AC/DC
Croke Park
★★★★★
AC/DC in Ireland have gone from the old Point Depot to Punchestown Racecourse to the Aviva Stadium and now, finally, to Croke Park, where they play on Saturday night to 82,000 people. As their creative heyday – 40 years ago and counting – fades, their popularity only increases.
But if AC/DC’s music is timeless, the band members, unfortunately, are not. The only original surviving member is Angus Young, the lead guitarist, who is also the only indispensable member. A year off 70, he still wears the schoolboy uniform, his collar-length snow-white hair peaking out from beneath his cap. He doesn’t bound around the stage any more like a man possessed by music, but he can still mesmerise with that Gibson SG of his. He’s Gandalf with a guitar.
Brian Johnson, AC/DC’s 76-year-old lead singer, contorts his body to reach those high notes like a man trying to give birth to a basketball.
The audience are, for the most part, young at heart, if not chronologically. Everybody present is defying the tyranny of time – and why not?
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The band are on their Power Up tour, named after the album they released in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was one of the few musical bright sparks of that year. Yet they only play two songs from it: the forgettable Demon’s Eyes and Shot in the Dark.
However much bands like AC/DC produce new material to signal that they are still a creative force, not many fans want to listen to it. And AC/DC have been accused in the past of sticking to the same old setlist tour after tour.
Not this time around. Sin City and Riff Raff, from Powerage; their opening song tonight, If You Want Blood (You Got It), from Highway to Hell; and Shoot to Thrill and Have a Drink on Me, from Back in Black, are reminders of that period from the late 1970s to 1980 when they produced a blue streak of albums without a bad song on them.
At Croke Park it’s riff after riff, hit after hit, with not a bad song in the set aside from the momentum-killing Let There Be Rock, with its 20-minute guitar solo – 19 minutes too long – which ends with Young gyrating around a riser above the audience.
The rest of the set is a compendium of classic cuts – Back in Black, Highway to Hell, Thunderstruck and You Shook Me All Night Long among them – that perfectly showcase why AC/DC remain so enduring.
This is the loudest gig I’ve heard at Croke Park, a tsunami of noise from start to finish, culminating in cannons and fireworks at the end. The bass is too high in the mix, and the vocals too low at the start, but that was quickly fixed.
Have we witnessed AC/DC’s farewell tour? Will we ever see their likes again? Will we ever see them again?
