“There was some madman running around inside the hall with a meat cleaver, chopping into people!”: How Angus Young remembered AC/DC’s scariest gig

In every show that AC/DC have played in their 50-year career, lead guitarist Angus Young has never stopped moving once he’s out on stage - and no wonder. It’s a survival trick he learned in the mid-’70s when the band were cutting their teeth in Australian pubs.

The first time Angus wore his old schoolboy uniform for an AC/DC show was in April 1974 during an open-air concert in Sydney’s Victoria Park.

As he recalled: “The first time I wore the uniform was the most frightened I’ve ever been on stage. But I had no time to think, thank God. I just went straight out there.”

In that moment he had some assistance from his brother Malcolm, the band’s rhythm guitarist. “Suddenly I just felt a boot and I was on,” Angus said. “And there’s this deathly silence. All you can do is play – and pray! You put your head down and hope a bottle doesn’t come your way. That became part of my stage act. I learnt to duck and keep moving.”

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But after that baptism of fire, there was much worse to come when AC/DC toured around Australia in pubs and clubs - spit-and-sawdust joints where the booze flowed and violence inevitably followed.

“Some of the places we played were worse than toilets,” Angus said.

“When I was at school and there was a dance with a band, it was always a band like Van Halen, an American high school band. You know, the guy with the long blond hair wiggling his hips.

“In the pubs we played in, in front of that hot, sweaty, beer-swilling crowd, you couldn’t even hope to do that.

“This was the kind of audience you couldn’t even tune your guitar to. If you bust a string, that was it. Sometimes you finished with just two strings, because there was no way they were going to put up with a couple of minutes of you fixing the guitar.”

And one show was particularly memorable, even if Angus couldn’t recall the name of the place where it happened.

“I remember one night I said to the rest of the band, ‘I’m not going out there.’ The police couldn’t get in the place. There was some madman running around inside the hall with a meat cleaver, chopping into people! And the front row was all bikers.

“I said, ‘They just want blood!’ You looked out and it was just like murderers’ row, and the look on their faces is like, ‘Send us the little guy in the shorts!’

“I had just one thing on my mind: I didn’t want to be a target for blokes throwing bottles. I thought, if I stand still I’m a target. So I never stopped moving. I reckoned if I stood still I’d be dead!”