Angus Young Quotes

I remember one of the first gigs I played with that amp was at a local church. They wanted someone to fill in with the guitar and my friend say, ‘Ah, he can play.’ And so I dragged the amplifier down and started playing and everybody started yelling ‘turn it down!’

The misunderstanding out there is that we are a ‘hard rock‘ band or a ‘heavy metal‘ band. We’ve only ever been a rock n’ roll band.

If I heard a noise at night, I’d think there was a burglar sneaking around; the first thing I’d do was check on my guitar.

That’s usually what happens with AC/DC: you make an album, and then you’re on the road flat out. And the only time you ever get near a studio is generally after you’ve done a year of touring.

I can’t deny that Eric Clapton‘s and Eddie Van Halen‘s lead stuff has influenced a stack of people, but for me, it’s the rhythm thing that’s way more impressive and important to a band.

Blues is a big part of rock and roll. The best rock and roll got its birth in the blues. You hear it in Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

We’ve been in front of really big audiences, and people have said there’s a couple of hundred thousand people out there, but I’ve never really noticed.

In the real world, people just get on with their lives. And that’s where AC/DC come in.

The school suit allows me to be an extrovert. Basically, I’m the opposite of what I am on stage.

I used to run home from school, pick up my guitar, and lock myself in my room and play.

For me, New York has always been a city of unpredictability. You can never guess what’s going to happen next.

Nothing happened overnight. Every country we went into, we started at the bottom. We knew that because the music we were playing and the attitude we had, we knew we’d be at the bottom and have to work our way up.

When I’m on stage the savage in me is released. It’s like going back to being a cave man. It takes me six hours to come down after a show.

Most people can do what I do – they can do guitar solos – but they can’t do a good, hard rhythm guitar and be dedicated to it.

Nothing happened overnight. Every country we went into, we started at the bottom. We knew that because the music we were playing and the attitude we had, we knew we’d be at the bottom and have to work our way up.

I saw Deep Purple live once and I paid money for it and I thought, ‘Geez, this is ridiculous.’ You just see through all that sort of stuff. I never liked those Deep Purples or those sort of things. I always hated it. I always thought it was a poor man‘s Led Zeppelin.

We always try to get new songs. That’s what AC/DC has always been about. You can listen to what we do, and you can go, ‘Well, it’s AC/DC, but it’s a new song.’ So that’s what we’ve always tried to achieve. So we’ve always got that style.

I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.

When you sign on and say, ‘I’m gonna do this and that,’ it’s always good to say at the end of it, ‘I’ve done all I said I would do.’

I plug into a lot of old rock & roll. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis – I love all that stuff.

I honestly believe that you have to be able to play the guitar hard if you want to be able to get the whole spectrum of tones out of it. Since I normally play so hard, when I start picking a bit softer my tone changes completely, and that’s really useful sometimes for creating a more laid-back feel.

I remember one of the first gigs I played with that amp was at a local church. They wanted someone to fill in with the guitar and my friend say, ‘Ah, he can play.’ And so I dragged the amplifier down and started playing and everybody started yelling ‘turn it down!’

The biggest tragedy we had early on was when Bon Scott died.

When we grew up, Australia was the land of opportunity; it really was.

I’ve always been someone who thought it didn’t matter where you were playing. I always shot for the best you could get. It never bothered me if it was small or it was big.

When we grew up, Australia was the land of opportunity; it really was.

The guitar can go at a scream. It can yell at you.

Go back to the very beginning, when we first started playing in local pubs. We used to play Chuck Berry covers. Every now and then, we’d slip in one of our own songs, and we found that we were getting away with it – nobody seemed to know these were original tracks.

I think we’re just one of those bands that we know what we do best.

You’ve got to love what you do. You’ve got to like doing it, because it is a lot of your life.

We played by feel. We felt as though you could put us on any stage, and we would find a way to win that crowd over. We had that attitude: We can’t fail. You might not like it right now, but you will.

There are all sorts of cute puppy dogs, but it doesn’t stop people from going out and buying Dobermans.

The places we’d play were full of bikers, brawlers, and drinkers coming off a day of work looking for a good time, and all these guys would be looking at me like Hannibal Lecter looking at his next victim.

A lot of people say, ‘AC/DC – that’s the band with the little guy who runs around in school shorts!’

Hearing a lot of early rock n’ roll records from a very young age was a huge influence.

The media, being what it is, is always looking for the next new thing. There are still bands out there playing, no matter what the new thing is. The Stones go out there, and people go see them without records or even airplay.

With AC/DC, we’ve always started with rock, and we’ve just kept it going. The critic‘s view is always, ‘They just made an album and it’s the same as the last one.’ I’ll have fifteen of them, anytime.

My part in AC/DC is just adding the color on top.

I never bothered with cars. I was probably one of the few kids in school who didn’t run around with hot-rod magazines. As I would be at home fiddling with my guitar, they would be fiddling with a car engine.

Actually, because I’m so small, when I strike an open A chord I get physically thrown to the left, and when I play an open G chord I go right. That’s how hard I play, and that’s how a lot of my stage act has come about. I just go where the guitar takes me.

Every guitarist I would cross paths with would tell me that I should have a flashy guitar, whatever the latest fashion model was, and I used to say, ‘Why? Mine works, doesn’t it? It’s a piece of wood and six strings, and it works.’

To me, meeting Buddy Guy was like meeting a piece of history.

My ambition was just to be able to play guitar.

My part in AC/DC is just adding the color on top.