Thunderstruck — AC/DC’s 1990 track became a stadium-rock rabble-rouser
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There are few songs big enough to put the “stadium” in “stadium rock” but AC/DC’s rabble-rouser “Thunderstruck” does exactly that. Since its release in 1990 it has become a staple of PAs at sports arenas across the world. The song, with its football terrace-style chant, gigantic power chords and pregnant pause before the chorus, seems almost tailor made for pumping up crowds.
That point was underlined in the recent Netflix series America’s Sweethearts when tension was centred around the ability of prospective Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders to complete the signature can-can-like “Thunderstruck” routine, including a wince-inducing jump-split. It shows how far AC/DC’s no-frills guitar sound has come since it was forged in seedy Australian pubs and share houses in the mid-1970s.
“Thunderstruck” was the lead song on the band’s 1990 album The Razors Edge, which is often seen as a comeback for a group who had enjoyed their biggest success a decade earlier with the timeless Back in Black. The band were at a crossroads. Their long-term US record company Atlantic opted to trade them to sister label Atco for Pete Townshend’s contract while Malcolm Young, the driving force of AC/DC, sat out a tour to deal with his drinking habit. And the band’s thunder was in danger of being stolen by the younger wave of Californian glam-metal acts that also traded in innuendos and fast riffs.
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The Razors Edge, produced by Bruce Fairbairn, who had just revived the career of Aerosmith with Pump, trod a similar path to many AC/DC records, ranging from the sublime — the fearsome title track — to the ridiculous: the execrable “Mistress for Christmas”, which guitarist Angus Young told Guitar World in 1991 was inspired by Donald Trump in his pre-political days. But it was the first song on the album that caught the ear of the record label executives who realised they had something special.
“Thunderstruck” starts with a quicksilver riff played by Angus Young on the B string that alternates between the open string and arpeggios. Young is fast enough to pick all the notes (most imitators use techniques such as pull-offs and hammer-ons for a similar effect). The guitarist showed his “little trick” to his bandmate and brother Malcolm who said he had a rhythm idea to sit behind it. The fraternal duo worked the piece up over a few months, completing it when they came up with a suitable title.
At first, Angus Young claimed that he had been inspired by an incident when a plane he was on was hit by lightning. Years later the story changed as he said the title was inspired by a childhood toy — a hydrofoil called a Thunderstreak — that “seemed to have a good ring to it. AC/DC equals power. That’s the basic idea.”
The pace of the song was ideal for singer Brian Johnson, whose high-pitched wailing of the refrain soared above the duelling guitars.
David Mallet, the director behind David Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes video, took the band to London’s Brixton Academy to film a promotional video. He created a “bear pit” atmosphere by installing scaffolding full of moshing fans — including future Conservative MP Louise Mensch — and used rudimentary Go Pro-like cameras which he put on guitar necks and drumsticks to create a striking new effect. The key shot however was of Angus Young duckwalking and soloing, filmed through a glass floor.
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The song has proved popular as a novelty showstopper by classical musicians such as Croatian duo 2Cellos, bagpipers the Red Hot Chilli Pipers and even the Finnish bluegrass group Steve ’n’ Seagulls, all of which can play the riff at speed. Australian children’s band The Wiggles laboured through a strangely bloodless six-minute version in 2022 but Odette, a Sydney singer, had more success with a sultry recording. Ministry, the American industrial metal band, captured some of the spirit of AC/DC on a 2011 cast-offs compilation.
“Thunderstruck” has also become a film soundtrack regular, used in Deadpool 2 and The Super Mario Bros Movie; it also provided the title of a low-budget 2004 Australian comedy film about a group of diehard fans which opened with the infamous “spell AC/DC” radio phone-in competition.
Perhaps the most unlikely appearance of the song came in 2012 when Mikko Hypponen, a Finnish computer security expert, published an email which he said he had received from an Iranian nuclear scientist. The Iranian scientist complained that the systems of the Islamic Republic’s Atomic Agency had been hacked and that some computers had started blaring music out in the middle of the night. As he told a bemused Hypponen, “I believe it was playing ‘Thunderstruck’ by AC/DC.”
Let us know your memories of ‘Thunderstruck’ in the comments section below
The paperback edition of ‘The Life of a Song: The stories behind 100 of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Chambers
Music credits: Leidseplein Presse; Sony; Chilli Piper Productions; Universal; Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Cleopatra
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