It's strange calling a gig intimate when it features one giant bell and only four cannons. By AC/DC's Herculean standards, however, tonight's one-off gig is a discreet affair. Conspicuous by their absence are the pyrotechnics, the giant inflatable woman, the catwalk, the giant smoke-belching statues, and about half a dozen more cannons.
The thing is, of course, that few bands extant are in less need of props to flesh out their gigs. AC/DC's music stretches across the last three decades as a kind of indefatigable, never-ending boogie. Change is unimaginable. Modernisation is anathema. The world turns, wars and regimes come and go, fashion reinvents itself so many times that even theatrical hard rock becomes cool again. And all the while, AC/DC keep on going, utterly impervious to what's happening around them.
It's easy to lose touch with reality, one suspects, when you rarely play gigs to fewer than 30,000 people. For AC/DC, a venue with a roof on is a novelty, which makes this show to relaunch the Hammersmith Carling Apollo such a special one. Everything has been done to make it appear as significant an event as possible, with tickets at £10 that sell out in four minutes.
There's a fiendish system, too, that causes the venue to be besieged all day with fans queuing up for their tout-proof wristbands. As the TV crews hover, the whole endeavor feels like a brilliant publicity scam, not least for convincing us that this moderately cavernous venue is a cosy little club.
That said, when Angus Young begins his pantomime striptease during 'The Jack', it is possible to see the wrinkles like never before. When he pulls down his shorts at the end of a routine that becomes more surreal with every year, it's also something of a relief that his pants display the Union Jack rather than Carling's logo.
New pants, though, would be a digression from AC/DC's ancient script. Rock'n'roll traditionally fetishises the spontaneous and unpredictable. These are not big parts of an AC/DC show, where setlists, moves, even the leap before the drum riser with which Angus finishes every song, are graven in stone.
Yet there remains no better rock'n'roll band on the planet, and there's something astonishingly exciting about seeing these bizarre middle-aged men in relatively close proximity. Brian Johnson still exaggerates every gurn, like a comedy gnome, but his voice is less rasping than usual, not quite as battered by epic touring. In the show's one concession to encroaching age, he chooses not to swing from the bell which creaks down for 'Hell's Bells', as it has done for a good 20 years.
The setlist, needless to say, is almost entirely as expected: tonight the faint surprises are 'Rock'n'Roll Damnation' and 'If You Want Blood (You've Got It)', a couple of Bon Scott-era classics presumably rolled out to highlight the fact that AC/DC's wonderful back catalogue has recently been reissued. Everyone here knows all the words to everything, and there is a moment of vague pathos when a roomful of long-coupled men in their 30s and 40s sing along lustily to 'The Jack', a song about the loose women and sexually transmitted diseases they can't have encountered in decades.
Then there are the absolute classics: 'Back In Black'; the ecstatic arpeggios of 'Thunderstruck'; 'Whole Lotta Rosie'; the cannon-assisted 'For Those About To Rock'; 'Highway To Hell'; 'Let There Be Rock'. And the thought occurs: is it any wonder that AC/DC have played an almost identical set for the past 20 years when they've written so many of rock's greatest songs? If you'd come up with something as straightforwardly euphoric as 'You Shook Me All Night Long', surely you'd want to play it every working night for the rest of your life? This is what AC/DC do, and give every indication of doing forever.
Thank God for that.
