Number 7 – AC/DC & Yothu Yindi – Jailbreak

AC/DC are beyond criticism, really. Beloved, genuinely global and singular. They hit paydirt the minute the Young brothers started playing together. They’re the only band to come close to matching Queen’s monolithic Wembley concerts in 1986, when they played River Plate in Buenos Aires in 2009. Watching 65,000 people chant and headbang their way through Thunderstruck is really quite something. In many ways, it was the ‘true’ band’s last hurrah, because Malcolm Young – who was already struggling to remember how to play songs he’d written – was soon forced to retire due to the dementia that would claim his life in 2017.

But AC/DC carried on, as we all know. After all, when it comes to persevering after loss, they own the rule book. Losing a singer of the talent and charisma of Bon Scott would’ve ended most bands. But AC/DC released Back in Black with a new singer, Brian Johnston (officially one the world’s most jovial gentleman), and proceeded to sell fifty million copies of it. Bon Who?

Hardly. In the same way that Queen will always be defined by Freddie Mercury even thirty-plus years after his death, AC/DC will forever be linked with the burning spirit of Bon. He was as cheeky as John Lennon, dirtier than a mechanic’s rag, and sang rock and roll like a motherfucker steeped in the blues. The list of great AC/DC songs just from Bon’s time in the band is peerless. And the song I’ve put at number 7 of my list might not even crack the AC/DC top 20 for many serious fans. Too bad. For me, ‘Jailbreak’ is the one.

Released in ’76, it deviates from the band’s increasingly indelible ‘root’n’run’ template. Of course, it was compatible with it, though; this time, it was get yerself on the run, in order to get the … well, you know. It’s a proxy narrative, in that the central character isn’t Bon himself, but his friend. A man found guilty of murder, sentenced to life, and determined to break out. The song’s circling riff is a filthy grind that somehow conveys torpor and desperation simultaneously. There’s the rage of the cuckhold at its core, in that the friend admits to a gun fight after finding his woman with another man, who, when all the kerfuffle is over, lies dead on a ground ‘with a hole in his body where his life had been'. Interestingly, there’s never an admission of guilt. Denial? Reasonable doubt?

I think these questions miss the point somewhat, because the desire for ‘liberty’ is at the song’s core. The escape from chains. For a nation with such a significant crime and convict thread in its national tapestry, the song resonates beyond its three chords, because the bloke who dies trying is heroic in the eyes of a nation that deifies Ned Kelly. Australia’s national identity is as elusive as any other nation, but giving zero fucks to authority is as tangible a part of it as anyone can lay a finger on. Yeah, he died, but he had a bloody good crack. We like that stuff. But ‘Jailbreak’ became so much more than this the minute it was covered by Yothu Yindi.

.

Yothu Yindi are known globally for their song, Treaty, released in 1991. The first song to reach the Australian top ten with lyrics partially sung in Language. A pulsing, danceable track, the band performed it at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics. Hearing the song’s Yolngu words sung by the great Dr Yunupingu over nothing but didgeridoo and clapping sticks remains one of my favourite Australian moments, and I don’t just mean Australian musical moments. This was historic, and its power endures.

A few years later, the band recorded a version of ‘Jailbreak’ for an AC/DC tribute album called Fuse/Box, released in 1995. Lots of pretty cool covers largely recorded by lesser known, independent bands. Nothing stands out like this version of ‘Jailbreak’, though, because as good as those bands are, they can’t compete with the power of context.

A Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody commenced in 1987. It concluded in 1991 and affirmed what was well known; Aboriginal people were (and still are) horrifically over-represented in Australian prisons. And despite the enduring bastardry that blames Aboriginal people themselves for this, the overwhelming evidence as to the cause is the brutal and enduring legacy of invasion, dispossession and disadvantage. As such, a song that places an Indigenous man in prison is immediately more powerful than one that doesn’t.

But Yothu Yindi don’t stop there. The sound is bigger, as befits something recorded 19 years later than the original. They add clapping sticks, didgeridoo, and chunkier bottom end. There is a slightly more embittered tone to the vocal which helps some of the lyrics resonate differently. The desire to see the sky and the wish to fly have a spirit quality to them that rings with a different kind of pain. And this time, the instrumental breakdown, unlike the one in ‘Treaty’, becomes incredibly dark. Kick drum pulse. Didgeridoo droning. Ominous enough to unsettle Joseph Conrad.

And then, the lyrics change. We don’t get ‘bullets flying’. Instead, we get ‘spirits dying’. And worse, ‘no point trying’. The original song’s protagonist makes it out with a ‘bullet in his back’. This one does so … ‘with a sheet around his neck’. When I first heard that, I literally shivered. This is so much more than a cover, I thought. This isn’t even rebellion. It’s a howl made of pure steel.

Anyone who’s heard Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower knows that a cover can surpass the original. I’m not sure if that’s happened here exactly, but I know that Yothu Yindi’s version of ‘Jailbreak’ matters more to me than the original. To me, it stands equal with any act of culturally subversive hybridity that I’ve ever heard. Hybridity, for those who’ve spent less time around post-colonial literary theory than I have, is when the colonised (invaded) culture repurpose something from the invading culture in order to fight back against invasion and oppression. AC/DC were, by 1976, deeply significant to Australian culture. They were white blokiness personified. To turn one of their songs into a musical version of a Black Panther salute was magnificent. I only wish that more people knew about it. Or, for that matter, just listened to it, because it’s an absolutely smoking version of a song of hot coals in petrol-vapor world.

Play them LOUD.