Music Arcades: AC/DC: If You Want Blood You've Got It

I think we have a rocker in the family. Lucy reports that The Boy was delighted when Jimi Hendrix (specifically Voodoo Chid, which is a bit scary) came on the radio. I've noticed him perking up whenever Mark Lamarr plays anything from the classic rock'n'roll era, or some garage blues. Apparently Kraftwerk make him laugh. But the other day, when Lucy brought him back from the swings and I had If You Want Blood booming out of the music room, he was beaming from ear to ear, and couldn't wait to crawl up the stairs (he's still a considerably liability on stairs) to the place where that joyous sound was coming from.

The CD booklet says this album was originally released on 21 November 1978. It went round our school quicker than swine flu. Well, maybe not, but it seemed stick around as a fixture in common areas for a year or two after that, so, in memory, it became a kind of stand-in for puberty. We enjoyed the innuendo in The Jack about curdling her cream, as well as the less veiled scream of "Gonorrhoea!" that followed it. But mostly we just enjoyed the riffs.

Things move fast around puberty, and within 16 months of this album coming out, AC/DC put out another album, and then their singer died — in a car parked about half a mile from here, as it happens. Only six months after that, Back in Black came out, and though I had to admit it sounded like a classic of its kind, my tastes were already starting to move on, along with my hormones. In truth I was never a massive AC/DC fan; I just got swept along by living at close quarters with those that were. As with Motörhead I maybe like AC/DC more unreservedly now — I bought this CD six years ago for a fiver from Fopp — than I did thirty years ago. (Possibly it helps that I only play albums like this every few years.)

What's slightly weird is the way the tracks are coded deep in my memory — when I listen to High Voltage, say, I can anticipate exactly when Bon Scott is going to say "let's get a chat" — but I hear the music quite differently when filtered through the extra decades of listening to very different music. But there's no escaping that this is a great live album. I wondered if it might have been recorded at one of those long lost shabby London venues like the Golders Green Hippodrome, but then I realised London audiences are never quite as enthusiastic as this one sounds. Glasgow was my next guess, and that turns out to be right.

Whole Lotta Rosie was always the centrepiece. The music papers told us it was sexist. What we probably didn't realise at the time — and I can't be the first to point this out — is that it was ahead of its time in challenging stereotypes of female beauty: 42-39-56 is not the shape and size of the women you see on the covers of magazines.