Up until December 2013 when an internet campaign was launched to get them to number one for Christmas, AC/DC held the record for the most UK hit singles without making the top 10. The campaign failed to get them to the top, but a mass of downloads allowed Highway to Hell to reach number four giving them their biggest UK hit. This week I tell the story of their first hit of the 1990s, Thunderstruck.

AC/DC were formed in Sydney, Australia by the Young brothers, Malcolm and Angus. Their original lead singer was Dave Evans who was replaced within a year by Bon Scott. By the time of their debut album, High Voltage, in 1975 the remainder of the line-up comprised Mark Evans on bass, and Phil Rudd on drums. In 1977 Evans was replaced by Cliff Williams who continued until 2016. Following the tragic early death of Bon Scott in 1980, aged just 33, the band were going to call it a day, but then reconsidered when they figured Scott would have wanted them to carry on and began looking fora new lead singer. A few were considered including Noddy Holder who declined because he had further plans for Slade and so Brian Johnson, the former lead singer with Geordie got the job and led the way until 2016 when former Guns N’ Roses vocalist Axl Rose replaced him. Angus’ gimmick was always to be in school uniform and even at the age of 62 he doesn’t look too out of place.

Many fans consider their early material the best, but Brian did a great job, they had top 20 hits in the eighties with Rock ‘N’ Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution, Let’s Get It Up, For Those About To Rock (We Salute You), Who Made Who and Heatseeker. Their first hit of the nineties was also their biggest – discounting the aforementioned Highway to Hell – Thunderstruck got to number 13 in 1990.

The tune came about by accident really as Angus described in the sleeve notes of the parent album Powerage, “It started off from a little trick that I had on guitar. I played it to Mal and he said, ‘Oh I’ve got a good rhythm idea that will sit well in the back.’ We built the song up from that. We fiddled about with it for a few months before everything fell into place.” Angus Young explained in The Story of AC/DC: Let There Be Rock, “I created the distinctive opening guitar part by playing with all the strings taped up, except the B. It was a studio trick I learned from my older brother George Young, who produced some of AC/DC’s albums and was in a band called The Easybeats. Lyrically, it was really just a case of finding a good title. We came up with this thunder thing and it seemed to have a good ring to it. AC/DC = Power. That’s the basic idea.”

They continued to released singles and albums throughout the nineties including Ballbreaker and in the 2000s with Stiff Upper Lip and Black Ice which, in 2008, gave them their second chart-topping album, 28 years after their first. To accompany the latter they set out of a 20-month world tour which took in 168 shows. During that tour some shows had to be rescheduled due to Brian Johnson receiving treatment for ulcers. The album was released worldwide but in the US it was only sold exclusively at Walmart, Sam’s Club and the band’s official website.

In 1988 they were inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association’s Hall of Fame and 15 years later into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In April 2014, Malcolm announced, via the AC/DC Facebook page, that he will be retiring from the band due to ill health but would be replaced in the studio by his nephew Stevie. Sadly Malcolm died in November 2017, just one month after his older brother George who, as mentioned earlier, produced much of the band’s early material.

Their sales figures are astronomical, by 2007, their 1980 album Back in Black had sold 22 million in the US alone which made it the fifth-best-selling album of all-time over there. Their total record sales exceed 72 million and are currently the fifth best-selling band of all time.

Thunderstruck was featured in the 1999 film Varsity Blues for which they charged a mammoth $500,000 for its use. The film’s music supervisor, Thomas Golubic, said at the time, “I remember being absolutely horrified when I heard that number, we spent a lot of time coming up with what we thought were great alternates, but there was going to be no budget on that, and they had money so they paid for it.”

