Great Southern Steve

well if you're looking for trouble...

Like all good Aussie boys, I love me some Bon and Co. especially when I’ve had a few, but when I think about it, there are some paradoxes in my attitude to AC/DC, viz:

• Even though I think all their songs sound the same, I love some to death, while others bore me (to death), and I find the “good track to filler” ratio pretty intolerable on the majority of their records. So, something stands out about some songs but I don’t know what it is.
• I don’t normally think of them as a singles band, yet my “best of” track list has lots of singles.
• I think I can only stand them in “small doses”, but I will happily listen to selected songs (“Live Wire” and a few others) about ten times in a row, getting increasingly louder each time.
• I think of them as a mood band, yet some of their songs just get me no matter what mood I’m in. In fact, they put me in the mood to listen to them more.

I’ll probably never figure them out. But anyway, here’s my Bon Scott era, reduced to the 12-song “best of” LP – incidentally, something the band themselves haven’t ever really released.

1. Jailbreak
2. Long Way to the Top
3. Rock and Roll Singer
4. Live Wire
5. TNT
6. High Voltage
7. Dirty Deeds
8. Let There Be Rock
9. Riff Raff
10. Whole Lotta Rosie
11. Kicked in the Teeth
12. Highway to Hell

I’ve included ‘Live Wire’ as an mp3, just so that in case you are a novice AC/DC listener, you can hear what plain rock music should sound like. I I fucking love the intro to this song. It’s just such an obvious piece of rock, someone just had to do it, and AC/DC decided that someone was them, and did a great job of it, too; it’s simple, solid, stirring, ballsy, and really well recorded.

Enjoy,

Steve.

I'm the man to see...