Credit: Dena Flows
Thu 14 May 2026 21:00, UK
The heart behind any great AC/DC song is the interplay between Malcolm and Angus Young.
Even though Angus was the star of the show half the time in the way that he strutted across the stage, Malcolm was the real mastermind behind a lot of the greatest riffs that they came up with, to the point where he couldn’t tell if he had greatness on his hands with ‘Back in Black’. But even if the solos were a damn fireworks show on every one of their albums, Angus knew that there was much more to a rock and roll song than waiting around for a decent lead break in the bridge.
Some of the greatest tunes that they ever listened to were some of the simplest as well, and while the game did change more than a few times when everyone heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time, Angus wasn’t about to change his style. The language was still all about the blues, and that was the kind of music that he knew like the back of his hand years before he even hit the stage for the first time.
Because if you think about it, the blues were the prototype for what rock and roll was supposed to become. The genre in itself is already a strange hodgepodge of everything from country to R&B to blues smashing against each other, but when you look at all of the guitar heroes that everyone thinks of, like Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, all of them had a starting point in the blues. All it took was someone like Chuck Berry to turn the whole thing into one of the greatest sounds on planet Earth.
Berry never claimed to be an innovator when he started out, but looking at the way that he played the blues, he was single-handedly building rock and roll from the ground up every single time he played. ‘Johnny B Goode’ will forever be the first thing that any kid wants to learn when they see Back to the Future for the first time, and even though Berry’s songs tend to sound fairly similar after a while, the fact that he wrote a guitar lick that perfect meant that he didn’t need to write anything else for the rest of his days.
And as far as Angus was concerned, you could keep your other guitar heroes if he could keep learning from Berry, saying, “Chuck Berry was never a caring person. He didn’t care whether he was playing his tune, out of tune or someone else’s tune. Whenever he plays guitar, he has a big grin from ear to ear. Everyone always used to rave about Clapton when I was growing up, saying he was a guitar genius and stuff like that. Well even on a bad night Chuck Berry is a lot better than Clapton will ever be.”
That sounds like an outright attack, but Angus was only callingit like he saw it. He believed that Berry was all that you needed to build a great song around, and even if there were more than a few songs where he took some cues from ‘Slowhand’, there was a lot more to explore in AC/DC’s catalogue if he followed along with what Berry was doing. And that all comes from double stops.
Further reading: From The Vault
Even though double stops are nothing new in rock and roll now, the fact that Berry made it a part of his sound is one of the reasons why Angus works so well in his band. It’s hard for any guitarist to stand out compared to the rest of the band, but long before the days of distortion pedals, Berry was using double stops so he could be heard over his bandmates, which worked wonders when Angus started doing the same thing during his solos for tunes like ‘Highway to Hell’.
Clapton might be more accessible for kids who grew up on the bluesy rock and rollers, but Angus understood that what Berry did mattered a lot more for him in the long run. The other guitar heroes were people who made their living out of showing off, but Berry wanted to make the kind of music that people could still dance to.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 