Angus Young says he doesn’t care about guitarist polls and is not fussed about where they rank him. In Rolling Stone’s Best Guitarist poll Angus was ranked at no 38 below St Vincent, Maybelle Carter, Joni Mitchell and John Frusciante.
In a 1993 Angus Young Noise11 interview, published in full for the first time ever this week, Angus says that he has always considered AC/DC as a group of musicians, not five individuals, and that the polls do not matter.
“AC/DC was a band first and foremost,” Angus says in the now streaming Noise11 interview. “We never looked at ourselves as an individual piece. That has always been the way we looked at it, you know. I’ve never gone out there and said AC/DC is one guitar solo, and there’s a drum solo and there’s a bass. AC/DC is just five guys who all play the with the same intense playing. We go out there and play rock and roll. We are not a band of five individual guys all displaying their technics”.
Angus is more impressed with what the fans think. “I’m quite lucky. There are a lot of people out there who say AC/DC inspired them to actually pick up a guitar. That is a compliment in itself too”.
AC/DC played their first show in Sydney on 31 December 1974. They have been a band ever since and he says only once considered disbanding. “The only time we came to that point was when Bon died,” Angus said. “That was a big decision if we continued or stopped. Ever since that time we kept going. I think that was the hardest thing for us to decide whether we should continue. Ever since that time we have only ever gone forward. We have never looked back and said ‘okay it stops’. I’ve always gone forward with a positive attitude.”
The death of Bon Scott in 1980 hit the band hard. “As a band it was like losing someone probably more than someone in your family. We were very close as people. We were very tight. In a band like AC/DC it is like a childhood gang. You have people who think the same as you. You spend so much time together that it is a very tough thing to go forward”.
At the time of Bon’s death, some shared a view that AC/DC should stay together while others advised them to discontinue. Angus says it was his brother Malcolm who made the decision. “There were a lot of people saying ‘go on, go on’ and a lot of people were saying ‘you should stop maybe'”, Angus said. “At the time when we even thought about it we didn’t even want to look for a singer. All I knew was that my brother Malcolm called me up one day and said ‘we should just get together and keep writing songs’. We were just mopping around at the time. He said ‘this will just keep our minds away from it’. Then we can decide when we felt more of what we should do. As far as replacing someone like Bon Scott, you can never replace him. We were just lucky we met Brian Johnson and Brian himself has his own character too. He has his own character like Bon. I always looked at anyone out there doing something different. They were unique people. As I do with Brian Johnson. I think he is also a unique character”.
For the first time ever, the 1993 Noise11 interview with Angus Young is now streaming in full. Have a listen to Angus and get some real insights into who he is.
AC/DC fans in Australia are poised for the imminent announcement of the Australian tour, expected to be for November 2025 and playing Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane.
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