A band forever Young

Brothers Angus and Malcolm Young. Photo / Supplied

There are few bands in the history of rock and roll that knew who they were and sounded how they sounded, literally, from their very first record. The Beatles' early recordings are incredible, but their youthful energy on Please Please Me is a far cry from Revolver or Let It Be. The Rolling Stones' earliest albums are stylish, well-executed 60s white-boy blues, but they're miles from the rich, dynamic, expansive playing of Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers.

The same goes for Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Kinks and just about every other pillar of classic rock and roll. AC/DC is the rare exception. Despite the youth of Angus and Malcolm Young and despite the band's roster changes, AC/DC's first record is an exact blue-print of their sound as it remains to this day.

The pair knew what they wanted to be and knew how they wanted to do it from the very beginning. It didn't matter to them that the music they wanted to do in 1973 was hardly the sound of the day.

1973 - that was the year of the release of Pink Floyd's prog-rock masterpiece Dark Side of the Moon, David Bowie's Alladin Sane, the Rolling Stones' Goat's Head Soup, Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy, Wings' Band on the Run, Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and the Who's Quadrophenia.

Aside from the Stooges' Raw Power, there wasn't a heaping helping of straight-ahead, overamplified rock and roll being released by any major acts who mattered worldwide.

AC/DC were as wonderfully alien to the sound of the day as they were a completely formed entity when they arrived.

Their first four albums aren't shaky or uneven; they're not the sound of musicians finding their way. They are complete, undeniable statements; they are the realisation of a musical language and a rock-n-roll vision that burst full-blown from the Young brothers, seemingly since the moment they first picked up guitars.

The pair may not even have been aware of it; in fact their attitude about their music has always been "It's just what we do"; but to know what to do without a period of experimentation is extraordinary.

It took the band, as it would any band, a few albums to reach their creative peak, but by 1979, they were into recording their seminal albums - Highway to Hell, Back in Black and For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) - all of which are distinguuised more by Robert "Mutt" Lange's immaculate production than by any musical departure from their earliest recordings.

Lange's studio direction highlighted the band's strengths as they'd never been captured before, and by the time they hit that stride their playing and songwriting had been polished by years of touring experience, so musically, nothing was all that different from the songs on High Voltage or Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

That's not to say that AC/DC never got better. The point is that they were always that good.From the book Why AC/DC Matters. 2009 by Anthony Bozza. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.