All aboard!

Someone told me something really scary once: people's taste in music doesn’t change significantly once they hit about 20. How horrible, I thought at the time – fancy being stuck with your late-adolescent musical taste for the rest of your days!

Now, though, I realise that this advice was wrong. My taste in music stagnated once I hit 14. Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, the Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Soundgarden. All of these bands were meaningless distractions from the real deal. The band. I'll give you a clue: there's only one time signature worth worrying about in music, and it ain't 5/16, you fancy-arse Conservatorium graduates.

Today's headline on the Yahoo! email website was:

"The new AC/DC album, ‘Black Ice’, will be released next month."

Now, my often-bored friends will tell you that I’m not the most enthusiastic person about anything much at all. But this event excited me in ways that less important ones, such as Russia's recent invasion of Georgia, failed to do. I realised how deep my affection for AC/DC went when considering how excited I was about the superficially unpromising material at hand. Let us look, for a moment, at the thin soil from whence my newfound happiness sprang.

The new single from Black Ice is called ‘Rock and Roll Train’. This title is, to be polite, not particularly promising. ‘Rock and Roll Train’ (henceforth R&RT) is the type of phrase that a lenient mother might be mildly proud of - mildly, mind you - if it was the very first phrase formed by her beloved two-year-old infant out of alphabetic fridge magnets. It is the type of phrase that one might expect to be created if the Teletubbies formed an AC/DC cover band, with Tinkie Winkie on lead, La-la on vocal duties, and Po smashing the skins into the ground. (I thought of it first). Even the neglected Bon Scott classic ‘Big Balls’ ranks higher on the grammat-o-meter. Lynn Truss, and other grammarians, would choke on their Royal Doulton cups of camomile tea at the mere mention of this song. Noam Chomsky may have considerable difficulty applying his theory of universal grammar to this song. It is, in short, a brain-slayer of a song.

Other titles from AC/DC’s back catalogue have their charm. ‘Rock n Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution’, for example, sounds tough and old-school working class – something a blackened Pittsburgh steelworker might say when his poncy, starched boss asks him politely to turn down his portable radio. (“Hey – screw you, man. Rock n’ Roll ain’t noise pollution, man.” Cue whistles & cheers.) ‘Rock and Roll Train’, meanwhile, brings to mind a dim-witted yellow cartoon boy pulling a large plastic train behind him while yelling ‘I choo-choo-choose you!’

But despite these rather deep-seated structural difficulties, R&RT succeeds quite nicely on its own terms. It’s good to know, too, that the band haven’t become slaves to fashion. That is a slight understatement: Brian Johnston still dresses with all the panache of someone who might expose himself to schoolchildren in a public toilet. Angus Young still dresses like someone who may fall under the 'high risk' category of being flashed by Brian Johnston in a public toilet. And the other people in the band, whoever they may be, still look like Australian Pub Band Extras from Pugwall (look it up). So – all aboard the Rock and Roll Train, kids!

Those who know me will realise that the above statement is not meant to convey disrespect in any way. R&RT succeeds excellently on its own terms. But more importantly, AC/DC’s terrifyingly genuine air of moral degeneracy – i.e. the feeling, when looking at publicity photographs, that something is actually ‘wrong’ with them in some fundamental way – make the current batch of 70s Rock-revival bands seem about as immoral and dangerous as the Obama Family Barbershop Quartet.

The lyrics. Well, I think it’s safe to say that Peter Carey needn’t look too nervously over his shoulder at this year’s Miles Franklin awards ceremony. I have only heard the song once, but I will try to recreate some of the magic (it helps here to think of R&RT as AC/DC’s Finnegan’s Wake, as compared to Back in Black’s Ulysses):

Well, I’m on a big train (real big train)
A really fast train (real fast train)
It’s a big, fast train (big big train)
It’s a rock and roll train (rock and roll train)

CHORUS Rock and rock and, rock and rock and rollllllll…..
Train. (Train. Rock and roll train)
Train. (Train. Rock and roll train)
Train. (Train. Rock and roll train)
Train! (Train! Rock and roll train!)

While the second verse violates the UN charter for the protection of the child, it is also the lyrical highlight.

Now schoolgirls wear short skirts (real short skirts)
And they wear them on the train (train. Rock and roll train)
They wear them till it hurts (hurts. Rock and roll hurt).
I like going on the train (train – the rock and roll train!)

REPEAT CHORUS 13 TIMES, TO CODA.

Here’s the link to the song:

http://www.acdcrocks.com/

Comments welcome.