At Murrayfield Stadium on their only UK stop this year, the band proved the power of sticking to your guns
It’s August at Murrayfield and, after a long time away, a famous – and famously combustible – group, founded by two brothers, takes to the field in the home of Scottish rugby. Their Celtic connection is strong, and so is their connection with their devoted following – a dedicated, raucous, thirsty fanbase who have voted with their feet to pack out the stadium and the queues for the bars.
But there the similarities between AC/DC and Oasis, who also played three nights at Murrayfield earlier this month, only begin. Both bands are masters of their singular craft: unchanging, crowd-pleasing, stoutly unflashy, loudly singalong. AC/DC started their 21-song, 140-minute set with “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)”, a barroom boogie that sounds as powerful and charged as it did when it was released on 1979’s Highway to Hell.
Ditto second song “Back in Black”, a stripling from the following year’s album of the same name, the record that was the debut of new singer Brian Johnson. Hastily drafted in to replace Bon Scott, who died in 1980, the Geordie is still going strong at 77 – hearing loss notwithstanding – and still wearing a flat cap.
This is stadium-crushing rock ’n’ roll that is, in all the best ways, meat and potatoes: comforting and reassuring, familiar and filling, no dancers or choreo required. Although guitarist Angus Young, the expat Scotsman who formed AC/DC in Sydney in 1973 with late brother Malcolm, still does a mean duck-walk at the age of 70. While dressed, obviously, as a schoolboy.
Oasis Live ’25 is the powerful, clocks-stopping sound of a band-of-brothers mythos preserved in cigarettes and alcohol since 1997. In much the same way, AC/DC’s Power Up Tour (styled “PWR/UP” on the t-shirts selling like hot flushes on the merch stalls), wending its way round the world since last May, is a remarkable demonstration of the merits of sticking to your guns for half a century. Last night their mostly middle-aged stans didn’t just flash traditional, appreciative hard-rock devil signs with their fingers. They flashed little devil horns on their heads, giving Murrayfield a stadium-wide infernal twinkle that would give happy-clappy Chris Martin cold sweats.
This show is the only UK stop this year, so there was a crackle in the air as electric as the blue hue of Young’s schoolboy uniform. “Hells Bells”, complete with AC/DC’s own version of Big Ben descending from the stage rafters, was pub-rock at its most chunky and doomy. “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be” was lean and taut. “Highway to Hell” – detecting a theme here? – provoked a sea of raised fists and lit-up phones.
Even for County Durham-born Johnson, Edinburgh is a sort of homecoming, the final northern hemisphere gig before a valedictory run of shows Down Under. But the only concession to that special relationship was a brief, squealing, heavy metal take on of “The Bonnie Banks O’ Loch Lomond”, and the frontman joshingly introducing “TNT” as “an old Robbie Burns song”.
But, again, like the brothers Gallagher, there was little in the way of onstage banter. Instead, lightning-fingered Angus let his guitar do the talking. Although by the time his soloing on “Let There Be Rock” had pushed the main set closing number past the 15-minute mark, you wished the PWR/UP tour would HRRY/UP.
But then for their final song AC/DC wheeled out the literal big guns: six cannons provide a percussive backdrop to “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)”. Here, once again this summer, a British stadium rocked deliriously to one of our greatest and most reliable global exports.
