“What’s the difference between a Lada and a sheep?”: Brian Johnson on the worst and best cars he’s ever owned
Well, it’s mostly about cars. And at the start it was very difficult to put that across. People are saying, “So the book is about the band?”, and I said, “No, no…”. I’m not one for autobiographies. I hate them, there’s too many of them. Nobody gives a flying fart! But with cars… I’m just nuts on them. I have been since I was a kid, there’s something wrong with us. My brother’s the same.
And what I found was, when somebody said, “You know, Brian, remember when you were in 1974 and you were going out with that girl?”. And I’m like, “I cannae remember!”. And they say, “You had the Ford Granada?”. “Oh, I remember!”. It’s true. I suddenly thought of all the cars I had, and the book came from there. Every time I thought of the different things that happened, it was through the car I had and the fun I had.
It was just before I went off to do the Black Ice album. I was having lunch with Jimmy Nail and his manager Tarquin. I was telling stories and tales and Tarquin said [adopts posh voice], “You should write it down!”. But everybody says that!
I wrote it just by hand. Scrawled it down. I’m not a good typist. I just wrote the fucking thing and then scanned it and sent it off to these fellas [his publishers] as I was writing it. I wrote it in no order, just how I remembered it. And to be honest, my memory’s dreadful. A lot of it might not be exactly factual, but it’s the way I remember it. In my mind, that’s the way it came to us. It’s just meant to be fun. There’s nothing malicious. There’s not a twat list or a shithead list. It’s not a getting-back book.
Well, I haven’t even read it myself yet! But I said to the boys in the band, I said to Mal, Ang, Cliff, Phil, youse are all in this book. And I showed Cliff what I’d written about him…
Aye, it’s true! He was in Newcastle with me and he saw this classic sports car. He was just taken by this thing. The funny thing was, he said, “I’ve gotta have it!”. And I said, “But you live in Hawaii! This is Newcastle!”. But he was gone. Like I say in the book, he was like a man in the middle of a blowjob – that was the look on his face. I just could not get him away from it.
So he bought it – and the fucking thing broke down! But Cliff loves his cars. He’s had a lot of them. Angus doesn’t bother, it doesn’t interest him. Malcolm loves his Jags. And Phil, he’s just a complete nutter petrol-head, a fanatic. He bought all the super-cars in the 80s, and he still races in Australia in one of them big V8 Commodore things. I race a lot, too. It’s my passion.
