MALCOLM
YOUNG

There is a street in the Cranhill district of Glasgow called Skerryvore Road. In the early 1950s, a family named Young lived at number 6. The father, William, had served as an RAF mechanic in the Second World War and now worked as a postman. The mother, Margaret, kept the house. There were eight children. The males all played music — it was simply what you did.

Malcolm Mitchell Young was born on 6 January 1953, the sixth son. Two years later, his brother Angus arrived. In the winter of 1963 — the "big freeze," snow eight feet deep across Scotland — the family saw a television advertisement offering assisted passage to Australia. Fifteen members of the Young family boarded a ship and sailed to the other side of the world. Malcolm was ten years old. Angus was seven.

They settled in Burwood, a suburb of Sydney. George, the eldest musical brother, had already befriended a Dutch immigrant named Harry Vanda at the migrant hostel. Together, Vanda and Young would become one of the most successful production partnerships in Australian music history. Malcolm watched all of this. He was paying attention.

The Machine He Built

Malcolm was twenty years old when he and Angus formed AC/DC in November 1973. He had already been playing seriously for years, absorbing Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, and the raw electricity of early rock and roll. He had a Gretsch G6131 Jet Firebird — a semi-hollow body guitar that most players would use for jazz or rockabilly. Malcolm used it to build a wall of sound that would shake stadiums for the next four decades.

The concept was simple, and Malcolm enforced it with absolute discipline: no keyboards, no synthesizers, no studio trickery. Two guitars, bass, drums, vocals. The rhythm guitar would be the engine. Everything else would follow. Angus was the spectacle — the schoolboy uniform, the duckwalk, the solos. Malcolm was the foundation. He stood stage-right, feet planted, and drove the machine forward with a ferocity that no one has ever quite replicated.

Keith Richards once said that Malcolm Young was one of the best rhythm guitarists he had ever heard. That is not a casual compliment from the man who invented the open-G tuning and wrote "Jumpin' Jack Flash." It is a recognition of something rare: a player who understood that the job of the rhythm guitarist is not to be noticed, but to make everything else sound better. Malcolm understood this completely.

The Darkest Day

Bon Scott was found dead in a car in Eltham, South London, on the morning of 19 February 1980. He was thirty-three years old. The official cause was acute alcohol poisoning. Malcolm and Angus were in Australia when they heard the news. They flew to London immediately.

The question was whether to continue. Malcolm's answer was characteristically direct: Bon would have wanted them to carry on. That was the end of the discussion. Within weeks, they had auditioned Brian Johnson, a Newcastle singer who had fronted a band called Geordie. Johnson arrived at the audition and sang "Nuthin' But a Good Time" by Purdie. Malcolm and Angus looked at each other. That was that.

They flew to Nassau, Bahamas, booked Compass Point Studios, and recorded Back in Blackin six weeks. The album was dedicated to Bon Scott — the cover entirely black, a mourning band in the truest sense. It has since sold over fifty million copies, making it the second best-selling album in history. Malcolm wrote the riff to the title track. He wrote the riff to "You Shook Me All Night Long." He wrote the riff to "Hells Bells." He wrote most of the riffs on the greatest rock and roll album ever made, and then stood stage-right in a white t-shirt and played them every night for the next thirty years.

The Gretsch Jet Firebird

Malcolm Young played a 1963 Gretsch G6131 Jet Firebird for most of his career. It is a semi-hollow body guitar — an unusual choice for hard rock, where most players gravitate toward solid-body instruments. The Gretsch gave Malcolm's rhythm playing a particular warmth and resonance that a Les Paul or a Stratocaster would not have produced. It was the right guitar for the right player, and together they produced a sound that is instantly recognisable from the first bar.

He ran it through Marshall amplifiers, tuned down half a step, and played with a pick using an aggressive, percussive attack that locked in with drummer Phil Rudd to create a rhythmic foundation of almost supernatural tightness. Session musicians who have tried to replicate Malcolm's parts in the studio consistently report that it is far harder than it sounds. The simplicity is deceptive. The feel is the thing, and feel cannot be taught.

That Gretsch now resides in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. It is displayed alongside Angus's Gibson SG, Bon Scott's microphone, and Brian Johnson's flat cap. Malcolm is not there to see it. But the guitar is, and that is enough.

The Silence

In September 2014, AC/DC announced that Malcolm Young had retired from the band due to ill health. The statement was brief and gave no details. The music press speculated. A few weeks later, the family confirmed what many had feared: Malcolm had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. He was sixty-one years old.

His nephew Stevie Young — who had briefly filled in for Malcolm during a period of personal difficulty in 1988 — took his place in the band. AC/DC released Rock or Bust in 2014 and toured through 2016. Malcolm was not there. He spent his final years in a care facility in Sydney, the city his family had sailed to in 1963 with nothing but a television advertisement and a willingness to start again.

Malcolm Young died on 18 November 2017. He was sixty-four years old. Angus Young's statement was six words long: "As a guitarist, I could never do what he did." From a man who has spent fifty years being called one of the greatest rock guitarists alive, that is a eulogy of extraordinary weight.

Street art tribute to Malcolm Young, November 2017. Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Power Up

Three years after Malcolm's death, AC/DC released Power Up. The album was built entirely from riffs and ideas that Malcolm had stockpiled over the years — a vault of unrecorded material that Angus had kept safe. The band dedicated the album to Malcolm, and the title was a direct reference to him: Malcolm Young was the power. He always had been.

Power Up debuted at number one in seventeen countries. Brian Johnson returned after a hearing scare that had threatened to end his career. Phil Rudd was back behind the kit. Stevie Young held the rhythm guitar position that his uncle had occupied for four decades. The machine ran. It always runs. That was Malcolm's design.

"Shot in the Dark," the lead single, opens with a riff that sounds like it could have come from Highway to Hell or Back in Black. It probably could have. Malcolm had been writing riffs like that since 1973. He wrote them because he loved rock and roll with a purity that never wavered, never chased trends, never compromised. He wrote them because it was what the Young family did.