Evans subsequently paid a visit to the band – at that time living in the legendary share house in St Kilda – and was given a copy of AC/DC’s first album, High Voltage, to learn. “I learnt the songs over night, and by the Tuesday night I was playing bass at the Station Hotel,” Evans laughs. “So it all happened pretty quickly!”
With help of an appearance on Countdown – who can ever forget Bon Scott dressed as a schoolgirl, smoking a fag and sending shivers down the spine of every parent in the country – extensive radio play of the band’s cover of Baby Please Don’t Go and a new management company, AC/DC gradually reached its career goals. “You could see everything growing week by week,” Evans says.
Evans went on to play on TNT, Dirty Deeds, Let There Be Rock and the Jailbreak EP. AC/DC had already established a presence in the UK, and the Young brothers’ intense ambition – complimented by Bon Scott’s leering rock’n’roll showmanship – was paying dividends. In 1977, with the band’s star still on the ascent, Evans was taken aside by Angus and Malcolm Young and told that he was no longer in AC/DC. “I knew there were tensions in the band at the time, but I put it down to the fact that Dirty Deeds had been rejected in the States,” Evans says.
35 years after being kicked out of AC/DC, and over 20 years since he last spoke to his former bandmates, and there isn’t the slightest element of bitterness in Evans’ recollections of the events that led to his departure, and the behaviour of the Young brothers. “Over the years I’ve come to realise that Angus and Malcolm were put on Earth to create that band,” Evans says. “It’s almost impossible to match their commitment – they are truly brilliant. The way I look at it, if I was exactly the right person for that band, I’d still be there,” he says.
Evans has, however, decided to set the record straight regarding his tenure in AC/DC, with a newly published memoir, Dirty Deeds: My Life Inside and Outside AC/DC, describing Evans’ time in AC/DC, augmented with stories of Evans’ encounters with other notable rock’n’roll personalities, including Gene Simmons, George Harrison and Alice Cooper.
These days Evans plays alongside former Buffalo singer Dave Tice in Tice and Evans. With Tice currently travelling through Europe, Evans is taking a well-earned break from gigging, and heads down to Melbourne later this week to attend the Back in the Day event at the Portland Hotel in the city, at which he’ll be signing copies of Dirty Deeds. While Evans is happy with his lot these days, he admits to the odd moment when he wonders what might have been, had he remained in AC/DC. “But I learned very early on in life that there’s no real point in labouring what happened in the past – you can influence the future, but you can’t change the past,” Evans says.