Some singers have such a command of a song that the listener is convinced it’s their own song. One such singer is Marvin Gaye who famously had a number one and is synonymous with I Heard It Through the Grapevine, but he didn’t write it nor record it first. Smokey Robinson recorded it first in 1966 and Gladys Knight recorded it the following year and her version was released first. The Isley Brothers and Willie Bobo both did it in the same year, but Gaye took it to number one on both sides of the Atlantic. But this week I focus on another Marvin Gaye track, also previously recorded by Smokey Robinson, which hit the UK top 10 in 1970 and written about four dead men.

The song is Abraham, Martin and John, I’ll come to the fourth later, which was written by the Indiana-born songwriter called Dick Holler who had been a member of band called the Dixie Cats in the mid-fifties which also included the singer Jimmy Clanton. Holler was a member of a number of different bands until the early sixties when he began to concentrate on songwriting. In 1966 he wrote a song called Snoopy vs the Red Baron which was recorded by a Florida band called The Royal Guardsmen and made number two in the US and number eight in the UK.

The following year he wrote Abraham Martin and John and gave it to the Royal Guardsmen who recorded the demo. The men in question are Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, three iconic figures who campaigned for civil rights in America. The last four lines of the song are, ‘Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby, can you tell me where he’s gone? I thought I saw him walkin’ up over the hill With Abraham, Martin and John,’ which is a reference to JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy who was also an American politician and civil rights campaigner specialising in the fight against organised crime and the Mafia. The song was recorded just two months after Robert’s death.

Dick Holler, who had actually written the song on the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated, played the demo to the head of Laurie records who thought it would be ideal for one of his former artists whose hit making days of the late fifties and early sixties had come to an end due to a drug addiction, but was now clean and looking to get his career back on track, that singer was Dion DiMucci. He had approached his former label looking to renew his contract and offered them a song he’d written about his drug problem called Daddy Rollin’ They were happy to but also told him they wanted him to record Abraham, Martin and John, they showed him the sheet music and Dion instantly hated it and refused to record it. In return Laurie refused to renew his contract. He eventually relented and it’s often cited that either his mother-in-law or producer Phil Gernhard first made Dion realise what the song was about, he didn’t get it. Gernhard claims that it was when Dion had to perform the song live with an acoustic guitar on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour because there was a musicians strike, that he finally understood its sentiment.

Dion said in his 1988 memoir, The Wanderer, “If it had been up to me, Abraham, Martin and John would have stayed just a young songwriter’s dream. I realised that what these four guys — Lincoln, King, and the Kennedys — had in common was a dream. It was like they had the courage to believe that a state of love really can exist… Abraham, Martin and John was a way of reminding people that they could aspire to great things, even in the midst of tragedy and confusion.” He did the song in one take but was irked that his song was relegated to the b side.

What’s always made me curious is that the song is sung in the order of Abraham, John and Martin. Admittedly if it had been called that it would be more of a mouthful to say, but why didn’t they sing the second and third verses the other way round?

The song was the last real success for both the singer and the writer. Dion never returned to the US top 50 again and Holler, who continued to write songs for the like of James and Bobby Purify, Petula Clark, The Bellamy Brothers and Cher, never had another chart hit. Dion once claimed that he had received over 4,000 letters thanking him for recording it.

Abraham, Martin and John has been covered by many people and in many diverse genres including Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Kenny Rogers, Bon Jovi, Tori Amos, Mahalia Jackson, Andy Williams, Whitney Houston, Cliff Richard, Paul Weller, Harry Belfonte, Marillion, Seasick Steve and even Dr Spock aka Leonard Nimmoy. The only UK hit version was by Marvin Gaye who never charted in his native country, however four versions did make the US top 40; Dion took it to number four, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles made number 33 in 1969, the black comedienne Moms Mabley made number 35 the same year and was the oldest person to debut on the Billboard chart – she was 75 at the time, and the radio DJ Tom Clay made number eight in 1971 when he combined his version into a six-minute medley with Jackie DeShannon’s What The World Needs Now is Love. His version included snatches of speech from both the Kennedys and Luther King and has children defining ‘bigotry’ and ‘segregation’, which, as Spencer Leigh pointed out, is audio journalism at its best.

