45 Years Ago: Bon Scott Plays His Final Show With AC/DC

AC/DC closed out their Highway to Hell tour on Jan. 27, 1980, with a makeup date in Southampton, U.K. No one knew it at the time but they were also playing their last show with Bon Scott on lead vocals.

Early 1980 saw the band's commercial fortunes shifting into high gear outside their native Australia. Highway to Hell was packed with some of their best songs. Helmed by incoming producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, the LP was AC/DC's first to crack the upper half of Billboard's Top 200, soaring all the way to No. 17 and sending the title track to No. 47 on the pop chart. With their fifth international release, AC/DC looked like they were poised for worldwide superstardom.

The band would, in fact, soon make that leap – but they'd sadly have to do it without Scott, who was found dead on Feb. 19, 1980. The singer's appetite for intoxication was well-known among his bandmates, but the details of his final night on Earth were tragically mundane: He went out drinking with some friends and overindulged. Then, after being left in his car with the driver's seat reclined so he could sleep it off, ended up choking to death on his own vomit.

READ MORE: AC/DC Albums Ranked Worst to Best

"For us, it was like losing a member of your family,” guitarist Angus Young would later admit. "It’s very, very difficult to go through something like that. Not only is it your friend, it’s also somebody you’ve been working with all that time."

Decades later, they'd be forced into a similar situation when the late co-founder Malcolm Young left the group amid health issues. The band decided to regroup and soldier on. Buoyed by support from Scott's surviving family, they went through the difficult process of hiring a new singer – then found the perfect new addition in former Geordie vocalist Brian Johnson.

The rest, as any AC/DC fan knows, is history: AC/DC re-emerged with Johnson at the mic mere months after Scott's death, sending their Back in Black album to stores on July 25, 1980. Both a tribute to their fallen mate and a top-to-bottom killer rock record, Black in Black picked up where Highway to Hell left off, giving the band its first Top 40 hits in the U.S. ("You Shook Me All Night Long" and the title track) and affirming its status as one of the bigger rock acts on the planet.

"It was kind of a go-for-broke," Angus Young reflected during a 2014 interview with UCR. "We really didn’t know if the people who knew AC/DC would accept this. Would they accept Brian? It was a lot of pressure on him. But I think he wanted to make it all happen."