RONALD BELFORD (BON) SCOTT

Bon Scott was born on the 9th of July 1946 in Kirriemuir, Scotland as Ronald Belford Scott. He spent the first six years of his life in the small town. In 1952, the Scott family relocated to Australia The Scott’s first resided in Melbourne then settling in a suburb of Adelaide called Sunshine. Eventually relocating to Freemantle in Western Australia. Bon took his first tentative steps as a performer at the age of twelve, playing a recorder duet with a classmate at a school concert and banging the drums alongside his father in the local Caledonian Society’s Scots pipe band. Bon`s lifelong distaste for authority lead him to quit his studies at the age of fifteen. After leaving school, he held a series of odd jobs, driving a tractor, labouring on fishing boats and working as an apprentice weighing-machine mechanic.
In Perth during 1966 he played with the Spectors. Then he moved on to The Valentines. In May 1967 The Valentines released a debut single entitled "Everyday I H ave To Cry" on the Clarion label. Then decided to move to Melbourne for a change of luck. The Valentines recorded three Easybeats songs, "She Said", "Peculiar Hole In The Sky" and "My Old Man’s A Groovy Old Man". The band officially called it quits on August 1st, 1970. Within six months of The Valentines dissolution, Bon received a call from Bruce Howe, leader of a new blues-rock band called Fraternity, inviting him to join his group. After two albums for R.C.A, Australia, "Livestock" in 1971 and "Flaming Galahs" in 1972, Fraternity decided to try their luck in Europe. For the most of 1973 they toured the continent, principally Britain and Germany. The even got to support a band called Geordie, fronted by one Brian Johnson in the U.K. Fraternity decided it was time to come home. It was then that Bon was involved in a motorbike accident that left him in a coma for three days and in hospital for several months, ending his association with Fraternity.
Now based in Adelaide, Bon was reduced to taking on casual work until the day he was offered the chance to drive this new band called AC/DC around. Bon lost little time in telling the band he could play drums. He persuaded the Young brothers that the band needed a better front man and he suggested himself as the ideal replacement. And when Dave Evans failed to turn up for a show Bon seized the chance. Bon Scott was a man who bought AC/DC into sharp focus. He was a unique personality, a man of such charisma that he could make every single fan in an audience of thousands feel like he was performing just for them, whilst also having the ability to make the local pub seem like an arena. He enjoyed life and loved nothing better than giving pleasure to others. Yet Bon was also an excessive and this would ultimately lead to tragedy. After a night of heavy drinking, Bon died in a car parked outside a friends flat sometime on February the 19th 1980. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Kings College Hospital. Bon Scott lies in the Freemantle Cemetery’s Memorial Garden in Western Australia.
Information and pictures kindly supplied by the AC-DC Resource centre,