Hundreds to play AC/DC’s ‘It’s A Long Way to the Top’ down Swanston Street

It’s been a while since Jody Steele has played the bagpipes regularly, but on Wednesday he too will hunker down and take to the air along with several hundred others to set a new world record for the largest ever ensemble performance on the Scottish instrument.

“I’ve already ticked a lot of the boxes in the pipe world,” says the 60-year-old, who first picked up the instrument (or acquired taste, if you prefer) at the age of 10, and whose playing has taken him to Edinburgh for the Royal Military Tattoo several times. “This is another tick on the list.”

The current world record was set in Bulgaria in 2012 with 333 pipers. But the organizers of this stabbing in Federation Square on Wednesday afternoon are confident that the number they have will exceed that.

What about song selection? AC/DCs It’s a Long Road to the Top (If You Want to Rock’n’Roll)Naturally, it’s a perfect choice, considering the band opened the Australian leg of their world tour at the MCG that night.

Meanwhile, backing band Amyl and the Sniffers, who are fresh off their Grammy nominations, announced they will play the Fed Square stage on Friday night at the last free public concert in space.

It’s been 50 years since AC/DC was recorded Long Road A few months later, Bon Scott, Angus and Malcolm Young, Phil Rudd and Mark Evans performed the song on a flatbed truck for a film clip. countdown (The second version is filmed in City Square).

There were three pipers from the Tobruk Rats, including Kevin Conlon and Les Kenfield, and both will be rocking again on Wednesday.

“I have so many memories of it,” Conlon, 88, says of his role in what has become one of the most iconic moments in Australian rock history. “But you have to understand that on that day, it was just another engagement. We had no idea that 50 years later we would still be talking about it.”

Conlon didn’t care much about rock ‘n’ roll then, and he still doesn’t. “But I heard this tune so many times, I loved it,” he says. He adds that it’s not only his favorite Accadacca piece, it’s the only one he knows.

When Bon Scott phoned and asked about the pipers, Conlon at first thought he had just been hired. “I didn’t know who he was,” he says. “I had never heard of the music or AC/DC.”

In fact, Scott played in a pipe band as a child, but only on drums. When he asked how long it would take to learn to play the bagpipes, he was told he would have to wait between nine months and a year. “And he said, ‘Oh, no, no, I want to be able to play these in about six weeks,'” Conlon recalls.

In the end, Scott decided to provide guidance on how to look convincing enough for the camera. So who actually played the solo on the track? Of course, this is a matter of some debate.

In some accounts, Scott steals it; Conlon, who knows the singer somewhat and says that Scott took “very good care” of him and his fellow pipers at the hotel, suggests that the riff was actually created on a synthesizer. However The most detailed (and likely) explanation comes from former bassist EvansHe played in the band from 1975 to 1977.

According to his account, the pipes were actually played together and clumsily by Malcolm Young and Phil Rudd, creating bursts of noise lasting only a few seconds. These “samples” were then looped by producer George Young (Angus and Malcolm’s older brother and a founding member of The Easybeats) to create the extended riff in the song.

In other words, it’s not fully synthesized, but it’s not far from it either.

However, on Wednesday, all the overalls will be alive. And although it’s traditionally a male-dominated field, there will be plenty of women with bags blowing in the wind, too.

“When I started, there weren’t many women,” says Deborah Clark, 70, who grew up in a family of pipers. “But it’s great to see that we’re pretty much on the same level now.”

He performed in Edinburgh, Red Square in Moscow and Tobruk. “[Former Libyan dictator Muammar] “Gaddafi actually paid for a private plane from Tripoli to Tobruk so we could go to the cemetery and do the service there,” he says. “He was a big fan of kaval music.”

Of course, not everyone is like that.

Steele’s parents enjoyed Scottish dancing but had little interest in it. Mull of Kintyre She could convince her mother of the musical merits of her daughter’s chosen instrument.

“He’s 96 now and has been living with it for many years,” says Steele. “But he has a saying: ‘I like bagpipes… when they stop.’”

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