10 October 1975
Well, if it’s 10 October, it’s… YES, THAT’S RIGHT: the 49th anniversary of the time AC/DC singer Bon Scott made a singer from another Aussie band drink his piss out of a roast turkey.
Now, this is one of those stories which is difficult to pin down precisely, but apparently it happened backstage at Australia’s King Of Pop awards, and IMDB says they took place on 10 October 1975.
…and this article about the history of the show remarks on the fact that 1971’s show was taped the night before, and if that was remarkable, it suggests that they normally went out live, so I’m working on the basis that the incident took place on the date of broadcast.
Anyway, AC/DC had had a gold album in Australia — High Voltage — and were doing everything they could to achieve international success: playing “four gigs a day, seven days a week”, and even appearing in department stores. So, a dumb awards show typically won by whoever was popular at the time with teenyboppers was presumably a fuck-it-it’ll-get-us-some-profile kind of gig.
The King of Pop awards, incidentally, did have a female category — it was called ‘Best Female’ until 1972, when the women finally got ‘royal’ status with the men. I do not believe the sexism of the event was what led AC/DC to view it with scorn, however.
According to AC/DC — Maximum Rock & Roll, it was “having to deal with hugging and kissing music industry people [that] was at the outer limit of their tolerance”. Which was, perhaps, why, at the awards dinner, Bon Scott produced “an enormous vibrator in front of a TV executive”. Then
with a few drinks under his belt, the singer acted out the great divide that existed between AC/DC and the rest of the music industry.
In the backstage hospitality area, Bon set about literally tearing his way through piles of TV Week magazines with wild-eyed contempt. Not long after, the sight of a turkey on one of the tables got his mind racing. He filled its body cavity with champagne, which he drank in between taking mouthfuls of the bird just to keep his stamina up. Enter Sherbet’s Daryl Braithwaite, who accepted Bon’s offer to take a few swigs of the bubbly sacrament. The AC/DC frontman stood to one side and watched, roaring with laughter: it had been a big night and he had had to relieve himself somewhere.
There is a wider question here about the attitude that rock is better than beastly, inferior ‘pop’ music — and it’s a valid one. Each to their own, and who’s to say that Kylie, for example, is a lesser artist than AC/DC? But Sherbet perpetrated this
…so you could argue that they got what was coming to them. And, earlier the same year, AC/DC had got into a punch-up with Deep Purple, so it wasn’t just ‘pop’ they had a problem with.
Also…
On the subject of arguably justified violence, er… ‘happy’ 87th anniversary of the day Oswald Mosley tried to sell fascism to Liverpudlians — and someone concussed him with a brick.
I haven’t written that one up, so if you can stomach a local newspaper website:
…that’s a pretty good summary.
