Following Back In Black was always going to be a massive challenge for AC/DC. By the time they began recording For Those About to Rock in Paris in the summer of 1981, their previous album had sold 10 million copies, and if AC/DC themselves hadn't changed, then certainly the climate around the Australian quintet had, in terms of expectations and demands.
It certainly didn't help that, before they arrived in Paris to begin their third album with producer 'Mutt' Lange, the band were royally fucked over by their own record label. In an astonishingly short-sighted move, in March 1981 Atlantic Records in America decided to cash in on the phenomenal success of Back In Black by releasing, for the first time in the US, an AC/DC album that they considered not worthy of release just five years earlier. In fact, so unimpressed was the US label's A&R department by Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap in 1976 that Phil Carson, the talent scout who signed the band worldwide, was told to his face that AC/DC were going to be dropped, and it was only his pleading (and a show of the finances around the band's previous release) that kept the band on the label.
Now, having successfully introduced the late Bon Scott's replacement Brian Johnson to America, Atlantic threw new fans (and radio programmers) into a tailspin by reintroducing Scott again on a 'new' record, against the band's wishes. In the short-term their tactic paid off - Dirty Deeds... reached number three on the Billboard 200 chart, one slot higher than Back In Black's chart peak - but many of those introduced to the Australian band via their 1980 smash album were understandably confused, and the band felt completely undermined.
This wrong-headed business approach hardly helped the band's mood as they commenced work on the 'proper' follow-up to Back In Black. Nor did the fact that the notoriously fastidious Lange spent the first ten days of the first studio session trying to find the right drum sound for Phil Rudd, before deciding that what the band actually needed was to change studios. It would be a further two weeks before Lange settled on a facility worthy of his occupancy, by which time Angus Young was already "bored shitless".
"By the time we’d completed the album," Malcolm Young recalled, "I don’t think anyone, neither the band nor the producer, could tell whether it sounded right or wrong. Everyone was fed up with the whole album."
It would be the last time that AC/DC would work with Mutt Lange.
Released on November 20, 1981, For Those About To Rock became AC/DC's first number one on America's Billboard 200 chart. It is not, sadly, a great AC/DC album. In truth, it's not even a mediocre AC/DC album. Take away the superb title track and - at a push, horny and dumb lead single Let's Get It Up - and what remains is easily the weakest set of songs that Malcolm and Angus Young had put their names to, up until this point.
There are those, however, who would argue that "DC's next album, 1983's Flick Of The Switch, is even worse. In fact, if you check out the ranking of AC/DC albums here, on this very site, you'll see that there are those who believe that the only AC/DC albums worse than Flick Of The Switch are 1985's Fly On The Wall and 1988's Blow Up Your Video.
With all due respect, this is absolute nonsense.
Famously, Malcolm and Angus Young chose to produce the album themselves, returning to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas where Back In Black was committed to tape. In the media, Malcolm Young was keen to emphasise that the band hadn't ditched 'Mutt' Lange - "We never pensioned Mutt off," he insisted to UK weekly magazine Sounds. "It was a thing with time - he's in big demand these days, and we always wanted to produce ourselves so we thought this is the right time to go for it" - but when away from the journalists' tape recorders he was less discreet.
"The attitude was, What the fuck are we paying this guy all this money for? We can fucking do it," the band's former tour manager Ian Jeffery told biographer and Classic Rock writer Mick Wall. "They felt that they didn’t need him.”
The idea of AC/DC making a 'back to basics' album might seem like a joke to some - there was little danger of anyone listening to anything they'd recorded with Lange and thinking that they'd stumbled upon an unreleased Mahavishnu Orchestra rarity - but following on from their experience with the producer in Paris, it's understandable that they might yearn for something more raw, more akin to their live sound.
Listening to the first side of Flick Of The Switch it's genuinely bewildering why anyone would think that this is AC/DC at their lowest ebb.
If the first four songs on the record - Rising Power, This House Is On Fire, Flick Of The Switch and the excellent Nervous Shakedown - lack a certain polish and finesse, surely no one can deny their in-your-face immediacy: there's a thrill to hearing one of the world's biggest bands so unvarnished and gritty.
Not that AC/DC were willing to acknowledge even the possibility that their elevated status might result in a dilution of their sound. When Brian Johnson joked to Sounds journalist Sylvie Simmons that it was "tough at the top", Malcolm Young very quickly shot down the very thought that AC/DC might be getting ideas above their station.
"No! It's still in the gutter as far as we're concerned," he stressed to Simmons. "We're still trying to get out of the gutter - that's our attitude. We're not trying to conquer anything; we're not trying to be anything we're not."
"It's a real hard rock and roll album; it's definitely back to where it should be with the band," Young told Simmons. "It's not made for radio, it's not made for MTV, it's just made for rock and roll. It's rock and roll with a noise."
Not everything on Flick Of The Switch hits as one might hope, admittedly. While Guns For Hire, with its stuttering guitar riff evokes Jailbreak-era 'DC, and Bedlam In Belgium - written about a gig in 1977 shut down by heavy-handed cops when the band over-ran their curfew - has the hooligan stomp of TNT, Deep In The Hole and Badlands never quite get into gear, and simply sound sluggish. Similarly, Brain Shake, while trying to emulate the frenetic Riff Raff, never comes close. But good luck finding an AC/DC album after Flick Of The Switch with only three duds.
Released on August 19, 1983, the album peaked at number 4 in the UK, and number 15 in the US. Without a genuine hit single it was never likely to be a blockbuster hit, and indeed it wouldn't be certified for one million US sales until 2001. But since when were sales the best signifier of an album's quality?
"When you've clambered to the top of the rocky mountain, there are two options open," future Classic Rock writer Malcolm Dome noted sagely in Kerrang! issue 50, in his review of the album. "You can either enjoy the brief taste of rarified fortunes, breathe in deeply and dare anyone to knock you off. Or else you can look down and realise just how far you can fall.
"Superficially at least, AC/DC could be accused of taking the second path," he continued. "For having reached for the twinkling stars via the phenomenal Back In Black, they wobbled somewhat with For Those About To Rock and have seemingly gone for ‘desperation measures’ this time around.
"So, is this the last gasp of a dying giant?" Dome asked rhetorically. "Wrong, buster!"
Wrong indeed.
But don't take our word for it, go listen for yourself, without prejudice.
