Every year, as spring plays footsie with summer, a rock n roll Brigadoon emerges in the town that forms a gateway to the glens. For 362 days, Kirriemuir goes about its business quietly, welcoming visitors as they make base camp en route to the great Scottish wildernesses. And then, as though compelled by an invisible force, it casts off rectitude and becomes a bacchanal.
This is Bonfest, a three-day celebration of the music of AC/DC and named for the band’s legendary lead singer, the late Bon Scott who died in 1980. In other parishes that form the spine of Angus and the Highlands cultural gatherings are characterised by tartan, fiddle music and wailing bagpipes. At Bonfest, supplicants with devil’s horns in their hair are summoned from across the world by sepulchral base lines, howling guitars and an apocalyptic drumbeat.
For the uninitiated, douce Kirriemuir, nestling off the A9 up past Dundee, is a curious location for a three-day carnival inspired by the music and culture of one of the world’s most raucous rock bands. For those of us, called to be acolytes, it all makes perfect sense.
Ronald Belford Scott was born in nearby Forfar and spent the first six years of his childhood in Kirriemuir, where his parents ran the local bakery, before the family emigrated to Australia. There, he encountered the Young brothers (and fellow Scottish emigres) Angus and Malcolm, whose band, AC/DC, was beginning to burn up Australia’s concert venues. With Bon Scott’s charismatic braggadocio they began to annexe the planet.
As you make your noon approach to Kirriemuir, the first tremors hinting at anarchy can be felt in the queuing traffic attempting to wind up through the town centre. But they’ll have to wait. An AC/DC tribute band is belting out another diabolic classic on the little town square and a few hundred aficionados in denim and leather are starting to shimmy.
Dozens of bands, occupying taverns, halls and the spaces in between provide a three-day-long, rock n roll monsters ball. A statue of Peter Pan sits on the square to commemorate the work of Kirriemuir’s other great son, the author, JM Barrie. Today, the wee man has been dressed up in a denim ‘battle’ jacket decorated with the collected badges of a lifetime’s head-banging. It’s a fitting commemoration: The Boy Who Never Grew up honoured by middle-aged hairy-arsed rockers captivated still by the soundtrack of their adolescence.
I meet Bob Entwhistle from Preston in Lancashire who’s been coming here for more than ten years. Bob and his motability scooter are festooned with AC/DC ephemera. Each of his fingernails is a miniature painted tribute and there’s a badge which says “Hellfest Family” (an interesting conceptual juxtaposition). His walking stick is topped by a silver skull. “It’s the highlight of my year,” he tells me. “The people of Kirriemuir are so friendly and welcoming and it’s my chance to meet up with old friends I’ve made through the years. I wouldn’t miss it.”
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Standing beside him is Joanne Lawrie from Bonnyrigg and her dog, Beau who’s wearing an AC/DC bandana. “You won’t get an atmosphere like this anywhere else. It’s like a family reunion.” Across the road, outside the Three Bellies Brae, a boisterous German AC/DC collective are bonding once more with Kirriemuir and making cultural connections. This is the Guard of the Memory of Bon Scott, an AC/DC fan-club from Berlin and Brandenburg over here to celebrate a rougher concerto.
In Kirriemuir’s Gateway to the Glens Museum, Karen the assistant gives us a traditional, Scottish taking -no-nonsense welcome and reminds Colin the photographer that he can’t take any pictures for commercial use. “Is The Herald okay,” he asks. “Well, I suppose it’ll just need to be,” she says. “We’ll give the museum a mention,” I venture. “Am I supposed to be impressed,” she shoots back.
The Bon Scott suite is on the first floor and features two large glass cabinets groaning with AC/DC and Bon Scott memorabilia. We’re in luck. Neil McDonald, the man who owns this collection is on the premises and soon I’m swapping conversion testimonies with him. “When did you first see the light,” I ask him. “It was three early gigs when I was a school pupil in Prestwick,” he says. “One of them was at the Caird Hall in Dundee in 1978. I managed to get a backstage pass and a seat in the front row. The band were brilliant, especially Bon.”
Amongst the band memorabilia is a genuine silver disc, which he bought from another collector. “If you don’t mind me being nosey, how much did that set you back,” I ask. “A few thousand.” But his prized possession is a Christmas card, personally hand-written by Bon Scott which remains in its original envelope. “Is it here,” I ask. “No, that card never leaves my home.”
You might snigger at this, but to me it made absolute sense: I wouldn’t be letting something like that out of my sight either. And so I feel moved to tell him about my old conversion experience, being invited by my friend to hear this mad mental band called AC/DC to whom he’d been recommended. And then an hour of them rocking Colchester in the BBC’s Rock Goes to College series and a bare-chested Bon Scott belting out Bad Boy Boogie: “On the day I was born the rain fell down. There was trouble brewin’ in my home town.”
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Overnight, my world had changed and changed utterly. Get ye behind me The Beatles, Abba and the Brotherhood of Man; come away in Led Zep, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Motorhead. The development of my musical tastes came to a halt about 1981 and, gloriously, has never since travelled beyond it.
The centre of Kirriemuir is garlanded by dozens of charming independent shops of the type you might expect to see in a town like this. In other places they might have closed early or pulled down the shutters for a few days until the storm had passed. Here though, they’ve all chosen to embrace the mayhem. All the shops – no matter how boutique and refined – have an AC/DC thing going on in their window displays.
In one of them is a reclining female mannequin of generous proportions sporting somewhat smaller foundation garments. This is a warm tribute to the eponymous lady of Whole Lotta Rosie, the band’s most popular crowd-pleaser. Others have condemned this anthem as celebrating something seedy and disreputable. But a closer analysis of the lyrics, written in 1978, tells the more discerning mind that it’s a pioneering and radical rebuke to body-shaming and the tyranny of physical perfection.
Not long after Bonfest was established here they built a memorial garden to Bon Scott with a statue to the great man as its centrepiece. For a few days the car park adjacent becomes a fayre. And if this type of music is the Devil’s own then Auld Nick wouldn’t be best pleased at the stall-holders gathered to bask in the glow of Bon. There’s the Angus Cat Rescue, the Woodland Trust; the Rotary Club of Kirriemuir; Vintage Hats, the Dog Station and Andy’s manclub (going through a storm or just been through one?)
Over by the Bon Scott statue a queue forms for selfies. A cherubic little girl brandishing an inflatable green guitar is loitering meaningfully. Her mum asks her: “Do you want to go and see Bon Scott,” as though they were visiting a department store Santa Claus.
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Up in the town hall, in the middle of the afternoon, a heavy rock band is belting out their version of Metallica’s version of Thin Lizzy’s version of Whiskey in the Jar. They seem to know what they’re doing and the lead singer’s howling sounds familiar. And is it not Trident: stalwart, no-nonsense Glasgow rockers, still happily keeping the flame alive. The lead singer is brandishing a bottle of Scotch. Suddenly, he steps into the throng and starts handing out tots and swigs until the bottle is empty before leading us all in a sweaty chorus:
“Mush-a ring dum-a do dum-a da
Whack for the daddy-o
Whack for the daddy-o
There’s whiskey in the jar’
Later, on the main stages, the headliners including Gun and The Bon Scott Revival Show will take possession of the night. Bon Scott proclaimed that Hell Aint a Bad Place to be. This weekend though, I’m in rock heaven.
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