AC/DC appeared on the Australian TV show Countdown numerous times over the years.
The show ran between 1974 and 1987, but broadcaster ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) would frequently tape over shows that had already aired, as film was very expensive and no one expected the footage to have any historical value.
Some of AC/DC's early performances, such as the March 1975 performance of Them's Baby, Please Don't Go – the one where Bon Scott is infamously dressed as a schoolgirl – are available on YouTube, while others (including the November 1974 performance of the same song, where Angus Young is dressed as an Aviation Pioneer, or the following month's version, where he's wearing a Zorro costume) have been lost.
In the last couple of weeks, more Countdown footage has emerged on the official Bon Scott YouTube channel, notably two clips filmed in 1976 as AC/DC visited London on their Lock Up Your Daughters tour.
Incredibly, AC/DC played 27 London shows over the course of the year, from their European debut at the Red Cow in Hammersmith in April for fewer than 100 fans, to a headline show at the 3500-capacity Hammersmith Odeon just seven months later. Over the course of those months, AC/DC also played 11 residency shows at the iconic Marquee Club on Wardour Street.
The first Countdown segment, which was broadcast in July 1976, finds the band in Covent Garden, where a shirtless, shorts-wearing Bon Scott (it was a famously hot summer) can be seen toying with a banana before the band runs between the Nag's Head and White Lion pubs.
The second clip, shown in Australia the following month, finds AC/DC hanging out with the tourists in Piccadilly Circus before heading to the Marquee, where anyone watching the filming would assume that then-bassist Mark Evans was the band's leader.
Other footage recently uploaded to the official Bon Scott YouTube channel – which is curated by his estate – includes four live clips of the singer fronting his pre-AC/DC band Fraternity, a short 1977 interview clip filmed in Hobart, Tasmania, and a 15-minute interview filmed for Countdown in November 1977.
Bon Scott would have turned 80 today.
