Brian Johnson live at Manchester Apollo, 1982 — photo: Harry Potts, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Brian Johnson
A flat-capped bruiser from Newcastle with a voice like a firework in a phone box. Brian Johnson spent the seventies fronting Geordie, had his hit, watched the glam wave recede — and then got the hardest job in rock: walking into AC/DC five months after Bon Scott died and recording Back in Black.
The lab’s interest in Brian starts before 1980, though. The thread that made him Bon’s successor was spun in 1973, at a gig where the two singers’ stories crossed without either of them knowing what it meant. That’s the kind of connection this whole site exists for.
Pull a thread
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap at 50: The AC/DC Album Atlantic US Refused to Release
Out in Australia on 20 September 1976, turned down by Atlantic’s American office, and finally in US shops in March 1981, thirteen months after Bon Scott died. It went to number 3.
The record that took five years to cross the Pacific
Fifty years ago this weekend, AC/DC put out their third Australian album on Albert Productions. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap was produced by Harry Vanda and George Young, the older brother of Malcolm and Angus, and it was made in a hurry. Malcolm Young later told the story plainly: “We didn’t have much time to do that album… All we did was go straight into the studio,” fresh off the High Voltage tour (Parade, via Yahoo).
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.
Bon Scott at 80: The 1973 Geordie Gig That Secretly Connected AC/DC's Two Eras
Bon Scott would have turned 80 on July 9. The best way to honor him skips the highlight reel and goes back to the night in 1973 when he watched Brian Johnson scream himself off a stage, filed it away, and accidentally wrote the ending of his own band’s story seven years early.
The myth we’re here to break
There’s a version of AC/DC history everyone carries around: two bands, cleanly split. The Bon Scott era, sweaty, sly and dangerous, and the Brian Johnson era, the stadium machine that made Back in Black. Before and after, original and replacement.