FIFTY YEARS AGO, FROM DOWN UNDER’S HARDEST SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS, ROSE AC DC, ATAVISTIC RIFF-PURVEYORS PAR EXCELLENCE. LOOKING BACK ON THEIR BIRTH AND EARLY STRUGGLES, SYLVIE SIMMONS FINDS A BAND – AND A SINGER – WHO STUCK TO THEIR GUNS, AND THEIR MONUMENTAL SOUND, THROUGH GOOD TIMES AND BAD, ON THE ROAD TO A DEFINING CATASTROPHE, KNOWING THE ONE TRUTH THAT MATTERED: “ROCK’N’ROLL WAS WHAT MADE PEOPLE HAPPY.”

Children of the damned: AC/DC in 1976 (from left) Bon Scott, Phil Rudd, Malcolm Young,Angus Young, Mark Evans.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS CAPSTICK.

Chris Capstick/Shutterstock

Then there was rock: AC/DC hit CBGB, New York, August 24, 1977 (from left) Malcolm Young, Bon Scott, Phil Rudd, Angus Young and new bassist Cliff Williams.

Bob Gruen

LATE AUGUST, 1977. IT WAS QUIET ON THE ROOF of the Hyatt House – or the Riot House, as the infamous Sunset Boulevard hotel was known to visiting rock bands. A little chilly too in the early hours of the mor ning after a show. On a sunlounger by the roof top pool Angus Young nursed a cup of tea and lit a cigarette from the stub of the last one. A few feet away, his brother Malcolm swigged from a bottle of beer. AC/DC had just played their first gig at the Whisky A Go Go. Ear-splitting, good-time rock, the small but enthusiastic crowd cheering as Bon Scott, the wir y, tattooed, topless front man, scooped tiny Angus onto his shoulders, jumped off-stage, and paraded him through the audience, Angus continuing to play guitar – despite, as he told me later, an enthusiastic fan leaving teeth marks on his private parts.

They ’d promised me an inter view back at the hotel, but Scott had disappeared. Now, finally, here he was, making an entrance, still shirtless, a shark’s tooth dangling from his ear, a bottle of bourbon in one hand, each of his arms wrapped around a woman, and grinning like a Cheshire cat.

It was AC/DC’s first US tour and the first of more than a score of times I inter viewed them over the years. First time I saw them play, too. What were they like? I’ll let Ozzy Osbour ne answer. “There’s no other band in the world like them. A meat and potatoes band. No bollocks. No fucking around.” Or Tony Iommi: “Probably the finest rock band. They ’ve stuck to their guns.”

The foundation of their songs was, and has remained, the three or four-chord, blues-boogie, American roots rock’n’roll they grew up on. Like the folk singers in the ’60s who treated Harr y Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music as Bible and template, Malcolm and Angus Young revered Chuck Berr y, Little Richard, Muddy Waters and Jerr y Lee Lewis. Subsequently they ’d unite the tribes of rock affiliation – punk rock, heavy metal, even alter native – in admiration of their minimalist purity, contained intensity and rarelydulled cutting edge. Fifty years later – through tragedy and trauma, the deaths of Bon Scott and, in 2017, Malcolm Young, and in defiance of the ravages of time – they forge on, October 7’s stalwart show at Power Trip in Indio, Califor nia sparking r umours of a full tour in 2024.

“We know what we are,” Malcolm told me. “Rock’n’roll. Not sitting around playing for yourself, climbing up your arse. We intend to stay that way.” And they did.

TEN POUND POMS THEY CALLED THEM, THE BRITS that left the UK for a new life in the sunny Antipodes at the end of WWII. In 1945 the Australian gover nment, looking for workers to man its new post-war industries, launched an advertising campaign in the UK. For a mere tenner, travel included, an entire family could leave the bomb sites, ration books and lousy weather behind. That winter had been the coldest in Glasgow in 10 years. In 1963 the Young family took them up on the offer and moved to Sydney – housed initially in Nissen huts in a migrant hostel, then in the suburb of Bur wood.

It was a big family, seven boys and one girl: Stephen (born 1933), Alex (1938), Margaret (1935), John (1937), William (1940), George (1946), Malcolm (1953) and Angus (1955). Only the two oldest, who’d already left home, stayed behind. All of them were musicians or music lovers. Four of them would go pro. The first was Alex, who played saxophone in Hamburg in a band called the Bobby Patrick Big Six . “He went there in the late ’50s,” Angus would tell me, “and hung around there during the Beatles time.” Brian Epstein signed Alex and his new band Grapefr uit to Apple in 1967, and Alex changed his name to George Alexander, maybe forgetting that one of his younger siblings already had that name.

“Stevie was the oldest and he played accordion,” explained Malcolm, “but John and Alex were the first to play guitar and it was sort of passed down to George” – the original George – “then myself, then Angus. It was like your toys when you’re kids – you get all your brothers’ and sister ’s hand-me-downs. Me and Angus would fiddle on it and one of them would say, ‘Listen, if you do it this way it will be easier for you because you’ve only got little hands.’”