Always defend the starting point: Angus Young (l.) and his brother Malcolm, on tour in Canada in 2000.
Photo: dpa
AC/DC will begin their next German tour in two weeks. The band is 51 years old and has hardly changed. Why? Still skin clean. Malcolm Young, whose death the band has now survived for ten years, once explained the AC/DC credo as follows: “You always come back to the starting point anyway, why should you set off somewhere else?”
His brother Angus, who emigrated with him from Scotland to Australia in the proletarian family group and then returned to Great Britain with the band in order to achieve success, always wanted to play like Chuck Berry. When he was able, he played in all positions, just as you used to be able to give the instruction in a football computer game: “Shoot at the goal from all positions.” With Angus Young, it looks like air guitar in real life.
Very good musicians play very simple songs, but unlike the comparable Motörhead, they have to be distinguishable for the stage dramaturgy. “They obey a kind of economy of scarcity that attaches importance to every single chord,” writes Frank Schäfer in “AC/DC – 100 pages,” in which he examines the mechanics of this successful band that has sold more records than the Rolling Stones.
Actually, they always make the same album, but they are always there. For Schäfer, this is a “classic tautology” and it goes like this: “Why do you like playing in a rock band so much? Yes, because we play rock ‘n’ roll.” Slash says admiringly: “Music can be that simple and that good if you give it your all.” He says that AC/DC have always remained a bar band. But when he goes to one of their concerts, he feels “like he’s seventeen again.”
Frank Schäfer: AC/DC – 100 pages. Reclam, 100 p., br., 12 €.
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