Glasgow Apollo (site) — where If You Want Blood was recorded

The Glasgow Apollo at 126 Renfield Street was one of the most storied rock venues in Britain — a converted cinema that held around 3,000 people and developed, through the 1970s and 1980s, a reputation for producing the most intense audiences in the country. Glasgow crowds were not passive. They arrived wound up, they demanded everything the band had, and when a band delivered, the response was something that visiting musicians described as unlike anything else in their experience. The venue itself was falling apart — the balcony shook, the sightlines were poor, the PA was never quite adequate — but none of that mattered, because the room had a quality that no amount of technical adequacy could manufacture.

On April 30, 1978, AC/DC played the Glasgow Apollo on their Powerage tour, and the show was recorded. The resulting album — If You Want Blood (You've Got It) — was released in October 1978 and is among the finest live rock albums ever made. Bon Scott is in commanding form; the band plays with the controlled fury of people who know exactly what they are. "Let There Be Rock" — the album's centrepiece, eleven minutes of escalating noise that somehow keeps getting faster and tighter rather than collapsing — captures what the band were in a small room in 1978 in a way that no studio recording could. The Glasgow audience is audible throughout, exactly as loud as you would expect.

The Apollo was demolished in 1987 after years of declining bookings and structural concerns. A plaque on the Renfield Street facade of the building that replaced it marks the site. For the city that produced Angus and Malcolm Young — who were born in Glasgow before emigrating to Sydney — the Apollo recording is a particular piece of homecoming: the two brothers who left as children, returning to the city of their birth to record something that would outlast the room it was made in.