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AC/DC jailbreak session after a few drinks in Sydney, 1976 |
Final and fatal hellraising of a rock star
Cult rockers AC/DC – second only to the Beatles as best-selling band of all time – are celebrated in a new exhibition of exclusive photographs, writes Simon Wroe
ON February 18, 1980, Bon Scott, the wild-eyed frontman of the Australian rock band AC/DC, raised hell for the last time.
He died of acute alcohol poisoning after a gargantuan drinking session in Camden Town.
Twenty-eight years later, almost to the day, Scott will return to the scene of his final party in an exhibition of exclusive photographs by Philip Morris at the Proud Gallery in Stables Market next week.
Scott, 33, was found dead in the back of a friend’s car in south-east London. He had been at the Camden Palace – then known as the Music Machine, now known as Koko – taking flagrant advantage of the free back-stage drinks.
As with many rock’n’roll deaths, conspiracy theories abound: people claim he died of a drugs overdose; others say his drinking partner fled the country.
The allegations prove only the enormous influence and popularity of Scott, a culthood that continues to this day: AC/DC are the second-biggest selling band of all time after The Beatles, and Scott’s urgent falsetto vocals have become a badge of authenticity for a generation of aspiring rockers.
Morris, like his fellow Australian Scott, was a young buck still making a name for himself when the two men first crossed paths in 1974.
“They stood out from many of the new bands at the time, they were into the Glam look but their guitarist was wearing his old school uniform,” he recalls.
Morris, who went on to work with Deep Purple, Bo Diddley, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, was “blown away by the energy” of the band on each occasion they met.
When the group were recording their Dirty Deeds album, Morris was invited to capture the process.
“As I was about to leave, I will never forget, by the lift on the floor of the studio Bon was very frustratedly screwing up sheet after sheet of his written lyrics, swearing and throwing them to the floor,” he says.
Morris’s black and white photos of some of the band’s more intimate and spontaneous moments are the result, he says, of him “spending hours trying very hard to blend in”. Scott, someone you could hardly accuse of blending in, might not understand such a sentiment, but he would probably approve of the photos.
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