Jeff Apter: Malcolm Young

Malcolm Young was the founder and the driving force of AC/DC, a man who possessed what many have called 'the greatest right hand in rock and roll'. That riff-producing mitt provided the muscle behind such signature songs as 'Highway to Hell', 'Back in Black', 'A Long Way to the Top' and many others, helping AC/DC survive shifting musical trends and numerous in-house dramas to stand tall as the biggest rock band on the planet. Yet Malcolm was the most unpretentious man to ever strap on a wide-bodied Gretsch. 'I've never felt like a pop star, ' he once told Rolling Stone. 'This is a 9-to-5 sort of gig.' This is the first biography to focus exclusively on Malcolm, and tells of his remarkable rise from working-class Glasgow and Sydney to the biggest stages in the world. One of eight, Young always seemed destined for a life in rock and roll: his brother George was a key member of Australian legends The Easybeats and was also a huge early mentor and supporter of AC/DC. His brother Angus, the oldest schoolboy in the world, stood alongside Malcolm in AC/DC for the best part of 40 years. Malcolm lived hard and fast, enduring incredible hardship when the band first started out in the mid 1970s, surviving the terrible loss of Bon Scott in 1980, and suffering numerous personal demons, including alcoholism. It was a series of severe health problems that led to his death, aged just 64, in 2017, from complications arising from the dementia with which he'd been diagnosed in 2014. Yet without Malcolm Young, there would have been no AC/DC - it's as simple as that. As the band's former bassist, Mark Evans, wrote of Malcolm: 'He was the driven one, the planner, the schemer, the behind the scenes guy, ruthless and astute.'