30 Years After The Death Of Bon Scott

I’ve spoken about Bon Scott’s death before and am re-working another Back In Black piece from year’s prior, but I can’t ignore the 30th anniversary of Bon’s passing without saying something.

Has it been that long?

My cousin and I are fixated on his passing and with the subsequent album Back In Black. More recently-on the completely unreliable Blabbermouth comment section-several people alluded to the fact that UFO knew about some of the foul play involved with Bon’s passing.

To bring you up to speed, the official story went like this:

Bon Scott had spent the first few weeks of February, 1980, writing songs for the next AC/DC album On February 19, he went to AC/DC’s tour manager Ian Jeffrey’s house for dinner and left around 6:30pm. He was to meet UFO’s Phil Mogg and Pete Way at the Music Machine, a venue in London. They never arrived. Bon continued drinking-reportedly consuming at least seven double whiskeys at the bar until it closed around 3:00 am on the morning of the 20th. A long-time friend, Alistar Kinnear, was with Scott at the time and offered to drive him home.

When they reached Scott’s apartment, Bon had passed out and Kinnear was unable to move him. Kinnear proceeded on to his own home where he went inside to retrieve a blanket. He went back out to the car, reclined the seat (bad move) covered up his still passed-out friend and retired into his home. He put a note on the blanket with his address and phone number, in case Scott woke up disoriented in these unusual surroundings.

Fifteen hours later, he left his flat and saw Scott still in the car and totally unresponsive. Kinnear freaked and drove the body to King’s College Hospital where they determined that Scott had inhaled some of his own vomit while passed out in the car.

And we all know you can’t really dust for vomit.

Much has been raised about the nature of his death-it was a very cold night in London and others (including Ozzy Osbourne) have speculated that he passed from hypothermia. Others questioned why Kinnear chose to leave Bon outside in the cold and even a few suggested foul play. It didn’t help that the local press misspelled Kinnear’s name, fueling conspiracy theories and suggesting that Scott didn’t really die at all.

Bon Scott doesn’t seem like someone who would go to any lengths to construct his own disappearance. As a man rooted in blue collar upbringing, he was doing what he loved best with AC/DC and all of his/their hard work was starting to pay off at the time of his passing.

And to blame Kinnear for his death is unnecessary. I’m sure the man was plagued with guilt the moment he saw Scott’s cold body still in his car. Scott was an adult with a drinking problem, and to think that someone was supposed to babysit him after he chose to overindulge is not fair. I look back on my own life and I recall more than one occasion where someone was left in their car to sleep it off, based entirely on the fact that lifting a grown man up some stairs while trying to get them into a residence just wasn’t about to happen.

One Blabbermouth commenter suggested “They (UFO) have a good idea what happened but refuse to talk about it.” Another commenter suggests that UFO were also around The Pretenders’ James Honeyman-Scott on the night that he passed.

Weird. Any insight to either of these would be appreciated.

But the real story for my cousin and I is what happened after Scott died. There were reports that members of Albert Productions-AC/DC production company-later visited Scott’s flat and exited with some personal belongings, namely a notepad with lyrics and song ideas. The only proof to this is how quickly the band developed Back In Black after Bon died, with a new singer who has gone on record to suggest that songwriting is not his strongest suit and that he has a particularly difficult time composing material with his new bandmates for Back In Black.

When you look at the songwriting credits after Back In Black, you’ll notice that Brian Johnston’s name suddenly evaporates, and on the tracks that he does receive compositional credits on, they’re worthless. No where near the level of Bon’s material and not even close to the songs that appeared on Back In Black.

It’s been suggested that Back In Black was, for the most part, completed and ready to record when Bon died. After all, Scott was using his time in London to finish up some songwriting duties.

There’s also speculation that there is demo material which contains songs from Back In Black featuring Bon Scott on lead vocals. The Young brothers deny this and have yet to produce any recorded evidence of it, and why should they? Back In Black is one of the world’s most successful albums and to admit that most of it was created with Bon still in the band would mean they’d have to correct the songwriting credits and provide the estate of Bon Scott with a huge windfall of royalty checks.

I’m not suggesting foul play, but Back In Black does sound like the work of a new band following the same pattern as their former frontman. And after a few albums in with Brian at the helm, they sound like a completely different band (lyrically) again, admittedly not one with the same level of lyrics that they’d managed before. Of course, some suggest that the band continued lifting from Scott’s notebook all the way to Flick Of The Switch before completely running out of material, forcing them to come up with things on their own.

And what did they come up with? “Sink The Pink.”

Nothing would change if the truth did come out or if these accusations were systematically dismantled by the band (Maybe they have been; provide links in the comment section if you know), but I’d sure like to hear how these songs sounded with Bon up front, even in their skeletal form. It’s selfish, I know, but it’s also selfish to keep Scott out of the picture of one of the most successful albums of all times if he indeed had a hand in creating it.

Adding to the drama? Alister Kinnear went missing at sea over three years ago and was just recently listed as officially declared dead.