BACK in Black has the best opening of any rock album.

The tolling bell, the sense of mourning mixed with threat, the slow guitar picking of an ominous death march with the heartbeat drum behind it that builds to an address by what may be the devil declaring that he's coming to take you, the listener, to hell.

It's Hell's Bells we hear, a warning and an invitation. And those factors were always at the core of AC/DC.

Back in Black was released 30 years ago this week and I remember the first time I heard it. Picture coastal rural Western Australia, far from Perth, and four or five panel vans with their backs open, chicks in skin-tight jeans and their Rock boyfriends (the Rocks were a working-class gang of the time) in black T-shirts, black jeans and ripple-soled desert boots, swigging from long-neck beer and Jack Daniels bottles, rocking out to the new AC/DC album beside the Chapman River.

Read more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

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