Over time on my Monday radio show I have had many interviews with really really interesting people. I’ve grown a bank of them & I thought it would be a good idea to transcribe them here for you to read.

The Fremantle Arts Centre made a call out a while ago for someone to document via bog their recent discovery of the front man of ACDC, Bon Scott. Whast resulted in it all was this. The gentleman who was lucky enough to get that opportunity was Lucas Ilean, and he joined me in the studios a year or so ago. Below is a transcript of that interview.

Philippe - You’ve been here before talking about the Bon Scott blog on Lisa’s show, and at that time you weren’t an AC/DC fan, were you?

Lucas – No, I was just at the beginning of the project. I began this project as, not as a non fan, but as someone who the work of AC/DC just hadn’t really come on my radar. For some reason i’d reached that age of 32 without ever kind of registering it. Maybe I didn’t live in the right suburban areas to be subject to that kind of peer pressure. So this was an opportunity to really immerse myself in a whole new way.

What kind of music were you into at that time?

When I was growing up in the 80s I was into sort of pop stuff, you know. I remember the first records I got were things like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna and I was into these kind of Aussie pop rock bands, these were more hair bands, like Uncanny X-Men and Pseudo Echo. I could find them in my record collection now, yes, but I think the way kids pick up music is just through what they’re exposed to. Stuff that was on the commercial radio stations and stuff that friends of mine and friends older brothers were listening too. I think kids are very impressionable.

Going from that kind of music aesthetic that you were very much familiar to, to something like Bon Scott and the world of AC/DC and their fans, and looking into the world of Bon Scott, wee you feeling a bit apprehensive of what was lying ahead for you when you started?

Well I was warned that the fan base for AC/DC is not only immense but also extremely passionate and quite protective…

I think they rival the Kiss Army in terms of passion…

Yeah, well I don’t know much about Kiss. I was really into some of their tracks that came out early in the 80s, they were very catchy. What i’ve discovered through this project is unlike so many rock acts or pop acts that were big in the 70s, the generations that keep coming up are picking up this passion. So parents pass it on to their children and they pass it on to their children and so on. That one family deep in the suburbs of Perth, where there were 30 members of this extended family all gathered together in this kind of den, which was, every surface was encrusted with some kind of AC/DC paraphernalia, they ranged from the ages of 2 to 62, every single one of them with an ACDC shirt. Those that were old enough with Jack Daniels and Coke, it was just amazing.

Why did you decide to take up this project in the first place?

I would never have proposed to take on this project, I also saw the call out for people to take part in a Bon Scott project, which is a large scale exhibition and performance event that the Fremantle Arts Centre is putting on with video artists and installation artists and painters and musicians and all this kind of stuff. I saw it and thought “this looks interesting”, and I passed it on to my friend Mick who’s really into AC/DC and said “maybe you should apply for this”, but they actually contacted me. It wasn’t because of any previous experience with AC/DC or Bon Scott, but because of my blogging experience, because two years ago I did a project called Bilateral Petersham, which was all about my local suburb. During the two month period of that project I just didn’t leave the towns boundaries and I blogged about things that happened. As lots of people remarked at the time, if make a restriction on yourself to not leave a very small geographical area, all of a sudden two months seems like a long time. So it was part of this experience with blogging, and my process was something that the Fremantle Arts Centre believed I would be able to apply to the topic of Bon Scott rather than, say,  the geographical area of Petersham. That process is really simple, it’s just about wandering around almost aimlessly until I bump into someone that tells me an interesting story, then the next day going and writing about it on the blog. It’s a kind of snowball process where the more I do this, the more people say “hey, you should meet this person, you should meet that person”, so I wander over and meet that person. It’s a very casual, haphazard form of I daren’t even say journalism.

You do take on and partake in intriguing projects, including the Bon Scott blog and the Petersham Bilateral project. I find it fascinating that you delve into these kind of ideals. Tell me about your recent tour over to Fremantle as part of the blog.

