40 Years of Back in Black

Today marks the 40th Anniversary of one of Rock’s most astounding achievements: AC/DC’s timeless album, Back in Black. What’s so special about the album is not just the quality of the songs on display, but the circumstances under which it was created. It’s a true phoenix risen from the ashes moment. 1980 was a year of great change in Rock music, though, as a new breed of Heavy Metal began to rear its head and left the old guard needing to adapt or die. To celebrate, Diaries of Doom have a look back at three bands who released important albums with a bit of a direction change in this momentous year:  

Black in Black - AC/DC

The start of the 1980s had been about as kind to AC/DC as the start of 2020 has been to the rest of the world. Having released perhaps their greatest commercial album to date, Highway to Hell, a year earlier, Bon Scott and the boys looked to be on the precipice of world domination with their rough and ready, bar brawling Rock ‘n’ Roll sound. It was not to be, however, as one of Rock’s most mercurial frontmen was taken from us too soon on February 19th 1980. 

Many bands could have folded under the grief, unable to find a pair of feet large enough to fill the monstrous shoes left by Scott. AC/DC picked themselves up and dusted themselves off remarkably quickly, though, creating the titan that is Back in Black in the process and defining what it means for a Rock band to snatch victory from the Jaws of defeat. Make no mistake about it, Back in Black is a stone cold classic of an album. A renewed sense of tautness to the songwriting, paired with crystal clear production arguably absent from their earlier work, makes for an enthralling listen as the band create Rock’s Mona Lisa, all while colouring by numbers! Sure, lots of people are a bit tired of hearing Back in Black and You Shook Me All Night Long played again and again, and again, and again, but to suggest that they’re not songs worthy of such airtime would be foolish. Besides, there are enough underappreciated songs on the album (think Hell’s Bells, Let Me Put My Love Into You and Have a Drink On Me) to quickly turn the groan that you might make when someone plays this album into a smile worthy of the Cheshire Cat, as you remember how many absolute bangers are on it. 

The rest, they say, is history. AC/DC were propelled into global megastardom off the back of this album and, although they would never quite manage to produce another one that consistently hit the heights achieved on this album, that does nothing to detract from the brilliance of this effort. The fact that it came in the aftermath of such tragedy makes it all the more remarkable. 

AC/DC still rock hard in 2020. Come at me. 

Black Sabbath - Heaven and Hell

Another band going through something of an identity crisis in 1980 were the fathers of Heavy Metal themselves, Black Sabbath. Ozzy Osbourne had either left the band or been fired, depending on which version of events you care to believe, and off the back of two rather lacklustre efforts in the form of Technical Ecstacy and Never Say Die, it was looking uncertain whether Sabbath still had the magic. 

Enter Ronnie James Dio, the little man with the big voice, famed for injecting some energy into the lethargic middle careers of several metal gods. The replacement of Ozzy’s ominous, nasal whine with Dio’s chesty powerhouse of a voice marked the beginning of an important shift in Sabbath’s sound, gaining a sense of the epic and otherworldly and embracing a mystical, gothic edge. Another welcome change was not just found in Dio’s skill with the larynx, but his skills with the pen. I love Geezer Butler’s lyrics as much as the next Sabbath devotee, but it’s hard to claim that they didn’t stray into cringy waters slightly too often for comfort. Dio brought epic tales of good and evil, dragons and wizards, magic and fantasy, perfectly complimenting the new dimensions of Sabbath’s sound. Swirling epics like Children of the Sea and the title track sit comfortably alongside barnstorming rockers like Neon Knights and Lady Evil to create one hell of a comeback album. 

Heaven and Hell hits the reset button on Sabbath’s career in a big way and what makes it all the more special is to compare it to what their peers were producing at around the same time: Led Zeppelin had just released the patchy, softer In Through the Out Door and were dead and gone by 1980, Ritchie Blackmore had decided that Dio would not be the man to give his band relevancy in the new decade, marching toward the mainstream and becoming unspeakably lame in the process, and the less said about Deep Purple in the early 80s the better! It’s testament to the enduring brilliance of Black Sabbath that they were able to reinvent themselves with such integrity on this album. 

Rush - Permanent Waves

I know that I’ve just had a dig at Rainbow and Deep Purple for drifting toward the mainstream in the late 70s/early 80s, but that’s because their doing so coincided with a notable staleness in their songwriting. One band who managed to produce a relatively marketable record in 1980 without producing a commodity rather than an album is the legendary Canadian trio, Rush. Having spent the late 70s writing Prog Rock classics about spaceships getting sucked into black holes and not having a single album without a song over 10 minutes long, the beginning of the 80s saw the band begin to diversify their sound and produce songs that might be construed as, gasp, a single. 

Permanent Waves is by no means my favourite Rush album, but it is a cracker and is also very important in the band’s evolution. It sees an erosion of the traditional power trio instrumentation that defines their earlier work and the injection of other influences that would come to define the synth-led direction that would become the basis of their sound by the end of the decade. Alongside greater prominence of synths on this album comes a notable New Wave influence, seen most clearly on the clean but driving Freewill and even a touch of Reggae on the timeless Spirit of the Radio. The importance of the latter song cannot be understated in terms of the band’s progression: a song as accessible but simultaneously challenging as this was unprecedented, even for Rush, and paved the way for future endeavours of a similar nature. The band might not have written songs like Tom Sawyer without Spirit of the Radio paving the way. This is not to say that there isn’t a little something for fans of the heavy, techy guitar riff: Natural Science blends the synths with some more raucous moments to great effect! 

Where for other bands, greater accessibility lead to a dilution of the core elements of their sound, the beauty of this record is that Rush managed to not sacrifice one to achieve the other. The result is an album that sounds very ahead of its time even today, so I can’t imagine how fresh it must have sounded back in the day. More people should know about Rush, and if you need an album to get someone started with them, you could do much worse than to point them in the direction of this one.

BP