With drummer Phil Rudd back and longtime AC/DC fan Rick Rubin on board as producer and promising to restore the classic sound of the band’s earliest recordings, things looks promising. It’s also the EP’s second most essential track: a statement of intent from a young band starting out, it’s the blues refracted through an Australian prism – fast, tough and retooled for the bar-rooms of Sydney. Baby, Please Don’t Go is a cover of the Big Joe Williams song made famous by Van Morrison’s Them and the original opener on High Voltage. You Ain’t Got A Hold On Me is a decent mid-paced rocker, Show Business is almost Status Quo-like in its simple boogie, while Soul Stipper is AC/DC at their funkiest, with a backing track that could have come straight out of a Blaxploitation movie.
The other tracks all originally appeared on the Australian release of debut album High Voltage. A great slice of blues storytelling, Bon has possibly never sounded more like his hero Alex Harvey than here, while Angus Young's SG-imitation of spotlights, sirens and rifle fire are a sweet touch. Originally the final track on the Australian release of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and a single in 1976, Jailbreak had been excised from the international version of that album, meaning that, four years after Bon Scott's death, it was the first time many of us heard his gleeful tale of dirty deeds and desperate measures. It may have been a cynical move, but at least it brought the title track to international attention. It’s more of an EP than an album, but for the sake of completeness, it’s worth looking at this mini-album released in 1984 by a record company seeking to keep the AC/DC sweet stuff coming. You might feel a little slighted banging through go-nowhere boogie-dirges like Ruff Stuff, Go Zone or Nick of Time, however. Nobody ever bought Powerage and felt cheated. You earned it, and they took pride in a job well done. And that’s really the major difference between great AC/DC albums, and not-so great ones: the good ones are all killer, no filler, with every track a finely crafted morsel of hard-core rock’n’roll so tight and lethal it can’t be reasoned with, stacked two-sides high.īack in their salad days, AC/DC were working-class heroes who knew how much sweat went into every buck, and that’s why the early albums were so dense with good stuff. Apart from those two songs it’s largely a slog through fairly pedestrian deep cuts. Still, Blow Up Your Video is not a great AC/DC album.
The message was clear: trends come and go, but AC/DC were forever. The next single That’s The Way I Wanna Rock’n’Roll takes a hard left from the clanging, metal-dominated 80s and essentially imagines a hard-rock Elvis Presley. Heatseeker was the album’s runaway hit: a deceptively subtle ode to the band’s 50s-era Chuck Berry duck-walking roots that doesn't clobber you over the head like the majority of AC/DC mega-jams do, but rather hits a thrumming, low-key groove and sticks with it. Harry Vanda and George Young, the men who had orchestrated the AC/DC sound, were back on board to produce Blow Up Your Video, and the band were primed to claw their way back to the top of the hard rock heap.
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