FILTER BOOKS

He’s the singer in AC/DC. Johnson’s second memoir focuses on the music.

By James McNair.

Flat cap philosopher: Brian Johnson, on-stage with AC/DC.

Getty

The Lives Of Brian ★★★★

Brian Johnson

PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH. £25

INN2016, when Axl Rose replaced him on the final leg of AC/DC’s Rock Or Bust World Tour, Brian Johnson couldn’t watch. “It was like finding a stranger in your house, sitting in your favourite chair,” he writes. Acute hearing loss had left Johnson mortified when unable to locate the key of Highway To Hell on-stage one night, and later, near-total deafness ensuing, he felt increasingly isolated and vulnerable. “I didn’t want to die,” he says. “I just wouldn’t have minded that much.”

Happily, prosthetic eardrum technology restored Johnson’s pitching and life-force. He rejoined DC and made 2020 comeback Power Up, the band’s first album in six years, and their first since the passing of talismanic rhythm guitar god, Malcolm Young. In a book that’s essentially an extended riff on snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, all of this figures. Recounted with wit, honesty and a confiding down-the-pub intimacy, The Lives Of Brian is a tale of fate, serendipity and dogged determination. It’s also a much more detailed, ruminative book than Johnson’s 2009 car-themed memoir, Rockers And Roll-ers: An Automotive Autobiography.

Despite the odd longueur (there is actual mention of jumpers for goalposts), Johnson’s childhood comes alive as he sketches his im-movable, war-worn sergeant major dad (“I’ve never watched Top Of The Pops and I’m not starting just ’cos you’re on it,” huffs Alan when Brian’s ill-fated glam band Geordie appear), and his lovely, Frascati, Italy-born mum, Esther. Depressed by English food, weather and the view to Dunston’s coal staiths, Esther attempts to escape to Italy with Brian in tow at least twice but is lured back.