Axl Rose stepped in for Brian Johnson when hearing issues forced him to step down from AC/DC‘s tour in 2016. But the job almost went to Jet singer Nic Cester.
In a recent appearance on Australia’s Triple M Cester talked about his audition, which he thinks might have happened because he’d performed “Back In Black” with Muse few times in 2010. “I called Matt Bellamy and said, ‘Hey, thanks for that!’”
Cester said that he flew to Atlanta for the auditions at the Black Crowes’ rehearsal studio and that “It was a tiny place but they were set up there with the enormous backline and I remember watching AC/DC and thinking, ‘There’s no way all of those amps are on’. Let me tell you, they were all on! It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my entire life.”
Cester added that Angus Young “put me through my paces. Everything was a test to see how I’d handle it – the volume and him going, ‘OK, let’s do this song’, and I didn’t know [some of them] off the top of my head so he’d just go, ‘Go over there and learn it.’”
Cester said that the whole experience was “pretty intense, but I realize now Angus was a super professional guy and he wanted to push me to my absolute limit to see how I would react.”