Angus Young

Angus Young is a Scottish-Australian rock guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder of the hard-rock band AC/DC, whose 1973 founding alongside his older brother Malcolm Young and subsequent five-decade output produced one of the bestselling rock catalogs in popular-music history. He was born Angus McKinnon Young on March 31, 1955, in Glasgow, Scotland. His father William Young was a sheet-metal worker, and his mother Margaret Young was a homemaker. He was the youngest of eight children in a working-class Scottish family that emigrated to Sydney, Australia, in June 1963.

He grew up in the Sydney suburb of Burwood and attended Ashfield Boys High School, leaving school at 15. His older brother George Young — a member of the Australian band the Easybeats — provided early musical mentorship to him and to Malcolm.

His November 1973 co-founding of AC/DC with Malcolm Young, his adoption of the schoolboy stage uniform (modeled on his Ashfield school blazer, shorts, cap, and tie), and the band's 1976 international breakthrough with the Atlantic Records release of High Voltage produced his late-1970s international hard-rock public profile.

The band's albums Highway to Hell (1979), Back in Black (1980, recorded after singer Bon Scott's February 1980 death and now one of the bestselling albums of all time), For Those About to Rock (1981), and continued output through The Razors Edge (1990), Black Ice (2008), and Power Up (2020) sustained AC/DC's commercial position across five decades. His older brother Malcolm Young died of dementia in November 2017, leaving Angus as the band's sole remaining founding member. He married Dutch fan Ellen van Lochem in 1980.

His name Angus derives from the Gaelic Aonghas (meaning one strength or unique choice), the name of a Celtic god of love and youth in Irish mythology. Angus has been a traditional Scottish boys' name carried into the modern era.