Despite recording POWER UP in August/September 2018, AC/DC held on to their new album for quite a while…
If you're an AC/DC fan, you probably remember the ridiculously thrilling moment photos of the reunited band started popping up in August 2018, with pics of frontman Brian Johnson and drummer Phil Rudd snapped outside Warehouse Studios in Vancouver sparking rumours that a new album was in the works. Now, with that record – POWER UP – out in the world, members of the band have been reflecting on that whole time, and explained why they held on to the LP for so long after those recording sessions.
"Well, we all agreed to be hush," Angus Young explains on the My Turning Point podcast. "And we've done that in the past. You keep it tight till it's out there in the public. And that's always been pretty much the approach in the band."
The guitarist adds that POWER UP – which was completed during a six-week period in August and September 2018, when the original photos were taken – would have come out sooner were it not for everything that happened in 2020.
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"The beginning of this year, we were planning, we were gonna get it out earlier," he continues (via Blabbermouth). "So we had worked on a lot of the promotional side of it. And we'd also actually been doing rehearsals, playing [together], because Brian wanted to see if [it] was at all possible [for him to perform after dealing with hearing issues back in 2016]. So we had actually been geared up.
"We had done promotional stuff, shot a video, and the record company were gonna put together all their plans, how they were gonna promote it and everything. The plan was to go earlier with the album. And then, it was a case of we were rehearsing, and, as I said, had done promo stuff. And then we had a quick break. We had gone into our home spaces.
"And then this pandemic thing sprung up out of nowhere. And not just us, it threw the whole world a big curve[ball]. So that plan fell apart, because from that point on, nobody knew what was happening in those early stages of that. So everything was put on hold until it was such time that it was possible to release the album. But pre-pandemic, we were hoping we could have got it out earlier."
Worth the wait? Absolutely.
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