How the Young brothers formed one of Australia’s most successful bands
AC / DC are far from the only Australian musicians who have achieved success outside their country: world famous pop stars are Kylie Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia and Sia, concerts of the rock band INXS have gathered entire stadiums, and there is no figure in the world of post-punk and alternative music. equal to Nick Cave. Yet it was AC / DC who blazed the trail for everyone else in the 1970s. And the success of this group, in truth, is on some fundamentally different level: suffice it to say that the album “Back in Black” is consistently among the ten best-selling releases of all time, alongside Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and “Hotel California »Of the Eagles group.
AC / DC’s founders and main musicians Malcolm and Angus Young were born in the UK. They moved to Australia as children, when in 1963 the large Young family traveled to the other side of the world in search of a better life. The first to become famous in popular music was George Young, the older brother of Malcolm and Angus, who was never part of the official lineup of AC / DC. In the 1960s, he played in the garage band The Easybeats, which claimed the status of the Australian Beatles, and composed, among other things, the wonderful, easy and charming hit “Friday on My Mind”. George’s success inspired the younger brothers to take up guitars too – however, at first they could not even suspect that they would become the absolute champions of the Australian music export.
Perhaps the most Australian thing to show up in AC / DC is the comic school uniform with short pants that Angus Young has regularly worn on stage; such suits were really worn by Sydney elementary school students. Otherwise, their work is an absolutely cosmopolitan weighted blues-rock, in which they always fanatically followed the once-chosen musical and poetic principles. The musical ones were just formulated by the Young brothers: energetic riffs, straightforward rhythm, power chords – when the middle sound is removed from the triad, and the remaining ones are definitely not colored in either minor or major, – mostly organized in a standard square.
Another British immigrant, vocalist Bon Scott, who called the lyrics of his songs “outhouse poetry”, was responsible for the poetic principles. This meant: extremely low humor (in the AC / DC repertoire there was, for example, the composition “Crabsody in Blue” – a portmanteau from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in the Blues” and the words crabs, “pubic lice”), an abundance of erotic plots (the hit “Whole Lotta Rosie ”narrated about the night Scott spent with a prostituted plus-size woman), as well as the poetics of drunken fights and other alcoholic intoxication. The frontman of AC / DC lived as he sang: “toilet poetry” in the overwhelming majority of cases had an almost reportage character.
