374 bagpipers gathered in Melbourne’s Federation Square to play AC/DC’s It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’Roll), setting a new world record just up the road from where Bon Scott and the band famously played the song on the back of a flatbed truck riding up Swanston Street 50 years before.
It’s the one hit AC/DC no longer plays live, retired out of respect to Scott after his death in 1980. But you barely notice it is missing when their live shows are this stuffed with classics: an audible thrill ripples through the 80,000 punters in Melbourne Cricket Ground when AC/DC opens with If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It) then tears straight into Back in Black. Who else could play such a huge hit so early in a show? But Accadacca can, in what is essentially a greatest hits celebration that goes for more than two hours.
Let’s address the elephants in the room: yes, Brian Johnson is 78 and, no, his voice can’t reach the heights or hold out as long as it did in the 1980s. He can’t screech as he once could on songs like High Voltage or Highway to Hell, but he sure gives it a go with a smile on his face. Johnson was forced to leave AC/DC’s 2016 world tour because of severe hearing loss (Axl Rose stepped in) but a fix was found and you can tell he’s happy to be back, cackling like a gremlin between songs. (Accadacca doesn’t do stage banter, and no one minds.)
Likewise, Angus Young – still wearing his schoolboy shorts at 70 – is noticeably slower on certain early tracks, including the frenetic opening to Thunderstruck. But it is still Thunderstruck, and who cares when a whole stadium is singing that loudly, that joyfully, as one?
With his shock of white hair and skinny legs poking out of his shorts, Young simultaneously looks like an ancient wizard and confusingly childlike; when he trots back to the band at the end of a song, he looks like a lost little boy running for his parents – until he launches into a frenzied solo, his fingers moving almost too fast to see. He can still duckwalk the length of a huge stage, wild-eyed and juddering around as though he’s been electrocuted.
He slowly loses clothes during the set, even using his tie like a violin bow to play his guitar. By the end, when his shirt is almost completely unbuttoned, he’s in charge of the whole show.
On Let There Be Rock, Young launches into a lengthy, indulgent and hugely entertaining guitar solo that almost feels like a challenge to any who thought AC/DC weren’t still up to it. The rest of the band fades away as Young struts, taking breaks only to revel in the cheers before throwing himself on the floor and rolling around like a man possessed. “Where did that come from?” Johnson asks afterwards; who could say?
Johnson and Young are our ringleaders but they have tight support in the rhythm guitar of Stevie Young, who officially came onboard in 2014 after his uncle Malcolm was diagnosed with dementia; as well as the bassist, Chris Chaney, and the drummer, Matt Laug, who plays with the determination of a man trying to trigger an earthquake. Your eardrums won’t be the same again.
Though the tour is named for the 17th album Power Up, released in 2020, they only play one song from it. Instead, we get the best of rest: Shoot to Thrill, High Voltage, Highway to Hell, You Shook Me All Night Long, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, TNT and Whole Lotta Rosie. There’s even room for a surprise with Jailbreak, a song they have not played live since 1991, which is welcomed with huge enthusiasm.
This is AC/DC’s first show in Australia in 10 years and Melbourne is their first stop – after all, it is the band’s “ancestral homeland”, as Johnson puts it, being “the home of Mr Scott”. It’s hard not to suspect this may be the band’s last world tour, and maybe even their last trip to the homeland – but what a thrilling spectacle it is if you can get a ticket. They rock and we salute them.
AC/DC are playing the MCG again on 16 November, then Sydney’s Accor Stadium 21 and 25 November, Adelaide 30 November, Perth 4 and 8 December and Brisbane 14 and 18 December
