Malcolm Young died on November 18, 2017, at 64. The AC/DC co-founder, rhythm guitarist and songwriter had retired from the band in 2014. His family said he had lived with dementia for several years and died peacefully with them at his bedside. His writing partnership with younger brother Angus Young helped establish AC/DC in 1973 and supplied material the band recorded after Malcolm’s death.
“Back in Black” offers one particularly revealing example of that partnership. In a 2003 Guitar World interview, Angus recalled Malcolm playing him the main riff from a cassette during the Highway to Hell tour. Malcolm was considering erasing it to reuse the tape; Angus wanted to keep it. The single-note figure was Malcolm’s work too, Angus said. The idea became the title song of AC/DC’s 1980 album.
Malcolm was born in Glasgow and moved to Australia with his family in 1963. When he and Angus formed AC/DC in Sydney, he had a clear idea of the music he wanted to play. Speaking to NPR in 2020, Angus remembered Malcolm thinking about the tough, gritty songs that got people moving in bars. He invited Angus to join him in making that kind of rock and roll. Malcolm also encouraged his younger brother to step forward when he played a solo, giving the audience someone to watch as well as something to hear.
The division of work developed naturally. Malcolm told Guitar World that he had played some solos on the Australian version of High Voltage, but preferred keeping the band’s rhythm steady while Angus moved around the stage. “When that’s on the money there’s no better feeling,” he said of getting the groove right.
That preference required precision. In an interview with Goldmine, Angus described how Malcolm controlled the spaces between chords and kept the beat driving. He remembered his brother handling unfamiliar requests in their early club days while he struggled to follow the changes. Angus’s measure of Malcolm’s importance was practical: if his own guitar stopped working, the band could keep its shape; if Malcolm’s stopped, the difference would be obvious. The rhythm part carried enough of the song for that loss to be heard immediately.
Malcolm was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with AC/DC in 2003. After his retirement, his nephew Stevie Young took over rhythm guitar, including on Rock or Bust. Malcolm and Angus still shared the album’s songwriting credits. Leaving the stage had ended one part of Malcolm’s contribution, while the material they had developed together remained available to the band.
That writing returned on Power Up in 2020. Angus told Apple Music that the album drew on songs the brothers had developed in 2007 and 2008, before Black Ice. They had accumulated more material than they could use at the time. Some ideas needed polishing; others were fragments that Angus completed, drawing on the brothers’ notes and his memory, he explained to Spain’s RockFM. Angus also said he chose to record the songs without splicing Malcolm’s old guitar performances into them. Dedicated to Malcolm, Power Up carried his co-writing credit on all 12 tracks.
