Geordie – Goodbye Love

Five years before AC/DC, Brian Johnson was broke and singing pop-disco on German TV

In 1975 Brian Johnson drove a 14-year-old Volkswagen Beetle. He fronted a band with a UK Top 10 hit to its name, he had a mortgage and two children to support, and by his own account he was completely broke. Late that September the band, Geordie, traveled to Baden-Baden to perform a new single, Goodbye Love, on the West German show Pop ’75. The appearance changed nothing for Geordie. Five years later Johnson was the singer of AC/DC, which is why this clip of a voice almost nobody was listening to is worth watching.

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Geordie had peaked early. The Newcastle band had come together in February 1972 with Vic Malcolm on guitar, Tom Hill on bass, Brian Gibson on drums and Johnson singing. Signed to EMI, they reached No.6 in Britain in 1973 with All Because of You. Can You Do It made No.13 and Electric Lady No.32, and then the hits stopped. Their 1974 album, Don’t Be Fooled by the Name, failed to chart at all. EMI never dropped them. The records simply stopped selling, and the band drifted. Johnson summed up the mood years later in his autobiography, The Lives of Brian: “It was hard to care when no one else did.”

Germany was the exception. Black Cat Woman had reached the German Top 40 in 1974, so a booking on West German television was worth taking seriously. Pop ’75 was the second season of Pop, a music show that had started the year before and ran until 1979, broadcast on the SWR and HR networks. Hans-Jürgen Kliebenstein hosted the edition Geordie played, and the bill gives a sense of how scattered pop was that autumn: 5000 Volts, the disco act fronted by Tina Charles; Linda Lewis; the Austrian folk singer Georg Danzer; the Italian group I Santo California; and the German composer Rolf-Hans Müller.

A band without its songwriter

The Geordie on that stage was not the band that had made the hits. Vic Malcolm, the original guitarist and the writer of their chart singles, left in 1975, and Micky Bennison took his place. By September, Allan Bradley had replaced Gibson behind the drums, so only Johnson and Hill remained from the band that recorded All Because of You. With Malcolm gone, the single came from outside writers, Brian Alterman and Mike Green, and from producer Pip Williams. EMI released Goodbye Love as a single on June 27, 1975, with She’s a Lady on the B-side. Bennison opens it with a guitar fanfare before the song settles into a pop-disco groove, a long way from the stomp of the band’s early hits. Johnson sings it clean and tuneful, without the rasp the world would come to know.

The single did not chart, and the royalties never came. Geordie released one more album, Save the World, in 1976, with Goodbye Love among its tracks, and Johnson left after it. The band’s 1978 album, No Good Woman, carried three of his unreleased tracks alongside new material without him. Johnson kept a version of Geordie playing the working men’s clubs of North East England, which is where he was when his phone rang in 1980.

The singer Bon Scott remembered

The call went back to a night earlier in the decade, when Bon Scott’s band was supporting Geordie. Johnson sang that show with appendicitis, writhing on the floor and still singing, and Scott took it for an act. He later told the Young brothers about the singer he had seen on the floor, kicking and screaming. After Scott died on February 19, 1980, Angus and Malcolm Young remembered the story. Johnson auditioned in March, got the job, and made his debut with AC/DC on Back in Black.

That is what makes Goodbye Love more than a curiosity. It shows a working singer doing what the market seemed to want in 1975, with the voice of Back in Black nowhere in sight. The single’s failure kept Johnson unclaimed, singing in clubs in the North East, when the one band that remembered him needed a singer. Without that failure, and the second-hand memory of a night in pain, the call might never have come.