It takes a while to get to East Dulwich from the centre of the city. You ride the Victoria-line tube to Brixton and hop on the single-decker P4 bus. You rumble through posh Dulwich Village, and the best part of half an hour later you alight outside the grim tenements of the Lordship Lane high-rise council estate.
You walk a little way up the street, turn left by the Harvester pub, and Overhill Road is the second turning on the right. The first thing you notice is a tatty building on the corner called the Rockbank Hotel, and you can’t help but raise a wry smile.
Number 67 is at the top of steep gradient. And it ain’t a pretty sight. It’s a dour, featureless block of flats penned in by ranks of bright-green wheelie bins. It could have been transplanted here direct from the Eastern bloc.
There’s a graffiti’d old ambulance parked directly outside the flats, which wipes that grin off your face straight away. To compound the irony, there’s even a Renault behind it (although admittedly it’s a Mégane, not a 5).
The trees that line Overhill Road are bare of leaves, but number 67’s front garden is a thriving jungle of roots, weeds and hawthorns. There’s litter all over the place. There’s a wheelbarrow in the corner that had once been full of white paint, but which is now all dried-out and crusty.
The only evidence of anything remotely rock’n’roll-related is a skateboard propped up in the porch of the house next door. Of Bon Scott’s heritage, there is not a sign.
But hang on a second… There’s a scratchy silver plaque attached to the front of number 67. Tiptoe up the path, look closely, and you can see a handful of scribbled tributes grouped around the legend ‘Flats 1-6’. The messages have been written in obvious haste:
‘To Bon, from Björn in Sweden’; ‘AC-Foxi-DC’; ‘Ronald and Frank from Germany – cheers’; ‘To Bon, Szmery from Poland.’
And that’s it. Nothing else, apart from the drone of an aircraft; the distant sound of schoolchildren playing; brambles rustling dryly.
Overhill Road must have changed substantially since 1980, the year of Bon’s death. Opposite number 67 is a big new apartment block called Dawson Heights that plainly wasn’t around two and a half decades ago.
The proprietor of a nearby Londis store has been in the country for only three months. He expresses surprise when he hears that a top rock star popped his clogs just down the road. The shopkeeper says he doesn’t know of any local residents who would have been on the scene so many years ago.
A tradesman unloading a white van shrugs; he’s only making a delivery, and he actually comes from Bromley. He’s heard of AC/DC, but not of Bon Scott.
There’s no reply from pressing any of the door buzzers stuck on number 67’s front wall, just the empty hiss of the intercom, like static from a badly tuned radio.
You turn on your heels with an air of resignation and trudge back down the hill. Fine rain fills the air. As you grapple with your umbrella, you notice the silhouette of a bright-yellow dog stencilled on to the pavement. It’s accompanied by a warning to owners not to allow their pets to shit on the pavement: Bag It & Bin It.
Try as you might, you can’t prevent that wry smile returning to your lips: Bag It & Bin It? It sounds like a bleedin’ Bon Scott song title.
Ronald Belford Scott was born on July 9, 1946, in Kirriemuir, Scotland. He emigrated with his family to Australia in 1952. He left school at age 15, and held a variety of part-time jobs before deciding to ply his trade in music; as a drummer-cum-vocalist, he enjoyed limited success before a motorcycle accident cut short his ambitions.
Once recovered, Bon took a job driving a stomping little outfit called AC/DC around: down the streets of Melbourne, across tumbleweed trails, along desert roads and beyond. But Bon always hankered to be a solid-gold-proper AC/DC band member, not a humble roadie.
Tempering his bright-eyed braggadocio somewhat, he charmed his way into the group’s affections and eventually achieved his aim, joining AC/DC as singer in late September 1974, replacing the glam rockin’ Dave Evans.
AC/DC’s brand new frontman made an immediate impact. Bon Scott was TNT.
Bon was only in AC/DC for a little over five years; he died at age 33 on February 19, 1980. Nevertheless, this bare-chested, black-haired, garrulous’n’glowering, lewd’n’lascivious larrikin was justifiably named the greatest rock frontman of all time in Classic Rock No.68. “Bon had a riveting presence,” we wrote. “He was cocky but he wasn’t conceited. He was vulgar but he wasn’t boorish. He was tough as nails but with a soft white underbelly. He was a hero, an icon, but he was also the guy next door, lying underneath a greasy motorbike with a spanner in his hand.”
But don’t just take our word for it. Even today Bon is fondly remembered by many of his peers. “I knew Bon for many, many years,” Jimmy Barnes, former frontman with Oz rockers Cold Chisel, told Classic Rock. “He was a good mate of mine. When I was about 15 I used to go and see him in Fraternity [one of Bon’s pre-AC/DC outfits], who were a great rock’n’roll band. Then he had that motorbike accident that took him off the scene for a while. And when he recovered he went off to join AC/DC. I then took his place in Fraternity – which was one of the sharpest learning curves of my life. I owe a lot to Bon.”
“What a lot of people don’t realise,” Barnes adds, “is that he was an R&B singer. His favourite singer was Sam Moore [of Sam & Dave]; their tones were very similar. To me, Bon brought something to AC/DC that they’ve lacked since his death – that tongue-in-cheek humour. You could never tell whether he was laughing with you, or at you. The chemistry between him and the Young brothers [guitarists Angus and Malcolm] was as good as Keith Richards and Mick Jagger… anyone, y’know? They were as menacing and as funny as anything I ever saw. And I used to see it regularly in small clubs in Australia.”
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