1979 Rock Classic, Called 'Too Poppy' by Its Own Band, Became Highway to Hell's Unexpected Standout
Imagine AC/DC listening to one of their own songs and saying: "That's too poppy for us."
It actually sounds like a joke because when has AC/DC ever been considered pop? It wasn't and it never has been.
In 1979, while finishing what would become one of the greatest rock albums of all time AC/DC almost cut a track called "Touch Too Much." They didn't like it. It felt out of character for the album - too slow, too easy on the ears, too different from everything else they stood for. They wanted it gone from the album.
Their producer had other ideas.
The Song That Almost Didn't Make It
Mutt Lange was a very unusual choice for AC/DC. The man had built his name working with Foreigner - a polished, radio-friendly sound that had nothing to do with what AC/DC was about. The band wasn't interested in being polished. They were a live band first, a recording band second. That special something that made them AC/DC wasn't something that could be manufactured in a studio.
But Lange wasn't trying to change them or what they were about. He just wanted to make them sound like the best possible version of themselves.
What he didn't expect was having to fight to keep a song on the record.
"Touch Too Much" sat differently from everything else on Highway to Hell. The rest of the album came at you intensely hard and fast. This one slowed down, leaned back, let itself breathe. It was bluesy and mid-tempo - closer to the band's early sound than anything else on the record. And that made AC/DC uncomfortable.
‘Too poppy', they said. Cut it.
Lange begged them to keep it.
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In the end, he was right.
Joe Elliott, the frontman of Def Leppard and someone who studied AC/DC the way young musicians study the bands that shape them, had no reservations about the song.
"It's funny because as Mutt said to me later, AC/DC couldn't stand 'Touch Too Much,'" Elliott said. "They thought it was too poppy, but I thought it was the best song on the album."
The best song. On Highway to Hell.
What the Band Couldn't See
Looking back now, "Touch Too Much" was telling the world something the band wasn't ready to hear.
The Bon Scott era ran on chaos and personality. Scott was one of a kind - a frontman who made every single song feel like a chaotic party that might get out of hand at any moment. "Touch Too Much" had all of that, but there was something underneath it. A hint of a melody. A little more structure. A song that could work just as well on the radio as it did at full volume.
Just one album later, after Scott's death, AC/DC released "You Shook Me All Night Long" - a song built almost completely around the kind of hooks they'd just refused to embrace.
"Touch Too Much" was the quiet beginning of that shift, even if nobody recognised or wanted it at the time.
That's exactly what makes this story worth telling. A band at the top of their game nearly erased the evidence that they were growing. Mutt Lange knew it. Joe Elliott heard it.
AC/DC just needed a little convincing.
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This story was originally published May 29, 2026 at 5:00 AM.