One of the song’s poignant line is ‘it seems the good die young’ and that is true of Marvin Gaye who was shot dead by his father the day before his 45th birthday. Dion continues to make music, his last album in 2016 being New York Is My Home of which the title track was a duet with Paul Simon. As for Dick Holler, he’s just celebrated his 83rd birthday and in 2007 was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. He currently has two homes, one in Switzerland and the other in Georgia, but returns to his native Baton Rouge, Louisiana for an annual reunion at the Baton Rouge Eagles’ Club.

The first hit single to use the term rock and roll in the title was Kay Starr’s 1956 number one hit Rock and Roll Waltz, the generally held view is that John Lennon was the first person to include the f-word in a song which he did in Working Class Hero in 1970, but Al Stewart actually who beat him by two years when he included it in his 1969 song Love Chronicles, but do you know who the first person to use the word reggae was?

Well it was Toots Hibbert; in an interview with Outline he explained its origins, “Yeah I’m the one who came up with the word reggae and is still very strong all over the world. Young people try to do it but they don’t capture it the way myself, Bob Marley and many other originals did. People are always trying to spell it reggae but I spell it reggay! The word was coming from the roots of Kingston in Jamaica. If someone didn’t dress properly then we called it reggae. You know, the word originally came from the streets but I was the first to coin it in a song.” People learnt about reggae from Toots and the Maytals and that first he recorded was called Do the Reggay.

Toots was born Frederick Hibbert in Jamaica and has just turned 75, as a teenager he moved to Jamaica’s capital, Kingston and met two musicians, Jerry Matthias and Raleigh Gordon who got together to form The Maytals and very quickly became a popular attraction in Kingston. In 1972 they appeared in Reggae’s most influential film The Harder They Come which starred Jimmy Cliff and featured an appearance by Prince Buster as the club DJ. The Maytals sang Sweet and Dandy and Pressure Drop the latter of which many have covered including the Specials, but the only act to chart with it was former Guns N’ Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin whose version starts in a rock style and then the last 45 seconds turns into reggae.

Although it was requested by Mick Blee it’s actually for his cousin Gary who is a singer and has recorded a song called The Old East End Tonight which is featured in a recent film called The Rise of the Foot Soldier 3. Gary often sings at a club in Hornchuch in Essex and always getting requests for a song called Monkey Man as originally recorded by The Maytals. With lyrics like ‘Tell you baby, you huggin up the big monkey man’, ‘I’ve seen no sign of you, I only heard of you huggin up the big monkey man’ and ‘Now I know that, now I understand you’re turning a monkey on me’ he wondered what it was all about.

Well it seems a simple explanation as Toots revealed, “Well Monkey Man is all about a girl, a very good looking girl. I fell in love with her and then a monkey-looking man took her away from me but I thought she was in love with me. The guy was ugly and not good looking like me, ha ha!” It’s not a song that has been covered much, but whether a white act could get away with it in the day and age is doubtful as someone will complain!

Toots has been working and touring now for six decades, “I arrange, create and produce, I like to just work, work, work by myself,” he says, but is still respected not just by reggae fans but his peers as well; in 2005 he sang with Willie Nelson on the song I’m a Worried Man which appeared on the former’s album Countryman. The following year a number of reggae artists came together to record a reggae version of Radiohead’s OK Computer, which was billed as Radiodread and Toots contributed Let Down. On New Year’s Eve 2011 at a private party Toots duetted with the Red Hot Chili Peppers on a version of Louie Louie.

Now he’s collaborating with dance act Major Lazer whose 2018 album Music is the Weapon features Toots contributing new alternate vocals to the track My Number which is based on arguably The Maytals’ most famous song 54-46 was My Number, which, if you’re wondering where that title came from, was Toots’ prison number when, in 1966, he served 18 months for marijuana possession.