The Moment Angus Young Always Tries to Revisit Onstage
Angus Young said his stage performances with AC/DC were designed to recapture a defining moment in his life. The guitarist added that he always aimed his delivery toward the youngest members of the audience, in the hope that the excitement and energy he was sharing would be passed to a new generation.
"A lot of it all goes back to … when I was an early teenager, 13 or 14,” Young told Tiny TV in a new interview. “What I liked music-wise, I had to wait up [for] all night. I would be there all night, and then at about two o’clock in the morning, there was a man on the radio, and he would play rock music. … He was an American man. And I had a little radio, and I would sit there in my bed and wake up just for this guy.”
He recalled hearing Cream and, later, Led Zeppelin – but cited listening to Jimi Hendrix as a key moment. “When I heard ‘Purple Haze,’ boy, that was it. I was so excited. … I thought, ‘How am I gonna find out about Jimi Hendrix?’ I was out walking anywhere. I went up to a magazine store, and I’m trying to look if they’ve got a magazine from England, ’cause I knew he was in London. And I found a little picture of this guy with a guitar, and I was going, ‘Wow! I wanna look that cool!’”
You can watch the interview below.
Young added that his stage show was his attempt to encapsulate those same emotions.
“I’m just trying to give you the excitement of that time,” he said. “I refer to that my whole life – I still think that. … [When] I get on a stage and I play, I’m playing to the new kid who’s 13, 14, who’s never seen me before. I go, ‘Okay, a lot of these older ones out there, they’ve seen me before. They know what [I’m] about. But that new kid, he’s not seen me before.’ And I’m going, ‘I’m gonna impress him. I’m gonna play for him,’ and it pumps you up. That’s all I need to do. I see some younger faces and I go, ‘Here I come!’”