To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Bon Scott’s joining AC/DC, Choirboys are thrilled to announce they will be paying homage to their idols AC/DC and Bon Scott by performing two of the greatest rock albums of all time: AC/DC’s High Voltage and Highway To Hell, track by track from beginning to end.
Mark Gable talks about his band’s homage to Australia’s greatest rock band.
Our readers would love to hear about the first time you saw AC/DC live.
I had asked Crispin Dye, who worked at Alberts Productions and was tragically murdered in an incident in Surry Hills in 1994. I went in to Crispin’s office in late 1980 and asked if Choirboys could get complimentary tickets to see AC/DC perform at The Sydney Showground on 23 February 1981. Crispin said No. I have to tell you I was a little disappointed. The day came for the show and Brad Carr, our then-lead guitar player, and I decided we were going anyway and there was ‘NO WAY we were going fucking pay for tickets’ so we decided to break in through a hole in the wire fence. This we did with great success. After all these years there we were watching AC/DC with the ‘new guy’ on vocals, Brian Johnson. We did miss Bon though. Everything went well till we looked up at the VIP section and there was George Young with Alberts Productions’ new signing, Cheetah. Cheetah were the two Hammond sisters and had just signed to the label a couple of months before. I’ll be honest, we were pissed off as we had been slugging it out for two years with the label and I would have liked to have been the one being cuddled by Angus and Malcolm’s brother George up with the VIPs. AC/DC were great. I bought beers for Malcolm some time later to pay back the ticket fees.
Enthusiasts of Bon Scott era AC/DC love to hear about whatever hilarious things he pulled while onstage, or offstage. Was there anything that you remember from the time/s you saw him play?
The story told to me in the late 70s by Fifa Riccobono, the office manager with Alberts Productions: The first time Bon sang with the band he did not know any of the lyrics to the songs, so, in true Bon style he made the lyrics up on the spot, and also in true Bon style all the lyrics he made up were full of profanities. If it were today it would most probably be unacceptable, but back in the early 70s it was absolutely normal behaviour for a singer in rock’n’roll band to be totally disgusting. Bon did it better than most.
Musically, will you be playing the two albums to mimic the style of the originals or with your own or Choirboys slant on them?
The answer to this question is very simple: No-one can replicate Whitney Houston, no-one can replicate the Beatles, and no-one could possibly even come close to sounding like AC/DC. We’re a band that started in Australia in the 70s in the pubs, just like AC/DC, and we will sound like Choirboys playing AC/DC music; it’s as simple as that.
Outside this homage show, where is your music taking you these days? Any new albums on the horizon?
We have three albums in the pipeline. One is already complete and will be out in April 2017. The next two albums I connected to the first album; they are in fact a trilogy and are all interlinked. I can’t say more than that at this time, as we would like it all to be a surprise because we what have planned with these albums is very different.
Saturday 11 February at Ballina RSL. Tickets at the club.
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