POWER PLAY

Regardless of what fate throws at ’em, you just can’t keep a great band down. In this worldwide exclusive interview, intrepid AC/DC icon Angus Young discusses life after Malcolm and the band’s positively charged new album, POWER UP

- RICHARD BIENSTOCK

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Us, ANGUS YOUNG has been spending a lot of time at home lately. “It’s a bit different,” the 65-year-old AC/DC guitarist admits about life in the time of quarantining and social distancing. Although in some ways, he adds, not so much. “I guess I’m used to being tucked away somewhere in a room and just putting together ideas and songs,” he says with a laugh.

As it turns out, Young has indeed spent a fair amount of time these last few years “tucked away somewhere in a room and putting together ideas and songs.” Which is how we’ve wound up, rather unexpectedly but certainly quite happily, with Power Up, AC/DC’s 16th (or, if we’re counting in Australian, 17th) full-length effort.

As for what makes it unexpected?

For starters, the band recorded it under a complete media blackout — traditional, social or otherwise. Aside from a few rumors — kicked off by surreptitious photos that surfaced in 2018 of various band members, coffee cups in hand, trolling alleyways around Vancouver’s Warehouse Studio, where they’ve recorded their last few efforts — things have been radio silent in the AC/ DC camp for several years.

More significantly, of course, there’s the fact that since the end of the Rock or Bust world tour there has been the looming question of just who, or even what, AC/DC is anymore.