One of the biggest challenges of success, especially for a band like AC/DC, is maintaining it.
In the late 1980s, AC/DC experienced the blessing and the curse of being one of the biggest rock bands on the planet, with a string of hit records that proved this was a beast with no signs of slowing down. In ‘88, Blow Up Your Video was yet another commercial success, catapulting them into a new artistic mindset where they, perhaps for the first time, had to step back and evaluate how they would keep up steam if they weren’t simply doing the same thing over and over.
More than that, Blow Up Your Video was a turning point for the band, settling it once and for all that blips in AC/DC’s success rates and artistic quality were just that – blips – and suddenly they were back, though not without the hardships of challenges like Malcolm Young’s addiction. They were also temporarily without Brian Johnson and had lost Simon Wright to Dio, leaving Malcolm and Angus Young scrambling to make sure the next record would live up to the hype.
So, on top of internal shifts and identifying a new direction, they had the pressures of maintaining success, but ultimately, handling it with care and attention began where it always did: identifying a foundation to build out from. The only difference this time was that, instead of working around soaring guitar solos and fiery riffs, they placed a newfound focus on songwriting, working on lyrics first and branching out from there.
As Angus revealed during an interview with Auckland Star in 1990, “Instead of being riffmakers all the time and thinking we could make tunes out of them, we started from the other end of the scale and concentrated on coming up with full songs.” This, above all, was their intention of outdoing the success of Blow Up Your Video as well as proving their resilience during a time when it mattered to stake their claim – with The Razors Edge almost immediately coming out on top just with a simple shift in approach.
While there are a few other setbacks that meant The Razors Edge needed a different level of intricacy, like enlisting Bruce Fairbairn and hosting sessions in Canada, it was their collaborative writing sessions that pushed the entire record to greatness without losing sight of that quintessential AC/DC familiarity. In fact, many claim it to be one of the most AC/DC albums out of them all, probably because there was still a hefty amount of core improvisation and spontaneity with tracks like ‘Thunderstruck’, a riff Angus initially came up with “by accident”.
“Malcolm and myself put our heads together and said we’ve got to come up with something that’s certainly better than what we’ve been known for in the past few years,” Young recalled. “We got stuck into the writing and ideas, and there’s where tracks like ‘Thunderstruck’ came from. [The title track] was another great track, the others were a bit more tongue in cheek.” Malcolm echoed this, saying that focusing on the writing was really where the magic came from.
Getting this headstart, as it were, meant that when they took the songs to their sessions, there was a sense that they were already ready to be fitted into that AC/DC sound, all with a level of ease they hadn’t even experienced before. As they said themselves, “It was probably one of the easiest albums we’d ever done” – an impressive feat, considering the quality of music that ultimately came out of something that hinged so heavily on their past successes, as well as frayed band dynamics.
