AC/DC Swapped One Song in Late 2025 and Handed the Setlist Majority Back to Bon Scott

The Power Up tour’s US leg opened in Charlotte with 21 songs: 11 from the Bon Scott years, 10 from Brian Johnson’s. That split is seven months old, and it took exactly one substitution to produce it.

Setlists are the only document a band publishes without meaning to. Nobody issues a press release saying “we’ve decided our dead singer’s material is what people actually want.” They just print the running order and hand it to the lighting crew.

So read it as a document.

The count everyone can do

AC/DC opened the North American leg of the Power Up tour at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte on July 11, 2026: 21 songs, roughly two hours and fifteen minutes, with The Pretty Reckless supporting (Consequence). The identical set turned up again in San Antonio on July 24 (Blabbermouth).

Eleven of those songs come from records Bon Scott sang on. Ten come from the Brian Johnson era. Scott died on February 19, 1980. The band has now spent 46 years without him and still plays his catalogue by simple majority.

Five years of Scott produce 11 songs. Forty-five years of Johnson produce 10. Per album, the Scott era yields roughly double.

That’s the count, and it isn’t the story, because the 11-10 is barely older than the tour poster.

The one-song swap that flipped it

Go back to the previous North American leg. AT&T Stadium, Arlington, April 14, 2025. Twenty of the 21 slots are identical to what Charlotte got. The difference sits at position 13, right after “Sin City”: that night the band played “Rock ’n’ Roll Train,” from Black Ice (2008) (setlist.fm).

Score that night: 10 Bon, 11 Brian. Johnson’s majority.

Now Melbourne Cricket Ground, November 12, 2025. “Rock ’n’ Roll Train” is gone. In its place, same slot 13, is “Jailbreak,” a song the band hadn’t played live since 1991 (setlist.fm, Ultimate Classic Rock).

Score: 11 Bon, 10 Brian.

One swap in the same slot inverted the majority, and it has held since: São Paulo in February 2026 (setlist.fm), Charlotte in July, San Antonio the same month. The setlist.fm average across the whole 83-show Power Up run still lists “Rock ’n’ Roll Train,” which means the tour’s own historical average is a Brian Johnson majority. The band moved off it late in the run (setlist.fm tour average).

Nobody in the organisation has explained the change. I looked. No quote from Angus Young, none from Johnson, nothing from management. So it’s a decision without a stated intention.

The collateral damage is worth noting on its own. When “Rock ’n’ Roll Train” left, Black Ice went to zero. The current show contains not one song from Flick of the Switch (1983), Fly on the Wall (1985), Blow Up Your Video (1988), Ballbreaker (1995), Black Ice (2008) or Rock or Bust (2014). That’s six studio albums without a song in the show.

And “Jailbreak” is a strange thing to bring back to America

“Jailbreak” was on the Australian Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap in 1976 and got cut from the international version. American listeners didn’t get it until October 18, 1984, when Atlantic put it on the ‘74 Jailbreak EP, a release named for a year the song wasn’t recorded in (Wikipedia).

So a Bon Scott song that reached the United States four years after Bon Scott died is returning to an American stage in 2026 after a 34-year absence. The first US performance since 1991 is the American headline here, and the setlist didn’t change for America. It changed in Australia in late 2025 and America inherited it.

The songwriting credits are more lopsided than the setlist

Count the vocalist credits instead of the vocals.

Bon Scott has a writing credit on all 11 of his songs, the Young/Young/Scott line. Johnson has six: the five from Back in Black plus “For Those About to Rock.” The remaining four (“Demon Fire,” “Thunderstruck,” “Shot in the Dark,” “Stiff Upper Lip”) are Angus and Malcolm alone.

Eleven to six. The most-credited singer on an AC/DC stage in 2026 has been dead since 1980.

That isn’t Johnson losing his credits after Back in Black; he kept writing through Blow Up Your Video in 1988, and those records simply aren’t in this set. His own explanation for stepping back: “I ran out of words.” (Wikipedia)

One more credit that outranks both of them: Malcolm Young, who died in 2017, is credited on all 21 songs in the show, including the two Power Up tracks built from his archived riffs. Angus on that album’s origin: “If I do anything in my life, I have to get these tracks down and get these tracks out.” (Louder)

Where the eras sit in the show is the real tell

The 11-10 headline flattens something else. Split the set in half.

• Songs 1-11: 3 Bon, 8 Brian.
• Songs 12-21: 8 Bon, 2 Brian.

The show opens as Brian Johnson’s band and closes as Bon Scott’s. The pivot is “Sin City” at number 12, and it never reverses: from there on, only “You Shook Me All Night Long” and the closer “For Those About to Rock” come from the Johnson era. The main-set climax, with Angus’s extended solo, is “Let There Be Rock” from 1977. The first encore song is “T.N.T.” from 1975.

Twenty thousand people walk out of a stadium in 2026 singing something recorded in a Sydney studio 51 years earlier.

The tour is called Power Up and plays two songs from Power Up, 9.5% of the show for the album on the poster.

Five people on stage, one of them was there

The 2026 touring band: Johnson on vocals, Angus Young on lead guitar, Stevie Young on rhythm, Matt Laug on drums, Chris Chaney on bass (Power Up Tour). Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams haven’t been replaced; they remain members who aren’t touring, and Laug and Chaney are touring musicians.

So of the five people playing those 11 Bon Scott songs every night, exactly one of them played on the records they came from.

Johnson has been carrying that material since 1980, and he’s been clear about what it is. To USA Today in May 2011, on Scott: “We still talk about him like he’s a member of the band in the dressing room.” (via Blabbermouth)

Fifteen years later, the running order is the documentary evidence for that sentence.

The album that replaced him is still the biggest slice

Back in Black contributes five songs, more than any other single record in the set. That’s the arithmetic: the album made to survive Bon Scott’s death is the most-played album of the night, and the era it launched still loses the count.

San Antonio’s show fell on July 24, 2026. Back in Black was released on July 25, 1980. The band played the eve of that record’s 46th anniversary with eleven of his songs in the set.

What we haven’t measured yet

The obvious next pull: does this hold across time? Nobody’s plotted the Bon share across AC/DC’s touring history: Black Ice (2008-10), Rock or Bust (2015-16), the Power Up legs. If the Scott percentage has been climbing tour over tour, the November 2025 swap is a trend line finally crossing 50%. If it’s been flat and this is the outlier, that’s a different story, and a more deliberate one.

There’s a second thread too, and it’s the one that keeps nagging at me. Johnson reportedly won’t sing “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)”; he’s told interviewers it belongs to Bon and he’d get it wrong. I couldn’t trace that quote past aggregators to an original interview, so I’m not putting it in quotation marks here. But if it’s accurate, it completes the shape: the man who sings eleven of Scott’s songs a night has one he won’t touch.

If you’ve got the original source for that one, or a setlist from the European leg between May and November 2025 that pins down exactly which night “Jailbreak” came back, come find us at @realrocklab on Threads or X.