Scotscub56 yrsOn 30 April, a week after the first show at the Red Cow, the new version of the High Voltage album was released in the UK and Europe. The US release followed on 14 May. The band went on to play a residency at the Marquee, the famous Soho club where so many legendary rock acts had performed – Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, Pink Floyd, The Who.
One of those Marquee shows was reviewed by Melody Maker’s Harry Doherty, who stated: “They’re a good boogie band, with apparently no pretensions about being anything else. Judging from the wild reaction of their audience, they could slip comfortably into Status Quo’s shoes.”
Certainly, there were similarities between AC/DC and Quo, in the heavy boogie numbers they played, with Malcolm Young a rhythm machine like Quo’s Rick Parfitt. What the members of AC/DC could never understand was why their band was repeatedly described in the British music press as punk rock.
Speaking to me in 2003, Malcom said: “When we first came to England in 1976, the record company wanted to market us as a punk band. We told them to fuck off!” Malcolm also recalled other heated exchanges from that time. “You’d get these punks having a go at us,” he said. “And Bon would go, ‘You better shut up or I’ll rip that fucking safety pin out of your fucking nose!’”
It’s A Long Way To The Top
The band’s UK tour kicked off at Glasgow’s City Hall, in the city where the Young brothers were born. It was named the Lock Up Your Daughters tour after a line from the song ‘T.N.T.’. The 12 June issue of Sounds carried a major feature in which the tour was billed as “a rampage across Britain under the Sounds banner.”
This feature, by Geoff Barton, was a detailed portrait of the band and their lifestyle. Barton met up with the band at the house in Barnes before travelling with them in a van to a gig at a club called the Porterhouse in Retford, Nottinghamshire.
In his description of the house, you could almost smell the place: “Cosy, if cluttered – cigarette butts and half-finished drinks are strewn liberally about its interior.” His description of the five band members equally vivid: “The first thing that strikes you about the band is their smallness – they’re all around five feet four inches; the second is their fresh-faced and bright-eyed appearances.
On closer inspection, however, you find that, although the skin is smooth enough, it looks a good deal older than it should do: the eyes are glazed more than shiny. On the road wear and tear, without a doubt. Bon Scott, the oldest and most well-worn of the five.”
The show in Retford drew an audience of around 100 people. The songs they played that night included ‘Live Wire’, ‘The Jack’, ‘High Voltage’, and a version of ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top’ featuring Bon on bagpipes.
Most evocative of all was the way Barton described Angus on stage: “He begins rushing up and down like a lightning streak – as the music gathers speed, so it acts as a series of electrical stimuli to the young lad. Ultimately, he falls to the floor and there, still holding his instrument, turns a full circle, crab-like, on his back in the grime, twitches violently, and then hits the final note of the evening with such force you expect the stage to cave in and see the whole band disappear in a cloud of dust.”
Bon Scott was so eccentric and yet so down-to-earth. On stage he was like a pirate, sort of leathery and macho, but in a comic way
The Lock Up Your Daughters tour ended at London’s Lyceum Theatre on 7 July, and ahead of the band’s appearance at Reading Festival on 29 August, another Sounds writer, Phil Sutcliffe, predicted big things for AC/DC – only this time, there was no reference to punk rock.
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