Quotes from Angus Young

The biggest tragedy we had early on was when Bon Scott died.

With seven boys and one sister, there was always a lot of music in the house. A few of my brothers were playing instruments, so it was from hearing that, coupled with discovering early rock, which triggered me to pick up a guitar and try to pick out the notes.

I always liked the double cutaway. It looked like two horns. It's like a red devil. So I went to the guitar shop, saw an SG that was sitting there looking rather lonely, and said, 'Hey, that's for me.'

From the first album, we've had songs like 'The Jack' that are blues based. We also did it in 'Ride On,' where we went into the blues.

I remember one of the first gigs I played with that amp was at a local church. They wanted someone to fill in with the guitar and my friend say, 'Ah, he can play.' And so I dragged the amplifier down and started playing and everybody started yelling 'turn it down!'

Yes, we're still five little people with a noisy attitude.

Hearing a lot of early rock n' roll records from a very young age was a huge influence.

The playing is great. The traveling is tough. It's a hard thing.

I found that pedals were too much to fool around with. You'd be halfway through a solo, and the batteries would go dead and conk out. And if you tread on the lead going to the pedal, something would always go wrong. Or some crazy kid would pull the lead out just at the moment when you're about to do your big number on it.

We don't go around the world counting ticket and record sales, nor do we glue our ears to the radio to hear what's trendy at the moment - we're not that type of band.

In the studio, my brother and I have always used a lot of Marshall amps. We like to keep it pretty basic. We just use a couple of cabinets each - sometimes just one, if we think that's enough. We mainly go for 100-watt and 50-watt heads.

I think we're just one of those bands that we know what we do best.

I never bothered with cars. I was probably one of the few kids in school who didn't run around with hot-rod magazines. As I would be at home fiddling with my guitar, they would be fiddling with a car engine.

I tried a Les Paul when I was a lot younger. I tried the Les Paul, and because of the weight of the thing, it nearly dislocated my hip.

When we were younger and first starting out in Australia, we found that we sold more records by word of mouth because we were playing the bars, clubs, and small places and building a following. And as we got bigger, we still relied a lot on word of mouth.

Most people can do what I do - they can do guitar solos - but they can't do a good, hard rhythm guitar and be dedicated to it.

I don't regard myself as a soloist. It's a color; I put it in for excitement. It's not great loss if a solo has to go. We've made songs without solos.

We came out in the midst of the hippie hangover. All this mellow music.

I think the '60s was a great time for music, especially for rock and roll. It was the era of The Beatles, of The Stones, and then later on The Who and Zeppelin. But at one point in the '70s, it just kind of became... mellow.

I saw Deep Purple live once and I paid money for it and I thought, 'Geez, this is ridiculous.' You just see through all that sort of stuff. I never liked those Deep Purples or those sort of things. I always hated it. I always thought it was a poor man's Led Zeppelin.

I'm sick to death of people saying we've made 11 albums that sounds exactly the same, Infact, we've made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.

The misunderstanding out there is that we are a 'hard rock' band or a 'heavy metal' band. We've only ever been a rock n' roll band.

When I was young, and I would see bands playing, I would dig the rock & roll and get excited, but when they would start to take the pace down, my attention span would start going.

With guitar riffs, we always look for something that 's a little bit special. We've always found that it is harder to come up with something that's nice and simple without getting something that's hard but easy.