I guess part of my project with the Bon Scott blog is to go wherever, within the boundaries of my resources, to go wherever I need to go in order to chase up interesting people. The event that recently happened in Western Australia was this enormous concert called the Bon Scott Celebration concert. At this concert was launched, was unveiled, this bronze statue of Bon Scott. The back story is the Western Australia Bon Scott fan club, which is one of the most powerful Bon Scott fan clubs in the world. Bon Scott is buried in Fremantle. He grew up there, he was originally from Scotland, but his grave is allegedly the most heavily visited grave in Australia, people make pilgrimages. So the WA Bon Scott fan club, understandably, is a really strong one. They’ve been lobbying for a few years to have the statue made and placed in Fremantle, as kind of an honourable icon of this local cultural hero. The previous year they had a fundraising concert and they pulled out of the woodwork all these legendary Aussie rock bands like the Angels and the Screaming Jets and what’s Angry Anderson’s band? Rose Tattoo. So they raised the money, got the statue built by this local sculptor guy, Greg James. He’s usually commissioned to make statues of politicians and ex Prime Ministers and things like that, because he’s very good at making accurate representations in bronze. So he took on this challenge, which for him was quite a stress, because he had the eyes of millions of fans from around the world on him to see whether he would get it right, and because his subject matter is dead, he had to do so much research. There’s a long story about all that stuff, but anyway, they finally got this statue built and launched it at this big concert. So my job was to go over and kind of be around Perth during the build up to this big concert. It was a period of great excitement. It also happened to coincide with the anniversary of Bon Scott’s death, and that’s a particular day, the 19^th of February, a lot of people make the pilgrimage over to his, so I was on hand at the site, Bon’s grave, to meet fans that showed up and just hear their stories about what it was that was so important to them about Bon.

There was a movie that came out not too long ago, Thuderstruck? I believe you were trying to persuade someone else to come along with you to make the, I suppose you could say the plot in the movie, similar to what you were doing?

Yeah, that’s right. I guess, inspired by the movie Thunderstruck, I put out this call called Bon or Bust for a travelling companion who was a diehard AC/DC fan to travel across the Nullabor with me and listen to AC/DC CDs and then, in a way, since I had to go to WA, turn the journey into part of it rather than just a means to an end. Unfortunately that call out ended up in bust. There were people that were going across but they were like “you’re crazy, man, just get on a plane, we’re flying”, you know. Then there were other people that really wanted to go and couldn’t afford the time off work, you know. I’m currently in negotiations for my next trip across to Western Australia, so possibly go across in a car with Bon Scott’s lovechild. So watch this space, it may or may not happen depending on availability of dates and stuff like that.

Have you met, or planning to meet any of the current crew of AC/DC for this project?

I would love to. Based on what i’ve heard about, however, they’re a little bit unavailable. Angus, the opinionative school boy guitarist, although he’s now in his early 50s, he lives in Holland apparently. Malcolm, the rhythm guitarist and who is apparently the mastermind of the band, he has a house in Balmain but they lead very private lives and it’s now known whether they’re actually going to be there at the moment. The other bands live in America, I think. I met this fellow called Clinton Walker, he actually just lives in the inner west of Sydney, and he wrote the definitive biography of Bon Scott. He was generous enough to spend a few hours with me talking about the process of writing his book and so on. One of the interesting things he said was that the ACDC management and band didn’t want to have anything to do with him. With Clinton, or being involved with the historicising and dredging up of Bon Scott’s history. So they kind of just put up a brick wall, they just didn’t respond, after a few initial emails they just stopped answering. They’re very protective about the kinds of histories and stories that are told, but obviously they love the fact that fans all over the world still keep the memory alive.

It’s very interesting to see that a band with such high end production in their shows and such very raw wound, I don’t know if it’s outspoken, but very loud sounding sounds, so to speak, are so protective in their own history as a band. They’ve been going for such a long time, and it’s so amazing to see that. They’re still humble little human beings in a way, as well.

I’ve heard other stories, like a fan called Glenn who I met in Perth, his whole back is tattooed with all the members of AC/DC, like a huge canvas. He’s obviously very passionate and he’s been to concerts overseas where he’s met Brian Johnson who’s the replacement for Bon Scott – although, 28 years ago now – and other members of the band and found them to be very friendly and supportive and so on. So I really don’t know. There’s lots of mini projects within this project that I need to chase up, like why not approach the record company, why not visit Burwood school where Angus and Malcolm used to go in the suburbs of Sydney and see if anyone remembers them there. There’s so many strands that I could pursue with my limited resources and time.

Tell me about ‘Let There Be Rock’. This is your fave AC/DC song, yeah?

I can’t get this song out of my head at the moment. You mentioned before that I started this project as a non fan. I have this process where every fortnight I by a new album. I’m trying to work through them chronologically. Perhaps it’s the same for you but you can really immerse yourself in one thing at a time. I could have gone out and bought them all at once, but you really get a dose of what that album is trying to achieve and diehard fans argue that Let There Be Rock is the first true whole album by ACDC, where they really constructed an album as one piece. It’s very anthemic, whereas their previous albums were more in the traditional vein of 1960s albums where you get a whole bunch of singles and cobble them together and it doesn’t really cohere. The more I immerse myself in this music I can’t get it out of my head. It’s really catchy, I mean it’s wonderful, Bon writing, obviously it comes from a biblical tradition – “let there be light”, as God was creating the world, so Bon is in the position of creating the world of rock he’s the one that said “let there be rock” and so it came to pass, it’s hilarious.