Youngs : The Brothers Who Built Ac/Dc (9781466865204) by Jesse Fink Page B

tangled up in Forster’s “noose” in the process.
    It was a price all three were willing to pay for the riches that would follow.
    *   *   *
    The Youngs wouldn’t cooperate with Clinton Walker for his pioneering book about Bon Scott, just as they haven’t for the shelf of AC/DC books that followed and I set out writing this one fully expecting not to be given any help at all. It seems anybody who’s wanted more out of them than a few far-from-enlightening soundbites for magazine or TV interviews and goes the official route to contact them gets short shrift from their minders, who are notoriously protective.
    â€œYou’re setting yourself a hard task, as you know,” Walker warned me before I’d even started.
    Emails were exchanged between myself and Fifa Riccobono and Sam Horsburgh, the trio’s gatekeepers in Australia. Riccobono poured cold water on my chances from the outset but at least asked me to send through some written questions for George Young and Harry Vanda. But it didn’t get me anywhere. Nor did an approach to Vanda’s new studio, Flashpoint Music. I even walked past Vanda on Sydney’s Finger Wharf one day but as he was sitting down to lunch with his family and it being a public holiday, I thought it best to leave him alone.
    â€œI have sent this through several times but it hasn’t been picked up,” Riccobono wrote back to me after a long hiatus. “I’m sorry I can’t be of help … I told you in the beginning that it would be a long shot.”
    Horsburgh, the point man for Angus Young and Malcolm Young at Alberts, replied: “I will forward your request explaining that you are approaching [your book] from a different angle but they—Angus, Malcolm and George—usually decline book requests.”
    Nothing eventuated. I made a follow-up inquiry and got no response. How to explain the shutout?
    â€œOnce AC/DC became a printing press, they really closed ranks around the family,” is how one insider explains Alberts’ almost paranoid protectiveness of the band.
    In New York, I emailed then called the office of their manager, Alvin Handwerker, and explained what I was doing. Again, there was no response.
    Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Musicians, even the best of the lot, aren’t always terribly articulate about what it is they are doing in their work. The Youngs, though fantastically astute operators and smart men, even if Angus and Malcolm were once described by their former British booking agent and now One Direction manager Richard Griffiths as “thick,” aren’t renowned for their erudition. They like a bit of blue language and got to the top amid a whirl of stewed tea, groupie sex, bar fights and a few too many long drags on cigarettes. As Melbourne’s The Age said in its review of the Engleheart biography of AC/DC , when not enclosed in their “famous dome of silence” Angus and Malcolm deal in “foul-mouthed, grammatically garbled quotes” and are “hardly the most eloquent commentators for this legend.”
    â€œ AC/DC remain as guarded and uncooperative as ever, leaving their loathed biographers to join the dots with old magazine interviews and whichever witnesses dare talk.”
    Conversely, though, there is the argument that music doesn’t need explaining. It’s a fair call yet one I have tried to resist. But writing this book was made doubly difficult by the fact that many people still within or that used to have a place in the AC/DC universe outside of the Youngs are either dead, declined interviews, didn’t respond or eluded contact, didn’t feel they had anything worthwhile to contribute or won’t talk to anyone. Formal approaches were made to interview the three non-Young members of AC/DC but I didn’t get anywhere through Handwerker. Trying the backdoor approach, I got a typed letter personally presented to