“No Pressure There, Then”: The AC/DC Classic That Brian Johnson Wrote on a Difficult Prompt, Released on Halloween 1980

Few people were having a year as difficult and incredible as Brian Johnson in 1980, the year he made his AC/DC debut following the death of the Australian rock band’s original vocalist, Bon Scott. In an ode to their late singer, the band returned with an album titled Back in Black, which played nicely into both the hard rock aesthetic and the reference to their mourning over Scott. As his replacement, Johnson had an opportunity most rock singers could only dream of. But it came at a cost.

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While brothers Angus and Malcolm Young tended to the song’s signature guitar parts, Johnson was in charge of writing vocals to match the instrumentation. Finding the right words for a song can be difficult enough as it is, but the prompt Johnson was given made it even harder. According to the raspy singer, the Young brothers told Johnson the lyrics needed to pay tribute to Scott without being morbid. “It has to be a celebration,” they told him. “Well, no pressure there, then!” Johnson joked.

Entirely out of his comfort zone but determined to keep his new gig, Johnson looked anywhere he could for lyrical inspiration. Sometimes it was cars. Other times, it was women. For the album’s second single, which AC/DC released on October 31, 1980, Johnson used an unlikely source of lyrical inspo: the weather.

Brian Johnson Wrote This AC/DC Classic Looking out at the Weather

Brian Johnson had never been to the Bahamas when he first traveled there with his new bandmates in the spring of 1980. (Scheduling conflicts and a lack of available studios meant that AC/DC would cut their record at Compass Point Studios in Nassau instead of in London.) The band was writing the record as they recorded it, which meant that Johnson spent much of his downtime writing lyrics. Some fell out easily. But when Malcolm Young told Johnson to write lyrics for a song they wanted to call “Hells Bells”, he came down with writer’s block.

In an interview with Metal Edge magazine, Johnson recalled producer Mutt Lange visiting him in his concrete shack to ask how the songwriting was coming along. Johnson complained of his writer’s block, and Lange tried his best to encourage him through it. While the two men were talking, a storm began rolling into the island. Johnson, nervous to see a storm “the likes of which a Northern boy had never seen before,” asked Lange about what was going on. Lange described the “rolling thunder” and “pouring rain” that, although wasn’t a hurricane, was “coming on like one.” After Johnson saw a menacing white bolt of lightning, he told Lange, “I’m only young, you know! I’m gonna die!” Sound familiar?

Johnson jotted down the different weather terminology Lange was teaching him and, by the end of their conversation (and the storm), he had a full song. “What I’d done was, without thinking, was I’d just done the weather report. That’s what it was—the f***in’ weather report! But that was enough to get me started. That was it. So, I gotta thank Mutt for that. What a song.”

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