I’m fairly sure that if you hear an AC/DC song on the radio, there’s about a 60% chance it’ll be Highway to Hell (the rest split between Back In Black, Whole Lotta Rosie, and Shook Me All Night Long). And this style of hard rock is the kind where when you listen to it, you feel like you ought to be doing something impressive involving a fast car and sunglasses. The reality is that you'd probably look like a sad spod (well I would), but never mind.
This is the kind of band that delivers what they do with solid ability, but it also feels like we’ve heard this kind of music from the likes of Kiss and Led Zeppelin a million times already. Singer Bon Scott (the lad from Kirriemuir) gives some good Plant-style screaming vocals, the rest of the band by and large perform some solid hard rock without doing anything flashy – Angus Young isn’t the kind of rock guitarist who seems to do a lot of widdly-diddly solos, at least not on this album.
There’s a vein of rather adolescent fantasies about women that runs through most of the songs, whether the predatory horniness of songs like Love Hungry Man or the delightfully slow and sinister Night Prowler, or the barely disguised innuendo of Beating Around The Bush (they may be Australian, but I don’t think they’re singing about the Outback).
At the same time, though, like Zappa, or Alice Cooper, I came away with the feeling that they’re not being entirely serious about it. Hard rock/heavy metal is a genre that works best when it walks the line between taking itself too seriously and playing it purely for laughs – it's a knowing wink at the audience that, yes, this is overblown but we’re all having fun. I suspect in part that Angus Young’s schoolboy stage persona is a nod to this – we’re really just giggling schoolboys, they’re saying, not threatening men.
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