It has been officially confirmed, the return to AC / DC of the former members, Brian Johnson, Phil Rudd, and Cliff Williams, who will meet with Angus Young again.
ARE YOU READY? #PWRUP pic.twitter.com/8gLuBElOci
— AC/DC (@acdc) September 30, 2020
Last September 30, AC/DC has officially confirmed that they are returning, with vocalist Johnson and drummer Rudd returning after a four and five-year absence from the band respectively.
#PWRUP pic.twitter.com/QPctWKzDCV
— AC/DC (@acdc) September 29, 2020
For frontman Brian Johnson, it demanded a medical miracle who suffered from hearing loss.
“It was pretty serious,” Johnson admitted in an interview with Rolling Stone. “I couldn’t hear the tone of the guitars at all. It was a horrible kind of deafness.”
The vocalist was able to finish many Rock or Bust shows purely practicing ”muscle memory and mouth shapes.” But the deafness was becoming more serious and Johnson couldn’t battle through it any more. “I was starting to really feel bad about the performances in front of the boys, in front of the audience. It was crippling,” he admitted. “There’s nothing worse than standing there and not being sure.”
“He’d pull his in-ears out and just shake his head,” bassist Cliff Williams recalled, remarking that seeing Johnson struggle was challenging for the band. “He couldn’t pitch. He was having a real hard time.”
“The first time he came down he brought this thing that looked like a car battery,” Johnson explained. “I went, ‘What in the hell is that?’ He said, ‘We’re going to miniaturize it.’ It took two and a half years. He came down once a month. We’d sit there and it was boring as shit with all these wires and computer screens and noises. But it was well worth it.”
The specific science following the treatment is something of a puzzle, with Johnson ready to reveal only minimum information: “The only thing I can tell you is that it uses the bone structure in the skull as a receiver. That’s as much as I can tell you.”
Johnson kept his bandmates updated with his improvement and, when Angus Young decided to reassemble the band for a new album, the frontman was up to the task.
“We’d get updated on how he was going with it and everything,” Young noted. “It was very good. I know how much a part of his life this is for Brian. It’s the same as the rest of us.”
The veteran band has advanced their return in recent weeks, while during these days they shared a series of advances of ‘PWR UP’, through their social networks, in newspapers, and posters.
“It was with the boys in full battlefield conditions and it was smashing, brilliant,” Johnson admitted. “I felt like I was a kid again.”