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Back in Black may be AC/DC’s most well-known and best-performing album, but it can also be a divisive topic among fans. To old-school purists, the band was never the same after their frontman Bon Scott’s death and subsequent replacement with Brian Johnson. But Back in Black produced some of the Australian rockers’ biggest hits (“Hell’s Bells,” “You Shook Me All Night Long,” and of course, the title track) and cemented their status as one of the all-time great classic rock acts.
Whether you’re on team Bon or team Brian, you have to agree that AC/DC turned a difficult period—not just in their own history, but the history of rock itself—into a triumph. In addition to Scott, 1980 saw the loss of greats like John Bonham, John Lennon, and Ian Curtis. Black Sabbath replaced Ozzy with Dio on Heaven and Hell. Pink Floyd kicked off The Wall tour, their last hurrah before fading out of the mainstream. Meanwhile, Iron Maiden’s debut album helped launch the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and REM played their first show in a deconsecrated church.
With the musical landscape changing all around them, AC/DC were determined to carry the torch of straight-up, hard-hitting rock into the new decade. Instead of calling it quits like Led Zeppelin, starting over like New Order, or drifting apart like Pink Floyd, they rolled with the punches and charged ahead, channeling their energies into the thing they did best: rock.
The night of February 18th, 1980, Bon Scott went out for a night on the town in London (allegedly to celebrate finishing the lyrics to AC/DC’s next album, more on that detail later). Sometime in the early morning hours, he went to sleep in a friend’s parked car and was found unresponsive the next day. He was declared dead on arrival at the hospital, and his demise was classified as “death by misadventure” (which sounds like an AC/DC song but is actually a formal manner of death in the UK).
A statue in Fisherman's Wharf, Western Australia, commemorates the life of Bon Scott.
After the initial shock of losing their friend and bandmate so suddenly, the members of AC/DC briefly considered disbanding. Ultimately, however, they decided to carry on and finish their album-in-progress as a tribute to Scott. Between March and April, guitarist brothers Angus and Malcolm Young continued to work on riffs and flesh out songs with bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd at E’Zee Hire Studios in London. Meanwhile, the group began holding tryouts for a new singer and sending audition tapes to producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, whom they had worked with on Highway to Hell the previous year.
AC/DC’s management reached out to former Geordie singer Brian Johnson, but after that group’s breakup, he was hesitant to commit to the rock star dream again. He eventually acquiesced and recorded his audition on March 25th, but only because he was already in London to record a jingle for Hoover. Johnson impressed the Australians with renditions of “Whole Lotta Rosie,” a crowd-pleasing cover he used to play with the short-lived Geordie II, and “Nutbush City Limits” by Ike and Tina Turner. He was officially welcomed into the band on April 1st and immediately thrust into the process of making the next record.
Ready for the tea? Some sources say that Johnson lifted lyrics from Scott’s notebooks, while Johnson maintains that he wrote every word with only the existing song titles as inspiration. But regardless of who penned the predictably sleazy, crude, and hypermasculine lyrics, Johnson’s vocal style definitely brought something new to the band. While Scott was known for his cheeky delivery and playful smirk, Johnson’s raspier voice and macho stage presence gave AC/DC a harder-edged sound and more no-nonsense image.
With most of the music written and lyrics still in progress, AC/DC (along with Lange as producer and Highway to Hell mixer Tony Platt engineering) flew to the Bahamas to record at Compass Point Studios in Nassau. After their gear was held up in customs due to a tropical storm that caused an islandwide power outage, the team buckled down and recorded from mid-April to late May.
While you might expect AC/DC to record in the studio equivalent of a dive bar with amps cranked to 11 and whiskey flowing freely, Back in Black demanded a change of scenery—and sound. On the previous album, the highly dampened acoustics of Roundhouse Recording Studios in London forced Platt to add artificial ambience by re-amping tracks through the monitors. For Back in Black, “The idea was to get that ambience on tape right from the start,” Platt said in an interview with BMI.
Most of Back in Black was recorded at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, just weeks after Brian Johnson joined the band.
“We spent some time choosing the right position for the drums by hitting a snare in various parts of the room,” Platt continues. “I discovered a ‘sweet spot’ where the snare suddenly sounded bigger, deeper, fuller, and most important, snappier,” which he later discovered was due to an empty cavity above the studio ceiling. After finding a sweet spot for the drums, Platt made the choice to set up the Young brothers’ amps in the same room while isolating Williams’ bass rig in a separate booth. This setup had a big impact on the sound of Back in Black, giving the songs an overall loose and natural “band-in-the-room” feel anchored by a tight, punchy bottom end.
