Simon Rushworth
When was the last time you saw AC/DC adorning the front page of a quality newspaper…
…yeah, well I don’t think it had happened in my lifetime until Monday.
But to see BJ and the boys splashed all over the Guardian (or at least down the right hand column) did make me feel proud to love rock.
Of course those cheeky broadsheet scribes had tried to fabricate some link between AC/DC and deep recessions.
They pointed to the fact that the band only sell bucketloads of records when times are hard.
And insisted that when the public at large had plenty of money in their pockets there was no call for rock ‘n’ roll.
Of course we know that rock is recession proof. Luke Morley of Thunder said so right here on these pages long before the Guardian jumped on the bandwagon.
Biff Byford agreed when we caught up with him last week – citing Saxon’s early 80s heyday and the correlation with a Margaret Thatcher run Britain dogged by strikes.
But I’m beginning to drift away from the point.
And that is who cares why AC/DC are on the front of one our leading high brow dailies?
Isn’t it just great to see their name in big bold headline type alongside the ‘real’ news stories of the day.
Isn’t it comforting to know that selling hundreds of thousands of albums (and that’s albums not downloads) still makes the media’s powers that be sit up and take notice.
And isn’t it great that in a year when Led Zeppelin demanded mainstream press coverage on an unprecedented scale, the previously unfashionable AC/DC can match them column inch for column inch.
So the Guardian chose to put a slightly negative spin on the Aussie superstars’ selling power.
Well they always say that all publicity is good publicity.
And that was never truer than Monday morning when the world at large was reminded that many of us do still rock.
For the record we rock through the good times and the bad, through prosperity and economic depression.
The story is not that AC/DC have topped the charts during another recession. The story is that four old blokes – one in a cloth cap and another in a school uniform – can still sell any records at all after eight years kicking their heels.
The sooner our friends in the so-called real world understand rock’s enduring popularity the better. Although the day when Motorhead make the Guardian’s front page is probably still some way off…
Simon Rushworth