Emotion? What emotion? “It’s wonderful to see ya all again, ” mutters AC/DC singer Brian Johnson cheerfully at the end of tonight’s opening song If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It) like he’s walked into an afternoon session at his local boozer rather than kicking off his band’s first tour in eight years. “Enjoy yourselves, OK?”
This famously hard-shelled band don’t do sentimentality, but the 70,000 people gathered under the closed roof of the vast Veltins-Arena, just outside of the German city of Gelsenkirchen, are definitely feeling it. All but the most blindly optimistic AC/DC fan doubted this night would ever come. The band that wound up the Rock Or Bust tour in 2016 were three key men down: singer Brian Johnson, retired injured halfway through and replaced by stand-in Axl Rose; drummer Phil Rudd, in legal hot water after some ill-advised drug possession/death threats shenanigans; and, most poignantly, guitarist and AC/DC’s steely heart Malcolm Young, at home battling the dementia that would eventually claim his life (bassist Cliff Williams also announced his retirement after the tour was over). Sure, there was last year’s comeback at the Power Trip festival, but who knew where there that was going to lead.
