Who Made Who (1986)
1. Who Made Who
2. You Shook Me All Night Long
3. D.T.
4. Sink the Pink
5. Ride On
6. Hells Bells
7. Shake Your Foundations
8. Chase the Ace
9. For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)
It wasn’t quite an album, and it wasn’t quite a greatest hits package. Who Made Who hovered somewhere in between: a Frankensteinian soundtrack for the ill-fated Stephen King film Maximum Overdrive. By 1986, AC/DC were fading into the sepia-toned pages of hard rock history. Yet somehow, this peculiar, patchwork release gave them a fresh gust of wind — or at least, a prolonged exhale.
Nominally a soundtrack, Who Made Who offered just three new tracks, only one of which had vocals — the eponymous lead single. Ironically, it was one of the band’s more successful outings in years, thanks in part to a slick music video and the (very mild) inclusion of synth elements — a near sacrilege for AC/DC’s church of raw guitar riffage. But fret not: beneath the studio polish, the core ingredients — Johnson’s strangled-cat wail and Young’s power chords — remained defiantly intact.
The two instrumentals, D.T. and Chase the Ace, are functional enough — polished, muscular, and entirely forgettable. Most likely filler for action sequences involving sentient trucks. They offered texture, sure, but they weren’t destined for the band's live canon.
Far more interesting is the inclusion of two tracks lifted from 1985’s disastrous Fly on the Wall, here remixed into competence. Sink the Pink and Shake Your Foundations finally sound like the songs they were perhaps always meant to be — muscular, swaggering rockers marred in their original incarnations by muddy production and undercooked mixing. Their reappearance here is simultaneously satisfying and tragic: proof that Fly on the Wall might have been salvaged with more care.
The rest of the album dips liberally into AC/DC’s back catalog. This in itself is no sin, but the selection feels scattershot, with little sense of cohesion. And then there’s Ride On — the moody, bluesy slow-burn from the Bon Scott era — dropped in with all the subtlety of a beer bottle in a baptismal font. It’s a superb track, of course, but its lone presence from the Scott years makes the transition from Johnson’s shriek to Bon’s laconic snarl all the more jarring.
Still, taken as a whole, Who Made Who served its curious purpose: it reminded the world that AC/DC were still alive, still capable, and still very loud. The album may have been a hodgepodge of new, old, and reanimated material — but sometimes, a bolt of lightning to the corpse is all you need.
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