The bassist quit, the vocalist deaf, the drummer was arrested, the founder of the group died - these are the latest events in the history of the AC/DC group. Well, how did they manage to release a new album?

On November 13, 2020, the Power Up album was released-the 17th in the AC/DC discography, the most loud group on the planet. As they succeeded, it seems that the musicians themselves do not fully understand. Three of them, for various reasons, left the group right during the tour of 2016, but then returned to the studio to complete the work of the founder of the AC/DC Malcolma Yang. Shortly before his death in 2017, he, together with his brother Angus, recorded new material for several records forward. "Medusa" retells the main thing from an interview with the group of The Guardian.

After each two -hour performance in the school suit, the guitarist Angus Young first went to the shower, and then dinner tightly: AC/DC concerts are not what they do for a full stomach.

On September 20, 2016, Yang left the Wells Fargo Center scene in Philadelphia. It could be the last concert at the 43-year-old group at that time. Then, as part of the tour, the team had already played 23 performances with Equal Rose from Guns N 'Roses, who replaced the AC/DC vocalist Brian Johnson, because he had so badly with hearing right during the tour that he ceased to hear himself on the stage. In the same summer, the Basist Cliff Williams announced that he was leaving the group, and the drummer Phill Radd could not go to the tour at all: he was put under house arrest in Australia because he threatened his assistant (and also kept Methamaphtamine and marijuana at home). The founder of the group, the elder brother of Angus Malcolm Young, a few years before that finally retired; At the end of his life, he developed severe dementia, he died in 2017. On the rhythm guitar, he was replaced by his nephew-Stevie Young.

Therefore, when in September 2018 the whole group - including Johnson, Williams and Radda - appeared in a picture from the studio in Vancouver, it looked like a miracle. “We entered the studio, and in the air smelled of electricity. - says in a new interview with The Guardian, Brian Johnson, who now hears much better thanks to artificial eardrum. - And, of course, Malcolm was with us. We all felt the strong presence of his spirit. ”

Of course, waiting for the new Highway to Hell or Back in Black would be naive, but Power Up, the 17th record of the group is surprisingly worthy of the album. Through The Mists of Time, for example, is similar to the early rems if they played hard rock. “I still have goose goosebumps from this song,” Johnson admits. -It recalls those times when rock and roll was such a cool occupation, we were all young, nothing ended, and it seemed to us that life would now be like then, in the early 1980s-to AIDS, to everything else. It's like a trip to time. ”

The musicians began collecting material for this album at the very beginning of the zero. After the STIFF UPPER LIP tour, which ended in 2001, the group went to seven -year -olds, but the Yangi brothers continued to meet in the studio and record new guitar riffs, balses and melodies. Did Malcolm already knew about his dementia? Has he tried in advance to provide comrades in the group in the margin of material in case of his disability or death?

“At the end of this period, we have already begun to notice some oddities behind him, but he held on to a well done,” says his younger brother Angus. He says that when they began to record Power Up, all the songs - the authorship of two Yangs - were almost ready. The Basist Cliff Williams has a slightly different version: "Eng and Mel generated a bunch of ideas for reefs and other things from which we selected 12 and developed them in the studio." Brian Johnson is sure that the founder of AC/DC himself invisibly helped them: “When we signed up, and I thought how best to sing one or another line, I said to myself: what would Malcolm want in this song? He was a strong personality and forced himself to respect himself, without applying any efforts to this. And although he is no longer with us, this respect did not go away. ”

The charm of AC/DC is not reduced only to heavy guitar riffs, school uniforms, a rumble of guns from the stage and generally a corporate deafening sound. The group always - both in the studio and at concerts - radiated the spirit of the partnership: it is important to be together with like -minded people and to break together. Although not that AC/DC participants have always been best friends. The Yangi brothers are known for their sharpness. In addition, many fans believed that Brian Johnson treated unfairly when he was actually fired, due to health reasons, a short, stingy press release on the group’s website (then he was removed). Then Cliff Williams left-because of another illness, chronic dizziness-but fans considered this a gesture of solidarity with Johnson.

Most of all went to the drummer Phil Radd. Johnson says that when Phil saw in television, the pale shadow of the merryman whom they all knew - he did not believe his eyes, although he knew that Radd had drug problems. As a result, the RADD served eight months under house arrest for drug storage (accusations of threats were removed from him), and Malcolm’s funeral in 2017 appeared already healthy “like a butcher’s dog”, as Johnson formulates in an interview.

When the whole group gathered again to recording the album, things immediately went in the way, AC/DC members assure. Of course, Angus Young, recording the plate, could do his nephew Stevie on the rhythm gitar, take some kind of vocalist and a studio rhythm-section like Johnson ... In the end, this group was chosen from such troubles that would guarantee to destroy any other-to recall the death of Johnson Bon Bon Bon in 1980. Yes, and the tour of 2016 with Eklom Rose passed remarkably: despite the fact that they were almost not familiar with him, AC/DC participants respond to the GUNS N 'ROSES vocalist is exclusively warm.

But for the AC/DC fans to perceive Power Up as a full -fledged new album of the group, one Yang was clearly not enough. Williams says that if it weren’t for Brian Johnson and Phil Radd, he would also not agree to participate in this. And if you ask Angus Yang himself, whether he was ready to record an album without a group comrades, he plunges into long memories of his older brother, discussing the great guitarists like Pia Townsend and Kita Richards - but does not answer the question.

After the record, it remained to check only one thing: is Brian Johnson capable of performing on stage? For this, the group gathered in a rehearsal studio in the Netherlands, Johnson put on his new artificial eardrums - and his life was literally transformed, Brian himself says: “I heard absolutely everything. Do not believe how good it became from it. ” “We played one song, and he [Johnson] showed two big fingers up,” recalls Angus Young. - He was ready to sing again and again. For many years I have not seen him so vigorous. "

Of course, in the world now the situation is such that Brian Johnson will have to wait a bit before he reaches the stage. But sooner or later, in some place on the planet around 11 pm, the tired Angus Young will enter the dressing room, dressed only in school shorts, white socks and boots, with hair sticking to his forehead from sweat. And he will go to the shower, wondering where to eat.

Retold Alexei Kovalev