With Lange guiding the sessions and Platt running the 48-channel MCI console and 24-track MCI JH-114 tape machine, AC/DC laid down their basic tracks almost completely live. Very little comping or editing was done, and surprisingly, no compression was used during tracking. “Back in Black” was the first song to be recorded, literally and figuratively setting the tone for the rest of the album.
Big, bold guitars have always been the cornerstone of AC/DC’s sound, and great care was taken in finding just the right setup to achieve the perfect rhythm and lead tones for each song. Both Angus and Malcolm played through massive Marshall stacks mic’d with Neumann U 87 and U 67s, mixing and matching different heads and cabinets to dial in varying amounts of gain and harmonics while Platt played with mic positioning to complement the tones.
“Sometimes it would be a 50-Watt head and the appropriate cabinet, sometimes it would be a 100-Watt head, and there were a couple of different 100-Watt heads that had their own textures,” Platt told Sound on Sound. “We’d turn them up until the cabinets were biting the right amount and the space around the cabinets was lighting up in the right way. Of course, the timbre of the amps would change according to the chords being played. So, while the guitars were each recorded with either a couple of Neumann U67 microphones or a U67 and U87—sometimes cardioid, sometimes figure of eight, sometimes omni, placed on different speakers of the cabinet—I would move them around depending on the combination of amps being used.”
If you listen closely, you can hear the difference between the tightly mic’d, high-gain guitars on “Back in Black” and “Shake a Leg” and bluesier, edge-of-breakup tones like on the intro to “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution.” Audible snare buzz on songs like “Shoot to Thrill” gives the feeling of a small club or rehearsal space, contrasting with the almost arena-sized sound of tracks like “What Do You Do For Money Honey”.
Angus Young's solos were recorded through a wireless transmitter with filtering that added "quite an edge" to the midrange.
For solos, Platt had Angus use a wireless transmitter—not so that he could prance across the studio like he did onstage, but to send his signal to two separate rigs: one in the main room and one in an echo chamber at the other end of the studio. The Schaffer–Vega Diversity system featured built-in filtering that “Added quite an edge in the middle area,” according to Platt, a factor that accidentally became a key part of Angus’ lead tone. In fact, that filtered tone is so legendary that it has been recreated as a guitar pedal and an outboard processor!
Concerning the bass, Platt has given a few different accounts of how he mic’d Williams’ Ampeg B-15 Portaflex. In some interviews, he recalls using an AKG D12 and Neumann U 87, while other times he specifies an AKG D20 and 414. Either way, the dynamic/condenser combo was augmented by a DI track for a cleaner option. While the bass on Back in Black never steals the spotlight, it provides a solid foundation for the guitars and locks in tightly with Rudd’s drumming, giving the songs far more weight and energy than the bass-light sound of ‘70s rock.
Platt’s drum miking is documented in multiple interviews and forum posts, so we know that the core of the sound comes from Neumann U 87 overhead mics, a Neumann KM86 and Shure SM57 on the top and bottom of the snare respectively, an AKG 414 on the hi-hat, and an AKG D20 and/or Neumann U 47 on the kick drum. But as with the guitars, the setup changed slightly depending on the needs of each song.
“The miking of the tom-toms—if we were using them—depended on their role,” Platt states in the Sound on Sound interview. “Sennheiser MD421s got used quite a bit, but sometimes I might even put [Neumann U] 87s on the tom-toms if I wanted them to be very specific. In the room there were at least a couple of ambience microphones, including a Neumann stereo mic which I moved around sometimes over the top of the drums and sometimes more towards the guitars.” Platt has stated that no compression was used during tracking, and only on the overheads and toms in the mix.
An empty space above the studio ceiling created a "sweet spot" for the drums to sound their best.
The closer you listen to the drums on Back in Black, the more you can hear the result of Platt’s choices. The bass drum on “Hell’s Bells” and “You Shook Me All Night Long” has a distinct snap to it, while other tunes feature a softer kick that gets out of the way of the bass and guitars. The snare is tight and crisp on “Givin the Dog a Bone,” noticeably beefier on “Shoot to Thrill,” and almost a background element on “What Do You Do for Money Honey.” The cymbals are consistently bright and splashy throughout the album, sitting above the guitars so as not to get in their way.
Because Johnson was still busy finalizing lyrics during basic tracking, all of his vocals had to be overdubbed (with a U 87, of course). And that’s probably for the best, according to Platt. “Recording a band like AC/DC, the main thing I had to do was avoid screwing up,” he told Sound on Sound. “That was even more important with regard to Brian, because if I didn’t capture some of his performances the first time around it would have been a really steep climb for him to get back to that same place.”
