4.52am Issue: 042 13th July 2017 - The Best Ex Edition

TAPED: AC/DC
If You Want Blood…..
As a ten-year-old schoolboy, AC-DC’s
‘Highway To Hell’ was an album that
introduced me to a different kind of music
than the kind my mom and dad listened
to, but it was when I started to work my
way backwards and listened to the band’s
first ever live album, ‘If You Want Blood
You’ve Got It’ that I realised that I
wanted to be a guitar-toting rock god and
that nothing else would ever be the same
again.
Of course it never quite worked out like
that (despite my buying a cherry coloured
Epiphone SG from my mom’s catalogue
and being gutted that next to my six-foot
frame, it was so small – I wanted one of
the big ones that Angus played!) but if
the career path suffered, my love for
what is still one of the finest live rock
albums ever has never dimmed.
Recorded in Glasgow as a kind of
homecoming for the Young brothers, ‘If
You Want Blood’ was anything but the
bloated live album people were used
to, instead taking a mere ten tracks
from the previous albums and if not
turning in a Greatest Hits set, showing
the world what they had been missing.
I never got to see that tour, or indeed
ever saw Bon Scott live, but I doubt his
voice was ever better than at that point
and on the live album songs that were
great (I would find out later) on
‘Powerage’, and ‘T.N.T’, never mind the
genius that is ‘Let There Be Rock’, took
on a life of their own on this album.
Of course Scott died not long
afterwards and whilst the band has
gone on to bigger things, the ten-yearold
me can still argue for years that
they were never better.
Let there be rock, indeed.