At the height of AC/DC’s Australian success in the mid-70s, before they’d cracked it in Britain, let alone America, Bon Scott was already a star in his own mind. Sitting in some pub in Sydney, a large beer and a quadruple whisky on the table before him, that gap-toothed grin on his face and a friendly female companion by his side, he would be the life and soul of the party. As his great friend and former AC/DC tour manager Ian Jeffery recalls, it didn’t matter if he’d been in the place before. “Wherever Bon went,” says Jeffery, “by the end of the night he’d have made ten new best friends.”
But he might just as easily have made 10 new enemies. With his wild larrikin laugh, glint in his eye and piratical tattoos festooned along his taut muscly arms, Bon was fond of a ‘blue’ – Aussie-speak for a punch-up. But only if he’d failed to charm someone first, winning them over with a brilliant one-liner. When the rough-and-tough blokes that frequented the Sydney bars where Bon liked to go would try to get a rise out of him, ask if he was AC or DC, Bon would reply: “Neither. I’m the flash in the middle.”
