Eight facts about Phil Rudd, one of rock's great drummers

By Malcolm Dome
( Classic Rock )
published

Revealed: AC/DC sticksman's taste for helicopters and Scalextric

AC/DC's drummer is 60 years old today, and as steady as ever. Here are some trivial (and some less trivial) facts about the Melbourne metronome.

• He’s the only current member of the band actually born in Australia. Rudd (full name Phillip Hugh Norman Witschke Rudzevecuis) entered the world in Melbourne on May 19, 1954.

• He was in a band called Buster Brown with future Rose Tattoo vocalist Angry Anderson. [](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rweQ7keDgm4)

• He was convicted of possessing marijuana in December 2010 in New Zealand. The magistrate at the time said, “It was not just an accident. You were blindly ignoring the law. You have been playing Russian roulette”, but the conviction was later quashed on appeal.

• He opened a restaurant called Phil’s Place in Tauranga, New Zealand in 2011. The establishment hopes to offer “fresh local food at affordable prices”. [](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gOdUmVy3S0)

• Rudd left AC/DC in 1983, and permanently returned a decade later. During his time off, Phil raced cars and flew helicopters.

• Talking of helicopters, Phil bought a Hughes 500 (worth half million dollars) as a present to himself after AC/DC’s Black Ice tour finished in 2010.

• You can buy a Phil Rudd dollar bill from eBay. They cost just $13.75.

• While on tour, Phil used to fill his hotel rooms with huge Scalextric circuits.

[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhnFpy18NIY)

Malcolm Dome
Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.