AC/DC were, are and always will be a 70s rock band. They wore jeans and drank beer and sang songs about chicks. They weren’t pretty and they weren’t smart, but they knew every Chuck Berry riff and they knew how to throw a party – uncomplicated guys from an uncomplicated time.
If the 70s had lasted forever, flavourless mush like Flick Of The Switch and Fly On The Wall would’ve been just fine. Among the whirls, bells and bongs of a pinball arcade or on the clunking eight-track in the dashboard of a weed-belching boogie van, what difference could there really be between Hells Bells and Sink The Pink? No one would notice. AC/DC were part of the architecture of the 70s. Their sweaty mugs were on your walls and their iconic logo was on your chest, and that’s just the way it was. But then the 80s happened, and it screwed everything up royally.
The 80s didn’t actually start in 1980. No one knows for sure exactly when they kicked in, but the fact is, one morning we all woke up to a neon-pink world full of Boy Georges and synthesisers and Rubik’s Cubes, and there was nothing we could do about it. Suddenly, everything we knew about rock was wrong. Denim was out, new wave was in, glam became metal, metal became Metallica and nobody wanted to listen to any boozy, longhaired, jeans-wearing, mascara-free old-timey rock’n’roll bullshit. Which was unfortunate, because AC/DC really didn’t know how to play anything else.
1983’s Flick Of The Switch was the first AC/DC album to really get pounced on by the critics. Rolling Stone succinctly summed up the general outcry: “With Flick Of The Switch, the Australian megabar-band AC/DC has now made the same album nine times, surely a record even in heavy-metal circles.”
Angus Young’s 1984 interview with Guitar World magazine was further proof that AC/DC didn’t get the memo about the 70s being over. “We wanted this one as raw as possible,” he said. “We didn’t want echoes and reverb going everywhere and noise eliminators and noise extractors.”
In other words, back to basics. You know, like in 1976.
Still, even if nobody particularly liked the last record, business was still brisk. They released the ’74 Jailbreak EP, a collection of mouldy-oldies from their Aussie-only days, and it was gobbled up by the diehards. In August ’84 they headlined the massive Monsters Of Rock festival at Donington, becoming the first band to headline twice. They may have been on the wane creatively – the now long-gone Guns For Hire was the only song from Flick Of The Switch that would survive their set-list by 1985 – but their wallets didn’t notice.
After relentlessly touring the US and Europe in 1984, AC/DC capped off the year with a headline appearance at the Rock In Rio festival in January ’85. Underwhelming album or not, the band were still huge, and getting bigger every day. But a sinister wind was blowing their way, one that found them embroiled in a troubling controversy over a six-year-old song hidden away on the B-side of Highway To Hell.
Richard Ramirez was a brutal serial killer who ran amok in LA and San Francisco in the early 80s, eventually murdering 13 people before he was chased down, captured and beaten by an angry mob in August 1985. Once he’d been caught, the public finally saw exactly who this ‘Night Stalker’ was: a deranged 25-year-old cat burglar with a penchant for satanism and – distressingly – a love of hard rock and heavy metal, particularly AC/DC, and especially that grisly old deep cut Night Prowler.
Naturally, the band rallied to the defence of their bluesy old chestnut, explaining to the press that the song, like all their songs, was about dirty, sticky, rowdy, climb-out-the-window-to-avoid-your-mum-and-dad sex. And it probably was. Still, it really does stink of some sort of malevolence, and lines like ‘You don’t feel the steel until it’s hanging out your back’ didn’t help their cause.
Suddenly, AC/DC were the definitive soundtrack to murder and mayhem, and they found themselves faced with nearly as many middle-aged anti-rock picketers at US shows as greasy-haired teenage punters. And this was still a month away from the PMRC’s disastrous ‘porn rock’ hearings, which would demonise our beloved, beleaguered Aussie hellraisers further.
The PMRC (Parents Musical Resource Center) was a committee formed by the high-profile wives of several US lawmakers with the expressed goal of increasing parental control over what their offspring were listening to. They vowed to expose the disgusting, sex, drugs and Satan-crazed filth that 80s kids were digging.
Prior to the hearings, they released their still stunning ‘Filthy Fifteen’ memo, a list of the worst offenders they’d come across – a wide-ranging array of songs that spanned the radio spectrum, from pop crooners like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna to black metal crazoids Venom.
Smack in the middle, sandwiched between Twisted Sister’s We’re Not Gonna Take it (which made the list for its ‘violent’ lyrics) and Mötley Crüe’s Bastard (ditto) was AC/DC’s Let Me Put My Love Into You, a bluesy grinder from Back In Black. It made the list for its graphic sexual lyrics. Apparently, goofy, ham-fisted metaphors like ‘Let me cut your cake with my knife’ were just too hot to handle in 1985.
Some of rock’s more vocal proponents stood up for AC/DC and other bands on the list. Dee Snider, Frank Zappa and even John Denver all appeared at the September hearings, defending the God-given right of every American to enjoy WASP’s Animal (Fuck Like A Beast) in the comfort of their own home. AC/DC did not make it to that weird party. They were busy whipping up another batch of porn-rockers for their Fly On The Wall album.
It probably wouldn’t have helped anyway. The die was cast, and every AC/DC album in the racks – as well as just about any other record with even a twinge of sex, drugs, violence, the occult, or any other classic rock’n’roll pastime – was slapped with a ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker. Welcome to the 80s, boys.
Amid this storm of hysteria, AC/DC released their tenth album, Fly On The Wall. Like Flick Of The Switch, it was self-produced. Also like Flick, it was instantly forgettable. It still sold a million copies but barely scraped the Top 50 in the US, and did a fraction of the business of megasellers like Back In Black.
The singles (the unfortunately titled Sink The Pink and Shake Your Foundations) went nowhere, at least until they were revamped for Who Made Who, the soundtrack album to Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, and AC/DC found themselves to be thoroughly out of step with all the LA glam-slammers like Mötley Crüe, Guns N’Roses and Ratt, who were currently ruling the rock’n’roll roost.
As 1985 limped to a close, AC/DC were in a truly unenviable position – hated and feared by religious fanatics and nervous parents, dismissed as old and tired by their kids. For most bands, this would be the end of the road. Luckily, AC/DC are not most bands.
