(Credits: Far Out / Joan Sorolla)
Thu 8 January 2026 17:00, UK
While Angus Young is often praised as being one of the greatest guitarists of all time, he frequently credited his brother with doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
AC/DC are sometimes criticised for having a sound which is relatively simple; however, this has always been a pretty unfair assessment of the hard rockers. Sure, their riffs aren’t the most complex, but that doesn’t lessen them as pieces of music. If anything, the fact that the band manage to make songs that are uniquely identifiable without an overly complicated approach to the riffs and chords that they use is deeply impressive.
While Angus is celebrated as being the band’s lead guitarist, who people love watching because of his chaotic playing style and his face-melting solos, he attests that his brother wrote the bulk of the band’s riffs. Malcolm Young is celebrated by many as being one of the best rhythm guitarists of all time, and it’s his ability to continue churning out such memorable songs that permits him said title.
“Some of the guitar pieces and the way he did them,” said Angus, praising his brother’s six-string ingenuity. “That’s what I used to say, ‘I don’t know how you conjure them up. I really don’t.’”
At the heart of everything that AC/DC do, regardless of whether we’re talking about the fretwork of Angus or Malcolm Young, is the blues. The blues was always a genre that didn’t use too many chords, and instead created intrinsic pockets of music that bands could find a groove in. AC/DC are a harder rock version of that; there might be more distortion and a pinch of chaotic good in the mix, but at its heart, it remains the blues.
Both Young brothers became obsessed with this style of music from childhood, not only because of the way it sounded, but because of the elements of myth that surrounded such a sound. Growing up in Australia, there was hardly a huge blues music scene, and so the legends that they used to listen to took on another role.
They weren’t just musicians, they were untouchable in every sense of the word. When you think of music in that sense, it’s hardly a surprise that Angus Young couldn’t get his words out when he met one of those blues heroes.
“I got a chance to sit and say hello to Buddy Guy once in LA. I was dumb. I couldn’t open my mouth,” said Angus. “Because we grew up in Australia, to find information about a lot of blues guys, I used to go to the library and find the jazz magazines. They didn’t even sell them at the time in newsagents and stuff. So I’d go into the library and read all about where these people were playing, like Muddy Waters and Elmore James.”
The lead guitarist concluded, “To me, meeting Buddy Guy was like meeting a piece of history. That’s why I was just standing there quiet. I thought, ‘I don’t want to upset any ear space whatsoever.’”
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