Angus Young Explains Why Highway To Hell Is So Awesome

Angus Young, co-founder, lead guitarist and the only remaining original member of the legendary band AC/DC, talked about their iconic album Highway to Hell.

In a recent appearance on the YouTube channel Anders Bøtters Tiny TV, Young was taken on a trip down memory lane by the host who recalled a moment in the ’80s when he found the vinyl of AC/DC’s classic Highway To Hell, which his uncle described to him as “The most dangerous album in the world!.” The remark made the guitarist laugh.

The host then said that he just listened to it before the interview and noted that it “still sounds like a fresh rock and roll album.” Then he asked Young what the band did to make the record still so good after all these years, to which the rocker responded:

“We’ve been in actually Miami in a rehearsal room and I think probably this may sound strange, but we went on like a Friday and we had been there like a couple of weeks but like one weekend, we actually… We had not really done weekends. We kind of worked for the week and said ‘Okay, we can take Saturday and Sunday off’ but this time we actually said ‘We’ll go in on the weekend’ and we went in on Friday and came out Monday and we had all the songs ready to go.

“I think we have two other ideas that we had before that, that we had worked on… It really was only one or two tracks, one was ‘Highway to Hell.’ We had that one together early and the other one was ‘Girls Got Rhythm.’ Those two tracks, we had in the first couple of weeks.”

Young then noted that they were working with another guy at that time but realized that they weren’t “functioning with him,” so they decided to “go in on the weekend and work on our own and put it together. And then we were lucky.”

The album proves that artists don’t need a lot of time to make a great album as Highway to Hell proves itself to be timeless. The host then asked Young if it was typical in their process to create an album within just a week or over a weekend, to which the guitarist said:

“Well, it’s probably because, you know, at that time, you know, we were really, you know, we were a band, you know, we went from one thing to the next so quick! You would… You were touring and the next thing you know, you were going ‘Okay, we got to do an album. We’ve got XX amount of time.’ And so a lot of things moved so fast.

“And that was it with Highway to Hell, because immediately after that weekend, you know, my brother Malcolm talked to Mutt Lange, the producer. And you know, he said, well, give me get me a cassette of what you got together, you know, he got that going quick, within a couple of days, and then he said ‘Right! Wake up in London!’ So we then had to, you know, pack our bags and get on a plane and get to London and England.”

And that’s where the iconic album was born. Watch the full interview in the video below.