Angus Younger, I’m informed by his consultant, will telephone me at 9.10am exactly on an autumn day in 2014.

As a fan, it’s an thrilling message to obtain. After all, we’ll speak concerning the band’s new album Rock Or Bust. However possibly we’ll additionally have the ability to go a bit off-topic and get into Angus’s ideas on some classics from his catalogue: say, the actual dynamic brilliance of “Down Cost Blues” or “Unhealthy Boy Boogie”. Whose concept was that odd stepped rhythm for the riff on “For These About To Rock”? Possibly we are able to get into another riffs, too.

“You’ll have 10 minutes,” she says.

Because it seems, that’s advantageous. Angus is a succinct talker not a lot given to philosophising or memory, which does its personal job of explaining why AC/DC have stayed nearly as good as they’re for so long as they’ve. It is a band of maximum focus, pragmatic selections, and in abeyance to a high quality management in proof from their first recordings (guided by Malcolm and Angus’s older brother George) to their most up-to-date album, //Energy Up//. The band has weathered firings, the demise of an important singer, deafness, alcoholism, an inexplicable spell of criminality, retirement – even the demise of a founder member, however nonetheless retains on going.

It’s an everlasting high quality you’ll discover celebrated in this new journal. In it we’ve reviewed every of the band’s albums, and visited them at key phases of their lifespan – discovering basic interviews from our archive. Notably good are the reportage items which present the band’s growing showmanship. There’s something referred to as the “Human kangaroo” which is mentioned in a 1976 interview with NME, but it surely’s too upsetting to enter right here.

Because it turned out, Angus and I did have a little bit of time to get into the constructing blocks of AC/DC: the riffs. “It could actually come any variety of methods. Typically you’ll have an excellent guitar riff, different instances you would possibly simply want an excellent title and it units you pondering – what if I do this, see the way it goes?

“A lot of the songs that we’ve ever sat and performed about with have been guitar riffs – any songs we got here up with, they have been all the time together with one another. It’s one thing we all the time did. Typically we borrowed bits from one another. Like Malcolm would say, “You already know that riff you had from that different interval? Let’s strive that with this…”

Even with Malcolm now departed, the message continues to be coming via loud and clear. AC/DC will likely be with us a very long time but.

For these about to get one right here… We salute you!