This week, AC/DC announced the North American leg of their Power Up tour. And when they hit those stadiums in 2025, it will be 45 years since Brian Johnson became the band’s singer, replacing the late, great Bon Scott.
It was in March 1980 that Brian was invited to audition for AC/DC. But as he revealed in an interview with Classic Rock, he was so broke at that time that he didn’t have the money to travel from his home in Newcastle to the audition in London - and he might not have made it unless another job in London fell into his lap.
Before he got the call from AC/DC’s management, Brian had felt that his days as a rock’n’roll star had long-since passed.
In the early ’70s, as the singer with glam-rock band Geordie, he was Newcastle’s answer to Slade’s Noddy Holder, a working-class hero with a voice like the foghorn on the Tyne ferry.
Geordie scored a Top 10 UK hit in 1973 with the foot-stomping anthem All Because Of You. But unlike Slade, they were never really cut out for the big league. When the band split up in the mi-’70s, Brian was desperate.
“I was completely broke,” he said. “I had nothing. And I had two kids and a mortgage to pay. I was driving a VW Beetle that was 14 years old. I was f**kin’ skint.”
Eventually he scraped together just enough cash to start up his own business, fixing windshields and fitting vinyl roofs on sports cars. He also made a little money on the side with a new version of the old band, christened Geordie II. Only this time there were no delusions of grandeur. “It was a cracking little band,” he said, “but we were never gonna make it as a recording act.”
Then came the phone call that would change everything.
A woman with a German accent told Brian that a band was auditioning for a new singer, that he had been recommended, and that auditions were being held in London.
Brian asked for the name of the band. He wasn’t going to travel all the way to London without knowing who he was auditioning for.
When she said she wasn’t permitted to tell him, he suggested she gave him the initials of the band’s name. There was a pause.
“Okay… it’s A, C and D, C.”
Even so, Brian remained hesitant. “I’d been bitten once by the music industry, and I didn’t want it to happen again,” he said.
“I wasn’t gonna do it, but a friend of mine, Andre, phoned me and said: ‘Brian, I have an advert I think would suit you fine. It’s £350.’ That was a big lump of money. It was a proper job, for Hoover. And I thought, hang on, I could probably go down and do the AC/DC thing on the same day.
“I just thought, I hope I get this ad thing. Because Andre did tell me: ‘There’s this big, black soul woman, it’s going to be you or her that gets it.’ I went: ‘Oh Christ!’”
The day Brian travelled to London, the omens were not good. Fearing that his clapped-out Beetle wouldn’t make the trip, he borrowed a friend’s car, a Toyota Crown. Just a few miles outside Newcastle he got a puncture. “I just went: ‘Oh, f**k!’ But the strength you had then…”
He worked like a maniac to fix the flat tyre, then floored the Toyota down the M1, arriving just in time to meet Andre at the studio in North London. Brian sang the jingle – ‘The new high-powered mover from Hoover, it’s a little groover!’ – and the £350 was in the bag.
But when he got back in the car and headed across London for his appointment with AC/DC at Vanilla Studios in Pimlico, his confidence evaporated.
“I was sitting in this little café just across from the studios and, God, it was miserable. I wanted to go home. I was too nervous to go over there. I just thought I hadn’t got a chance of getting the gig, because they don’t know me, really.
“I remember getting this pie and a cup of tea, and I couldn’t eat the pie cos the f**kin’ crust was too hard! And I just went: ‘Oh, bollocks, better make a move.’ I got up and walked across the street. And that was it. That was me changed after that…
Once he was inside the studio, the band asked Brian what song he’d like to sing first. Brian suggested Nutbush City Limits, the early-70s rock/soul classic by Ike And Tina Turner.
“It was brilliant!” he said. “After we did it I was smiling, and they said: ‘That was a breath of fresh air, mate!’ Everybody that had come in before me had gone: ‘Smoke On The Water?’ And the boys were like: ‘No, not again!’”
Then came the real test, the clincher. They tried the AC/DC Whole Lotta Rosie. “I got tingles singing Rosie,” Brian said. “I had a lucky day, you know?”
Brian returned to Newcastle none the wiser. Even when he was summoned back to London for a second time he was still uncertain.
“They asked me down again and I said: ‘Guys, I cannae be doing this. I got a shop full of cars up here.’ And I did! But I went down in the end.”
The second audition passed smoothly, but again the band remained tight-lipped. “I stayed at a hotel overnight with Keith Evans, one of their roadies,” Brian recalled. “Keith was going: ‘I think you’ve got it, mate.’ I said: ‘Nah, I think they’re just making their mind up.’”
It was a few days later that Brian received a call from AC/DC’s rhythm guitarist Malcolm Young.
“I’ll never forget it,” Brian said. “It was my father’s birthday and I’d been playing pool at The Crown pub. I went back home, the phone rang and it was Mal. He said: ‘We got an album to do, we gotta leave in a couple of weeks, so… if you’re set for it…’
“I said: ‘Are you telling me I’ve got the job?’ And he went, ‘Oh yeah.’ I said: ‘I tell you what, mate, I’m gonna put the phone down. Could you ring again in 10 minutes just so I’m sure that it’s not somebody takin’ the piss?’ And he went: ‘Yeah, sure.’
“And he phoned back, on the dot, and says: ‘So, are you comin’?’ He still wouldn’t say it! Mal’s not like that. ‘Well, are you comin’ or what?’ And I’m like: ‘Shit, yeah!’ I put the phone down – I didn’t want him to hear this – and I went: ‘Whoah! F**k!’
“I’d bought me pop a bottle of whisky for his birthday present and I just opened it up and took a big swig of it!”
The album they went on to make was, of course, Back In Black. It became the biggest selling rock album of all time, and happily for Brian Johnson, he never had to sing another jingle again.
