AC/DC Arnstadt tickets

Few bands have stayed this loud for this long. AC/DC formed in Sydney in November 1973 around brothers Angus and Malcolm Young, with a name their sister Margaret spotted on the power adapter of her sewing machine. The brothers felt the letters captured the raw, power-driven feel of their live shows, and 50 years of evidence backs them up. Their sound grew out of Australian pub rock, music built to be played live with a minimum of distraction, and critics have filed it everywhere from hard rock and blues rock to heavy metal. The band's own description is simpler: rock and roll, nothing more, nothing less. At home in Australia, they are affectionately known as Acca Dacca.

The first two albums, High Voltage and T.N.T., arrived in 1975 for Australasian audiences only, before an international deal with Atlantic Records in 1976 took the band global. The classic lineup settled in 1977 with the Young brothers, Phil Rudd on drums, Cliff Williams on bass and Bon Scott on lead vocals, and Highway to Hell (1979) became the band's first top 20 album in the US. In 1980, English singer Brian Johnson took over as frontman, and the band's next album, Back in Black, became the second best-selling album of all time, with an estimated 50 million copies sold worldwide and a 612-week run on the Billboard 200. The run never really stopped: For Those About to Rock We Salute You (1981) was their first Billboard 200 number one, The Razors Edge (1990) delivered Thunderstruck, Black Ice (2008) topped the album charts in 29 countries, and Power Up (2020) became their seventeenth studio album.

The live show has always been the point. AC/DC sharpened their craft playing up to four gigs a day in Melbourne pubs, and that pub-rock approach scaled all the way up: record-setting residencies at the Marquee Club in 1970s London, a 1991 Monsters of Rock set in Moscow played before 1.6 million people, a three-night stand at River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires, and the Black Ice World Tour, which spent 20 months across 108 cities playing to an estimated 4.9 million fans. The numbers hold up offstage too: more than 200 million records sold worldwide, 84 million in the US alone, and a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2003. The influence runs from the new wave of British heavy metal bands such as Def Leppard that built on their riffs to Dave Grohl and Slash, who both count AC/DC among their formative favorites. Angus Young still tours in the schoolboy uniform he first wore in 1974, which means AC/DC tickets have promised the same thing in every era: guitars up, no frills, full voltage.