AC/DC – Touch Too Much (1979)

“There was a lot of buzz about us”, Angus Young recalled. “‘And a girl asked me, ‘Well, what would you call the tour?’ And I said, ‘It’s a fucking highway to hell'”. 

That offhand remark gave AC/DC the title for the album they were about to record. And fittingly enough, the making of it turned out to be its own kind of highway to hell, thanks to a rough start in the studio with producer Eddie Kramer. The idea was to take the band to the next level after their early records with Vanda & Young, but it just didn’t click. The Young brothers thought Kramer was trying too hard to mold them into something closer to the Rolling Stones. So they scrapped everything and started over.

Enter a young Robert John “Mutt” Lange. He didn’t have (yet) the legendary résumé Kramer did, but he’d made some noise with the Boomtown Rats and quickly hit it off with the Aussies, though not by being a pushover. In fact, he and Bon Scott clashed more than once. New songs like ‘Touch Too Much’ had more melodic vocal lines than Bon was used to, and Mutt pushed him to stretch beyond his usual snarl.

In the book ‘AC/DC: Maximum Rock’n’Roll’ by Engleheart/Durieux, Ian Jeffery, the band’s longtime tour manager, remembered one of those moments vividly: “A couple of times Bon would come in and say, ‘Okay, you cunt! You think you can fucking sing it? You sing it!’ And Mutt would just sit there and sing it in his seat because he’s a trained singer. Bon would stop in his tracks and say, ‘Okay, cunt, I can do it’”.

Lange brought in new studio techniques to thicken the sound while keeping that raw, streetwise AC/DC punch. One of his innovations was a heavier use of backing vocals. ‘Touch Too Much’, with its anthemic shout-along chorus, was the perfect example. “We did the backup vocals for the ‘Touch Too Much’ during the mixing time – recalled engineer Tony Platt in the same book – and I remember sitting there and going, ‘Fuck, this is going to be huge! This is going to be a massive single!’”.

The track did reasonably well, reaching No. 29 in the UK and even landing the band a ‘Top Of The Pops’ appearance, just two weeks before Bon Scott’s untimely death, in what turned out to be the only known public performance of the song with its original singer. After that tragedy, ‘Touch Too Much’ quietly disappeared, loved by diehards but ignored by the Brian Johnson–led lineup.

Decades later, the song made an unexpected comeback in the setlist when Axl Rose stepped in on vocals for AC/DC’s 2016 tour. He called it his favorite AC/DC track, and the band finally gave it a shot live, only to never dust it off again when Johnson returned behind the mic a few years later.

For the trivia-minded: back in 1977, the band had already recorded a completely different song called ‘Touch Too Much’ (later included in the 1997 Bonfire box set). Apart from the title, it shared nothing — not the music, not the lyrics — with the ‘Highway To Hell’ classic.

🟥 Song Story is a series of articles about famous hits and forgotten deep cuts, tracing their origins, detours, and legacy. A full index can be found here.