Justin Hawkins from The Darkness has gone deep in a chat about one of his favourite bands; AC/DC.
He has always been big fans of Acca Dacca, and speaking with Guitar World he gushed about the band, and especially about their seminal album Back In Black.
Hawkins called the record “timeless” and says it remains the “benchmark” for a rock record, even 40 years after it was released.
“I still think Back In Black is the benchmark sonically for how you want a rock record to sound,” he said.
“You have to hold it up comparatively to Back In Black, because no other album has the same power and illusion of simplicity. It’s a truly timeless record.
“There’s a lot more going on in the production than first meets the ear. You can’t just have guitars playing riffs, there’s more clever stuff that [producer] Mutt Lange brought to the record and as a result it really stands up.”
His favourite tracks are ‘Hells Bells’ and ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’, but when it comes to his #1 top song The Darkness frontman can’t go past the record’s title track.
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He went into detail about ‘Back In Black’, and how it shows off AC/DC’s blueprint as a band through the beauty of the guitar playing by the Young brothers.
“And the album’s title track has the ultimate rock riff. It does everything in those four bars.
“You don’t need anything else and even the chorus alone is superfluous. And it’s all deceptively slow, so it creeps up on you. The lyric and the delivery of the lyric, on the other hand, are frantic.
“That chemistry between Angus and Malcolm is AC/DC’s blueprint. It really is in the fingers for those guys.
“The tones in Back In Black are as authentic and real as it gets. You can tell the album was recorded in a really unforgiving way, which means the playing had to really be spot-on.”
The beauty about Back In Black as a record lies in that it brings together complex things and makes them sound simple, Hawkins explained.
“All these things sound simple but I really don’t think it is. It took the band years of doing exactly that to get to that standard.
“I love how it was all panned, too. All AC/DC records are like that, to be honest. You can be driving around and hear exactly what each guitar player was up to.
“Maybe that’s why they became so iconic – it was so clear what their roles were. They weren’t buried amongst each other, lost in a wall of sound.”
Hawkins isn’t the only rocker recently reminiscing about AC/DC and their ongoing legacy to the world of music.
Metallica’s Lars Ulrich recently sung the praises of the band during their Bon Scott era, calling the period “the definition of rock ‘n’ roll”.
Check out ‘Back In Black’ by AC/DC:
