AC/DC lead guitarist, and eternal schoolboy Angus Young, recently spoke with Paul Elliott of Total Guitar. During their chat, the Back In Black album took the spotlight. An excerpt has been transcribed as follows:

After the Highway To Hell tour, you, Malcolm (Young, rhythm guitarist) and Bon (Scott, vocalist) got together in London (England) to begin working on the album that would become Back In Black. How much of it was written with Bon?

Angus Young: "Bon wrote a little of the stuff, a week before he died. We started writing the music with Bon on drums. He was a drummer originally. He’d bang away while me and Malcolm worked out the riffs."

When Bon died in February 1980, after one too many drunken nights, had you feared that his life might end that way?

Angus Young: "As a person, Bon stared death in the face a lot. The way he said it was, ‘One day you gotta go. You gotta be a stiff.’"

Did you feel, as most AC/DC fans did, that Bon was irreplaceable?

Angus Young: "Well, when we auditioned singers, they'd say, 'How am I supposed to sing over all this volume?' We said, 'We don’t want you to sing - we want you to scream!’"

You certainly found the right man for the job in Brian Johnson.

Angus Young: "Yeah. I always said he sounds like somebody dropped a truck on his foot. And, like Bon, Brian had a good sense of humor."

On the simplest level, Back In Black was a great rock ’n’ roll record. But on a deeper level it was, as you described it, a memorial.

Angus Young: "The whole Back In Black album was our dedication to Bon. That’s why the album cover was pure black, and why the album starts with a bell ringing, something sombre and different to anything else we’d done."

To read the complete interview, visit this location.

Back In Black, the band’s seventh studio album, was their first to feature vocalist Brian Johnson, following the death of Bon Scott. The album, produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange, spawned the singles "You Shook Me All Night Long", "Hells Bells", "Back In Black", and "Rock And Roll Ain't Noise Pollution".