A plumber once told a music journalist that Brian Johnson had been mistaken for a groundskeeper by a young apprentice while he was working on a palatial pad a few months back, and the AC/DC frontman answered with a line that sounded more like a pub joke than a superstar’s comeback: “Aye, and I’ve never made much of the bastard’s music either,” before riding off on his motorbike.
The story, impossible to corroborate, fits the portrait Johnson has long projected offstage: plain-spoken, funny and willing to poke at his own legend. It is the same quality that runs through a separate account he later gave about a night in Scotland with the late Malcolm Young, when the pair took their Land Rovers on a trip around the country and ended up chasing the Loch Ness monster with fireworks.
Johnson said Young had a big box of fireworks with him when they checked into a hotel right on the side of the loch. “We both had these Land Rovers, and we’d taken them for a trip around Scotland – Malcolm loved his fireworks, and he’d taken a big box with him,” Johnson said. He said the two were “four sheets to the wind” when Young suggested, “C’mon, let’s go and find the Loch Ness monster! I’ve got fireworks, and it might attract it,” then headed into the water in their shoes and went “up to their knees” in freezing water.
Johnson’s account, later repeated to 60 Minutes Australia after he had first told the story to NME, is less about the monster than about Young’s appetite for chaos. He said Young had a drink in one hand and a box of fireworks in the other while trying to set fire to the loch. “What a night,” Johnson said. “It was just nights like that when you just thought, how daft and fun was that?”
That mix of mischief and warmth is why the anecdotes land. Johnson, the frontman of AC/DC, comes across in both stories as a man happy to be underestimated, whether by a plumber’s apprentice or by a loch that refused to produce a monster. He said of Young, “That was Malcolm with his fireworks,” and added, “It was just hilarious. Well, at least I laughed.”
That is the answer both stories give in the end: Brian Johnson is not playing a role in them. He is simply sounding like himself, and that may be the most revealing thing about him.
