Song

You Shook Me All Night Long

ACDC

Album:

Back To Black

Lyrics meaning of You Shook Me All Night Long by ACDC

AC/DC singer Bon Scott died in 1980, choking on his vomit after a night of boozing, just as their LP, Highway to Hell, made the band hit the bigtime.

Two days later, brothers Malcolm and Angus Young were rehearsing again (“Bon would have done the same,” Angus said), and in a few weeks, they had a new singer, Brian Johnson.

And the first song they wrote together was “You Shook Me All Night Long,” which Johnson told his new bandmates was “the best rock & roll song I’ve ever heard in my life.”

"You Shook Me All Night Long" appears on their album, Back in Black, and also reappeared on their later album Who Made Who.

There have been several claims made over decades that some parts of the the song were written by Bon Scott.

Silver Smith, late former girlfriend of Bon Scott, interviewed by Jesse Fink for his biography of Scott, Bon: The Last Highway, said: "I know for sure that [the song] was written at [my flat in] Gloucester Road [in Kensington, London] back in ’76. 'She told me to come but I was already there' – he wrote that in a letter to somebody, one of his grotty mates, just after we got together, actually. He always kept notebooks and added and subtracted to them and so on. He put in 'American thighs' even way back then, because that was the market they were going to try and crack. So that was written a long time ago."

In the same book, Scott's girlfriend in Miami, Florida, a woman under the pseudonym "Holly X", says the original lyric "chartreuse eyes" was changed to "sightless eyes" and that she had a horse called Doubletime. The lyrics "working double time on the seduction line" appear in the finished song.

Doug Thaler, Bon's friend and AC/DC's booking agent on their American tours, also says: "I don’t care who tells me anything different: you can bet your life that Bon Scott wrote the lyrics to 'You Shook Me All Night Long'. It's Bon Scott's lyrics all over the place."

From AC/DC: Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be by Mick Wall: "However Malcolm Dome claims that shortly before he died, Bon 'shoved me his book of lyrics. He had sheets of lyrics that he kept in a file, carried them around.

He'd been showing me some of the ideas he'd been working for Back in Black. Not the song 'Back in Black' but songs that were for the next album. There were a couple of lines, like, 'She told me to come but I was already there', which ended up in 'You Shook Me All Night Long' - that’s a Bon lyric. And I saw it. I saw it written down. There were lyrics, lines used, on Back in Black that Bon wrote. [But] he wasn't credited and to this day no one's really sure what happened. I don't think he even got close to finishing the whole songs. But there are lines in there that I know."

It reached number 35 on the USA's Hot 100 pop singles chart in 1980.

"You Shook Me All Night Long" placed at number 10 on VH1's list of "The 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s". It was also number 1 on VH1's "Top Ten AC/DC Songs".

You Shook Me All Night Long lyrics by ACDC

She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean

She was the best damn woman that I ever seen

She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies

Knocking me out with those American thighs

Taking more than her share, had me fighting for air

She told me to come, but I was already there

'Cause the walls start shaking, the Earth was quaking

My mind was aching, and we were making it

And you shook me all night long

Yeah, you shook me all night long

Working double-time on the seduction line