Pipers look to cut new record with AC/DC’s It’s A Long Way to the Top

It’s been a while since Jody Steele regularly played the bagpipes, but on Wednesday she’ll pucker up and blow along with several hundred others in a bid to set a new world record for the largest ever ensemble performance on the Scottish instrument.

“I’ve ticked a lot of boxes in the piping world already,” says the 60-year-old, who first picked up the instrument (or, if you prefer, the acquired taste) as a 10-year-old, and whose playing has taken her to Edinburgh for the Royal Military Tattoo a couple of times. “This is another one to tick off the list.”

The current world record is 333 pipers, set in Bulgaria in 2012. But the organisers of this stab at Federation Square on Wednesday afternoon are confident they’ll have the numbers to wheeze past that.

And the choice of song? AC/DC’s It’s A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock’n’ Roll), naturally, a perfect choice given the band opens the Australian leg of its world tour at the MCG that night.

Meanwhile, support act Amyl and the Sniffers, hot off a Grammy nomination, have just revealed they will play on the Fed Square stage on Friday night in the latest free public concert in the space.

It’s just shy of 50 years since AC/DC recorded Long Way in December 1975. A few months after that, Bon Scott, Angus and Malcolm Young, Phil Rudd and Mark Evans performed the song on a flatbed truck for a film clip for Countdown (with a second version being filmed in the City Square).

They had three pipers from the Rats of Tobruk, among them Kevin Conlon and Les Kenfield, both of whom will again be blowing merrily on Wednesday.

“I have many, many memories of it,” 88-year-old Conlon says of his part in what has become one of the most iconic moments in Australian rock history. “But you must realise, on that day, it was just another engagement. We had no idea that 50 years later we’d still be talking about it.”

Conlon didn’t care much for rock’n’roll then, and still doesn’t. “But that particular tune, I’ve heard it so many times, I love it,” he says. It’s not just his favourite Accadacca track, he adds, it’s the only one he knows.

When Bon Scott phoned asking about pipers, Conlon at first thought he was a new recruit. “I didn’t know who he was,” he says. “I’d never heard of the tune or of AC/DC.”

Scott had, in fact, played in a pipe band as a child, but only the drums. When he asked how long it would take him to learn to play the bagpipes, he was told he should expect between nine months and a year. “And he said, ‘Oh no, no, I want to be able to play these within about six weeks’,” Conlon recalls.

In the end, Scott settled for some guidance on how to look convincing enough for the camera. As for who actually played the solo on the track? Well, that’s a matter of some debate.

Some accounts have Scott playing it, while Conlon – who got to know the singer a bit and says Scott “looked after” him and his fellow pipers “very well” back at the hotel after they’d wrapped for the day – suggests the riff was actually created on a synthesiser. But the most detailed (and likely) account comes from former bassist Evans, who played with the band from 1975 to ’77.

In his telling, the pipes were actually played by him, Malcolm Young and Phil Rudd, collectively and clumsily creating bursts of just a couple of seconds of noise. Those “samples” were then looped by producer George Young (Angus and Malcolm’s older brother, and a founding member of The Easybeats) to create the extended riff in the song.

Not quite synthesised, in other words, but not far from it either.

On Wednesday, though, the bagpipes will all be live. And while it’s traditionally been a male-dominated field, there will be plenty of bag ladies blowing in the wind too.

“There weren’t very many women when I started out,” says Deborah Clark, 70, who grew up in a family of pipers. “But it’s great now to see that we’re pretty much on par.”

She’s performed in Edinburgh, in Red Square in Moscow, and in Tobruk. “[Former Libyan dictator Muammar] Gaddafi actually paid for a private aircraft from Tripoli to Tobruk so we could go to the cemetery and do a service there,” she says. “He was a big fan of pipe music.”

Not everyone is, of course.

Steele’s parents were into Scottish dancing, but no amount of Mull of Kintyre could convince her mother of the musical virtues of her daughter’s chosen instrument.

“She’s 96 now, and she’s been living with it for many years,” says Steele. “But she has a saying: ‘I love bagpipes … when they stop’.”

In need of some good news? Sign up for our Greater Good newsletter for stories to brighten your outlook, delivered every Wednesday.