Yngwie Malmsteen’s Opinion About Angus Young’s Guitar Playing
Yngwie Malmsteen and AC/DC's Angus Young - The Music Network / House of Blues
The extravagance of heavy metal in the rock scene is duly credited to the hardcore riff-meisters who are virtuosos of their craft. To earn praise from your most talented contemporaries in the field exceeds any material bounty. Metal guitarist prodigy Yngwie Malmsteen comments on AC/DC’s legendary lead guitarist Angus Young’s guitar play. Young has been known to add to AC/DC’s adrenaline driven performances with his own quirky energy, clad in his school uniform and beret, and his ever present duck walk while delivering face-melting riffs.
In an interview with Music Radar, Yngwie Malmsteen explains why he thinks Angus Young is a severely underrated guitarist. “He’s super-tasty and always good! It’s still blues, though, even when he does his big solo. Classical isn’t just little triplets here and there; it’s your entire mind being released from the pentatonic box – a linear kind of playing. And no-one really does that.”
“It’s all guitar players who listened to other guitar players who listened to other guitar players. That’s a very incestuous line, and what happens is people don’t leave the pentatonic boxes enough. To play classical, you need to throw everything away and think in a completely new manner. What’s my favourite AC/DC riff? I love them all, but Hells Bells is amazing,” Malmsteen continued.
Malmsteen also offered a compliment to rock and blues icon Eric Clapton, “I think maybe the first kind of blues I ever heard was John Mayall And The Bluesbreakers. I didn’t really even know who it was playing, but it kinda registered this was how you do the blues. And then Cream were really good… you could say it was the heavy metal for its time, for sure!
I don’t have any favourite Clapton solos as such, but there are certain songs like Stepping Out that I love. I’ve never met Eric Clapton, which is too bad because we’re both Strat and Ferrari men… he knows the deal, haha!”
Nothing beats a fellow artist who appreciates your craft with more gusto than the general public. We’re waiting on Angus Young’s reply on that one!
