It was one of those moments you never forget. It’s a memory that rises with a sharp pain in the back of my brain whenever I hear Highway To Hell or You Shook Me All Night Long, a memory tinged with regret, fear and revelation. It came again a few days ago while I watched a promo clip of the two-disc DVD AC/DC retrospective Plug Me In , which hits the stores this week. It’s the memory of my first encounter with AC/DC. Not pleasant at all.

In Melbourne Australia’s music capital in late 1974 there was already a buzz about this new band from Sydney. It had something to do with pedigree. Scottish Г©migrГ©s Angus and Malcolm Young were the younger brothers of George Young, co-founder of the Easybeats with Harry Vanda, Australia’s fabled first real internationally recognized rock ‘n’ roll band.

George and Harry were enormously talented songwriters and producers, whose string of hits in the mid-1960s, co-written with Easybeats singer Stevie Wright, included Friday on My Mind, She’s So Fine, Wedding Ring and Come and See Her, among others. All were benchmark achievements in the development of a distinctive, original and innovative strain of indigenous Oz-rock in the post-Beatles boom years.

Harry and George were smart, rich and, still in their 30s, head poobahs of their own mighty publishing and production empire. That they had chosen to invest their wisdom, money and experience in George’s younger brothers unknown quantities in the domestic rock ‘n’ roll circuit in which myself and my band, Country Radio, were among countless road-sore veterans signalled something more important than nepotism.