Overdubbing allowed Lange and Platt to capture a few solid takes and comp together the best bits, rather than frying Johnson’s vocal cords to get the perfect take live with the band. “A reasonable amount of comping was done with Brian’s vocals, but not a vast amount,” Platt adds. “I learned so much from Mutt in that regard, including how you try to get three or four performances that would be perfectly acceptable as a master vocal and then compile the best of the best, taking things to a higher level every time.”
While some may question the provenance of Johnson’s lyrics, the opening lines of “Hell’s Bells” struck him like a bolt of lightning. During “the mother of all thunderstorms,” Johnson recalled in Louder Than Hell: the Definitive Oral History of Metal, “I said, ‘Jesus, the noise of the thunder is coming in.’ Mutt said, ‘There you go, that’s a start, Brian, the rolling thunder.’ And I went, ‘It’s f--king pouring rain, look at the wind, it’s comin’ on like a hurricane. And look at that lightning flashing across the sky!’ Honestly, I was like a reporter. There was an alarm bell ringing, so I went, ‘Got my bell I’m gonna take you to hell. Gonna get ya, Satan get ya! Hells bells.’ That was it. It was ten minutes, and the song was done.”
After wrapping up at Compass Point, the band headed to New York in late May to finish overdubs and begin final mixing at Electric Lady Studios. The studio was chosen for its Neve 8078 console as well as its state-of-the-art Westlake monitor system. “It was always difficult to find a studio where Mutt liked the monitors,” Platt told Sound on Sound. “I hadn’t worked at Electric Lady before, but I’d always been quite a fan of Westlake rooms, and the one in Studio A was really good. I’m not crazy about horn-loaded monitors, but something about the way Westlake rooms were balanced really appealed to me. Eastlake rooms were largely about dampening everything down and controlling the sound as much as possible, whereas Westlake tuned the room to its characteristics.”
Before mixing could commence, backup vocals were recorded with Lange, Williams, and Malcolm Young singing. During these sessions, Malcolm conceived the idea of adding real bells to the intro of “Hell’s Bells”—not just on the record, but also for the upcoming tour. A 2,000-pound bell was commissioned from a foundry in London, and Platt was dispatched across the pond to record an existing church bell for the album.
Tony Platt had a hell of a time recording this bell.
“We took the Rolling Stones Mobile [studio] to this bell tower, set up the mics and struck it,” Platt told Premiere Guitar. “But when we did, the birds living there all took off. By the time it stopped, they’d all come back! So I abandoned that session.” To get a cleaner capture, Platt then went straight to the foundry to record the actual bell, which had already been cast but not finished. “I went to the bell foundry with Ronnie Lane’s Mobile, in an Airstream Caravan, and backed it in,” he recalls. “The bell was out of the cast, and the tuning was within a few cents of being spot-on. The guy that made the bell hit it, and we captured it on a multitrack.”
With only one chance to get it right, Platt set up “15 or 16” microphones around the space, including Neumann U 87s, AKG 451s, and even Shure SM 57s. “At Electric Lady when we were doing the mix, Mutt and I chose a combination of the close and distant microphones that produced the best sound, made a mix to half-inch at 30ips and then slowed that down to 15ips,” he explains. “Out of the takes that we had, we chose the best one and, because there were no samplers in those days, spun it in. We had quarter-inch and two-inch tape machines; I started the two-inch and dropped it in, and Mutt started the quarter-inch at the appropriate moment.”
All the attention to detail in the recording phase meant that mixing Back in Black was “A very straightforward process,” according to Platt. “A lot of it was about getting the right blend, and there were some bits and pieces that we knew we’d want to introduce; like the slight detuning underneath the snare.” AC/DC were staunchly against using effects like delay and reverb, but like a good mixer, Platt used only as much as the music required. Very subtle slapback delays make the vocals sound just a bit larger than life, and a touch of reverb does the same for the snare. “Back in Black” probably has the most obvious use of effects, and even those are fairly tame by 1980 standards.
Whether or not you think rock and roll is noise pollution, it’s hard to argue that Back in Black brought AC/DC… back. Mere months after losing a core member, they turned tragedy into triumph, putting out one of their most critically acclaimed albums and kicking off a new era with Brian Johnson.
Back in Black released in the United States on July 25th, 1980, and hit the UK and Europe on July 31st. It debuted at #1 on the UK Albums Chart and hit #4 on the US Billboard 200, staying in the top ten for three weeks. In 2024, the album was certified 27x Platinum by the RIAA, and currently ranks as the #2 best-selling album of all time, topped only by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Pop may have taken over in the ‘80s, but AC/DC made sure that rock and roll will never die.
