AC/DC, Edinburgh review: 'euphoric'

Many thousands of people, it seems, still have a never-ending appetite for a man who's now hit his 70th year giving it some spirited duckwalking action across the stage in a saltire-blue velvet schoolboy uniform.

For Glasgow-born guitarist Angus Young, the last remaining founder member of AC/DC, this just about counted as a homecoming gig. For everyone else amid the sea of light-up red devil horns at Murrayfield, it was potentially the last chance to experience the live AC/DC juggernaut in action in Scotland.

Mind you, Brian Johnson - Bon Scott's near ever-present vocal replacement of the last 45 years and a man seven years Young's senior - is still hammering away with a vigour that would put men 20 years younger to shame. In black denim and slate grey flat cap, he prowled the stage, his signature shriek for the most part a picture of good vocal strength and training.

"F***in' hell," he permitted himself after one audible splutter early in the set - although he'd just torn through a ferocious, stomping Back in Black, after which thrill any artist would deserve some slack.

Now onto its second leg since last year, the Power Up (or PWR/UP) tour is happening in belated celebration of 2020's 17th studio album of the same name, which was composed by Angus with his brother Malcolm when he was still alive. It's a greatest hits set by any other name - but still, when the muscular descending riff of Demon Fire appeared, or Shot in the Dark lit up, these Power Up songs sounded like they could have been recorded on Johnson's first day in the studio with the band.

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Everything else was surely all the crowd hoped it would be. The stage design was predictably huge, with seven screens providing near-surround detail on every one of Young and Johnson's movements, and also forgivably corny.

As the band entered, a roaring red muscle car raced through generic, just about adequately animated streets apparently intended to double for Edinburgh (or so the signs told us). At a mention of fire, digital flames licked around the images of the band. During the predictably mighty Thunderstruck - the one song whose pace appeared to defeat Young as it went on - bolts of lightning flashed.

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All the way through, Young and Johnson's chemistry was combustible. Like the rebellious kid smoking behind the bike shed, Young's jacket was off by the early arrival of Have a Drink On Me's swaggering groove, its lyric demanding "don't you worry 'bout tomorrow" - a perfect mantra for this band. After a euphoric communal roar through Highway to Hell, the tie went with it for Sin City, scratched across his fretboard just as he and Johnson seemed to hit their second wind.

The sun was down by now, and Johnson's voice was undefeated by a thunderous Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, a coruscating High Voltage, the euphoric You Shook Me All Night Long, and on into Whole Lotta Rosie, a defiantly, almost antagonistically endless Let There Be Rock and a burst of Loch Lomond to open the encore. Raging against the dying of the light doesn't get much more exciting or vital than this.

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