AC/DC Blazed the Runway with a Fiery “Highway to Hell” at Prague 2025

A scorching summer twilight draped Prague’s Letňany Airport on 26 June 2025, and the flat expanse thrummed like a giant amplifier waiting to spark to life. Tens of thousands of black-clad fans had gathered for AC/DC’s Power Up Tour kickoff, but whispers across the runway all circled one wish: to hear the blistering opening chords of “Highway to Hell” roar across the Czech sky. The mood mixed festival glee with pilgrimage gravity, each heartbeat syncing to an invisible countdown that promised rock-and-roll history in the making.

Hours earlier, makeshift beer gardens doubled as story circles where grizzled veterans swapped tales of club gigs from the 1970s while first-timers fingered brand-new lightning-bolt merch. The air smelled of klobása, sunscreen, and fresh vinyl pressings; somewhere backstage, techs were line-checking Angus Young’s cherry-red SG against the hum of fifty-foot LED walls. Every laugh, every clink of a pint glass felt like one more click on a collective ratchet of anticipation, winding ever tighter toward sunset.

When the giant screens finally cut to black and an air-raid siren howled across the PA, the roar that followed rattled steel crowd barriers. A heartbeat of silence lingered—long enough to steal everyone’s breath—before Angus strode onstage in his schoolboy uniform, planting his first G-chord with fretboard authority. The unmistakable riff of “Highway to Hell” exploded through the stacks, and fifty thousand voices detonated in perfect time, chanting the title line like a sacred vow.

Brian Johnson emerged a split second later, cap pulled low, his gravel-pit scream slicing through the night: “Livin’ easy… livin’ free!” In that instant, Prague felt welded to Perth 1979, when Bon Scott first immortalized the hymn to no-rules freedom. The song’s history pulsed beneath every lyric, a haunting but joyous reminder of the front-man whose spirit still rides shotgun on every tour bus.

Strobe lights flickered fiery orange while columns of flame shot skyward, turning the runway into a devil’s highway worthy of the song’s namesake. Angus duck-walked across a catwalk that jutted deep into the crowd, spinning like a human Catherine wheel each time he hit the turnaround riff. Even at seventy, his footwork and grin suggested a kid who’d just discovered electricity for the first time—only now the current ran through stadium-grade transformers.

Stage left, rhythm guitarist Stevie Young anchored the groove with machine-tool precision, honoring his late uncle Malcolm’s iron-fisted style. Behind him, Chris Chaney’s bass rumbled like freight cars across a steel bridge while Matt Laug’s kick drums thumped so hard they seemed to move runway asphalt. The engine room felt unbreakable, letting Angus launch fretboard squeals and pick-scrape fireworks without fear of sonic collapse.

Mid-song, Johnson seized a flag bearing Bon Scott’s portrait and held it aloft, triggering a wave of cellphone lights that glittered like distant headlights on a nighttime interstate. The chorus hit again—“I’m on the highway to hell!”—and the harmony became a single leviathan roar, a multigenerational choir bonded by four decades of shared catharsis.

The Prague setting added rich subtext. In the early 1990s, AC/DC’s first Czech shows felt like contraband celebrations in a country newly free to embrace Western rock; now, those early fans stood shoulder to shoulder with their teenage kids, proving the band’s riff-driven gospel transcends both language and era. The Vltava River might as well have carried those power chords all the way to Charles Bridge.

Lyrically, “Highway to Hell” remains an anthem of joyous defiance, and on this night its message echoed louder than ever. The idea that life’s wild ride should be seized at full throttle resonated across a crowd still emerging from global uncertainties—proof that the song’s rebellious spark hasn’t dimmed a lumen since 1979.

Technology kept the legends lethal. Johnson’s custom in-ear monitors shielded him from punishing decibels and preserved his towering shriek; Angus carried a wireless pack that let him sprint fifty yards down the thrust before dropping to his knees for the solo, strings screaming beneath spotlight columns as white-hot as furnace jets. Age registered only in the tour program; onstage, the band moved like men half their years.

Social media ignited mid-show. Clips tagged #HighwayToPrague trended worldwide within minutes—grainy phone videos capturing Angus’s windmill picking against a backdrop of flames. Rock journals called the rendition “vintage voltage,” while longtime fan forums argued it eclipsed even the classic Donington ’91 take.

As the final chorus crashed, four cannon-like mortar blasts hurled red confetti that drifted like embers onto the masses. Johnson milked the last word—“HELL!”—holding the mic to the sky as fireworks erupted behind the LED wall. The applause felt tectonic, rolling across the runway like aftershocks and setting seismographs in nearby control towers quivering.

The band plunged straight into “Thunderstruck” without so much as a breather, refusing to let energy levels sag. Each song funneled adrenaline into the next, turning the setlist into a single closed circuit of raw voltage. The audience, far from spent, surfed that current with arms raised and voices hoarse, as if determined to keep the power on till dawn.

Long after the encore cannons of “For Those About to Rock” boomed, fans stumbled toward Prague’s Metro C line, ears ringing and smartwatch decibel readouts screenshot for posterity. In multiple languages, the same amazed question surfaced: “How can they still be this good in their 70s?” It wasn’t disbelief so much as awe—a recognition that some fires, once fanned, burn hotter with time.

Ultimately, Letňany 2025 didn’t just deliver a faultless “Highway to Hell.” It reaffirmed that rock-and-roll vitality is measured not in birthdays but in voltage. As long as Angus’s fingers fly and Brian’s rasp ignites crowds, AC/DC will keep paving new lanes on that well-loved highway—one thunderous, immortal riff at a time.