Every band has an early song that now makes them cringe, and AC/DC are no exception. So when guitarist Angus Young, now the band’s only original member, was asked to nominate the group’s most “regrettable” song during a 2020 interview, he didn’t have to rack his brain to come up with an answer.
“On our first album, High Voltage, we did a love song called Love Song,” he told Vulture writer Devon Ivie. “That was very different for us. I didn’t know if we were trying to parody love songs of the time, because Bon [Scott] wrote the lyrics. I don’t even remember what the words are.”
If at this point you’re struggling to recall the song in question, much less the lyrics, you can be forgiven, because before it appeared on AC/DC’s 2009 rarities compilation Backtracks, Love Song – or as it was titled originally Love Song (Oh Jene) – was only found on the Australian version of the band’s debut album High Voltage, released in 1975, and didn’t make the cut for the tracklisting of the international edition of the album which emerged in 1976. Evolving from an unrecorded song called Fell In Love by bandleader Malcolm Young and original AC/DC vocalist Dave Evans, the song was overhauled lyrically by Bon Scott, and given a sincere romantic sheen unlike anything else in the AC/DC catalogue.
Scott’s lyrics included this soppy verse:
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“When you smile I see stars in the sky
When you smile I see sunrise
And I know you’ve been thinking of me
And I know how you want it to be”
“I remember that song,” Angus Young told Ivie, “because the guy who worked for us at our record label told us that’s what was on the local radio at the time – very soft music. He thought we should release that song, because it’ll probably get some airplay. I remember thinking, Who in their right mind would want this to go out?
“We were very fortunate, though, because all of the radio stations who had seen us live knew this was not who we were,” Young continued. “So these stations started to flip the record over and play the other song, which was a cover of a blues standard called Baby, Please Don’t Go. We actually scored a hit from the B-side! That was the one saving grace of the song.”
To be fair, Love Song isn’t terrible, it just doesn’t sound anything like what we know and love as an AC./DC song. Musically, it could come from America’s west coast circa 1967’s Summer Of Love, and you could easily imagine it being covered by Guns N’ Roses circa The Spaghetti Incident? If pushed, we could easily list ten worse AC/DC songs (hint: all of them were released between 1985 and 1990), but that’s for another time.
Listen to Love Song below.