BLACK to the FUTURE

FOR ANGUS YOUNG, the pre-show ritual was the same as it had always been. In the dressing room backstage at the Palais des Expositions in the Belgian city of Namur, AC/DC’s lead guitarist changed out of his jeans and T-shirt and put on his schoolboy uniform, went for a pee and had one last cigarette to take the edge off his nerves. But this was no ordinary gig. On this evening, June 29, 1980, AC/DC were to perform in public for the first time with their new singer, Brian Johnson. In the last few minutes before going onstage, Angus glanced at Johnson and could see the tension in his frontman’s face. “He was sh*tting himself,” Angus recalled.

Johnson had big shoes to fill. The man he’d replaced, Bon Scott, had been a great rock and roll singer and charismatic frontman, a free-spirited hell-raiser whose easy charm earned him the epithet Bon the Likeable. Following his death in February that year, the band had pushed on with Johnson to make the album Back in Black. Reflecting on the album years later, Angus recalled, “When I first heard it in all its glory, I thought, F*ck, it’s magic!”

But on that warm summer evening in Namur, with the release of the album still a few weeks away, Johnson was a worried man as he waited for show time, wondering how AC/DC fans would react to him, especially when he was singing the old songs — singing Bon’s words. It was only when he got onstage and looked out into the audience that he realized how much those fans were rooting for him. There amid the throng, he saw a banner raised aloft, bearing a dual blessing: “R.I.P. Bon Scott. Good Luck Brian.” “That,” Johnson recalled, “just lifted me.”

There were moments during the show when all of that anxiety and adrenalin got the better of him. “It was a very traumatic night,” he admitted. “I was so nervous.” Halfway into the set, he had a brain freeze and sang the same lyrics to two songs. “I thought, Oh