AC/DC | Highway to Hell (1979)

I had an inkling of the Sisyphean nature of this project when embarking on it. Knowing my tendency to blog on a bit (elsewhere, I make a virtue of it), I thought the main challenge would be to keep these posts to a proportionate length.

I also reckoned without lacking the leisure time to put in the disc spins — the first quarter of 2024 proving so hectic that I completed only the first post in this series by the end of March.

And in that post I pointed out the glaring omission of AC/DC’s 1979 album from my record collection, making me wonder, ‘Why the hell haven’t I got Highway to Hell?’ And so I scored an early vinyl copy on eBay, upping the Sisyphean ante not two discs into this ever-spiralling venture.

Despite the fact that it’s only a recent acquisition on record, Highway to Hell is an album with which I’m very well acquainted — a familiarity dating more or less back to its release.

As a schoolboy, I found the lyrics of Touch Too Much, ‘She had the face of an angel smiling with sin / The body of Venus with arms’, incredibly witty — I still like the juxtaposition of sin on a celestial countenance and the comic qualifier appended to the comparison with the Venus de Milo. The underlying music also shows a restraint that belies the song’s title — a relatively low-key riff that complements Bon Scott’s saucy vocals in the verses and builds to a crescendo in more familiar AC/DC style at the chorus.

The gritty riff of the fist-pumping eponymous album opener is another highlight as is that of the boogie-woogie belter Beating Around the Bush.

Side two has If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It) as a standout, and AC/DC again echo The Stones’ Let It Bleed LP from a decade earlier in Night Prowler, which centres lyrically, like the Stones’ Midnight Rambler, on a nocturnal killer.

Scott signs off the album with Robin Williams’ extraterrestrial catchphrases from the TV comedy Mork and Mindy — ‘Shazbat. Na-nu na-nu.’ — his final vocal contribution to the band’s recording career.