AC/DC Rattled the Runway with a Thunderous “Hells Bells” at Letňany 2025

The late‐afternoon sky over Prague’s Letňany Airport still glowed amber on June 26, 2025, when the colossal bronze bell descended from the lighting grid, its silhouette framed by smoke and spotlights. Almost instinctively, the field of 80,000 black‐shirted fans fell into tense silence, knowing that once the clapper struck, AC/DC’s gothic anthem “Hells Bells” would boom across the runway and signal another night of hard-rock legend in the making.

Seconds later, the opening toll reverberated like an air-raid siren, shaking ribs and rattling beer cups. Brian Johnson strode to the front lip of the stage, cap low, eyes blazing, and delivered the ominous first line—“I’m a-rollin’ thunder, pourin’ rain”—with such gravelly menace that even long-time fans swore it rivaled his 1980 studio take. Every word hung heavy in the humid summer air, amplifying the song’s funereal grandeur.

Behind him, Angus Young emerged in his signature maroon schoolboy blazer, duck-walking across a catwalk that split the audience down the middle like a lightning scar. Each crunching chord he unleashed felt etched in granite, echoing off nearby aircraft hangars and turning the open field into a makeshift cathedral of distortion. Meanwhile, Stevie Young’s rhythm guitar anchored the groove with locomotive precision, paying quiet homage to the late Malcolm Young’s indomitable legacy.

The Prague crowd, famously vocal ever since the band’s storm-threatened 2016 stop, needed no prompting to roar the chorus back toward the towering speaker arrays. As Johnson barked the refrain, thousands of fists pumped skyward in perfect sync, their shouts rolling outward like concentric shock waves. For a moment, the collective chant transformed the massive venue into an arena of defiant unity, bonding generations of fans under one thunder-laden anthem.

Flame cannons erupted in time with Phil Rudd’s kick-drum thumps, shooting pillars of fire that briefly illuminated Angus’s sweat-soaked face. The veteran drummer—reinstated for the 2024–2025 Power Up world trek—played with stoic economy, his snare cracks perfectly spaced to let the song’s foreboding atmosphere breathe. Each measured hit threw listeners back to Back in Black’s haunting studio ambience, reminding everyone why that record still sells a steady half-million copies annually.

Midway through the performance, a massive LED backdrop displayed vintage footage of AC/DC’s first European tours, splicing images of Bon Scott-era club gigs with Johnson’s early stadium triumphs. The montage felt like a ghostly roll call, underscoring how “Hells Bells” once introduced fans to a new front-man in 1980 and now, forty-five years later, remains a spine-tingling rallying cry for live rock supremacy.

Angus seized the song’s instrumental break to unleash a soaring, blues-inflected solo that danced between pentatonic phrases and unexpectedly lyrical bends. He sprinted the full length of the catwalk, collapsing to his knees at its end in a nod to his immortal 1991 Donington showcase, then spun on his back, legs flailing, without missing a note. Mobile-phone flashlights rippled across the crowd like fireflies, capturing a guitarist who refuses to age in slow motion.

Meanwhile, tour-newcomer bassist Chris Chaney locked in with Stevie’s right-hand engine to propel the bell-heavy riff every bit as thunderously as late bassist Cliff Williams once did. Fans who had fretted over line-up changes whispered relief to one another—Chaney’s attack was muscular yet tasteful, providing the perfect ballast for Angus’s pyrotechnics and Johnson’s sandpaper howl.

As the climactic chorus thundered yet again, the bell’s final toll coincided with a barrage of white strobes that momentarily rendered the entire airfield snow-blind. In those blinding flashes, silhouettes of crowd-surfing diehards drifted over outstretched arms, while security staff in fluorescent vests grinned at the sheer spectacle of it all. Even jaded roadies backstage admitted later that the roar felt “loud enough to register on seismographs.”

The song’s ominous outro—those last descending chords—hung in the night like trailing sparks from a spent firework, granting a fleeting hush before cheers flooded the void. Johnson tipped his cap, Angus saluted with his SG, and the bronze bell slowly rose back into the rafters, its job done but its echo lingering like a warning siren well past dusk.

Fan reactions poured onto social feeds within minutes. Clips of the descending bell and Angus’s floor-spin broke view-count records set earlier on the tour, and Czech hashtags for “#HellsBellsPrague” trended globally before the band had even launched into the next number. Journalists on site filed breathless dispatches comparing the performance to the band’s legendary 1981 Long Beach shows, cementing its place in AC/DC’s ever-expanding live lore.

Back in the VIP risers, industry veterans swapped memories of Back in Black’s release party, marveling at how the once-new single had evolved into a gothic stadium centerpiece. One longtime promoter, who first booked the group in a 3,000-seat theatre, quipped that the bell prop alone now costs more to ship than the entire band fee in 1977—proof that AC/DC’s scale has grown as relentlessly as their riffs.

Local historians noted that Letňany Airport—originally built for inter-war Czechoslovak Air Force drills—has morphed over decades into a pilgrimage site for rock megashows, from the Rolling Stones in 1995 to Metallica in 2019. Yet many agreed the 2025 edition of “Hells Bells,” with its perfectly timed pyros and bell tolls echoing off hangar walls, might stand as the venue’s most cinematic moment to date.

Even after the final encore of “For Those About to Rock” and its booming cannon fire, fans poured onto Prague’s late-night trams humming the descending “Hells Bells” motif, their voices ricocheting through carriage windows and into warm summer streets. Some clutched limited-edition lithographs printed with the bell’s silhouette; others simply grinned, bruised and hoarse, already telling friends that lightning—both literal and metaphorical—had struck Letňany once more.

Long after stagehands dismantled towers of steel and smoke cannons cooled, that spectral chime still seemed to float in the humid air. For those who witnessed it, “Hells Bells” in Prague 2025 wasn’t merely another run-through of a classic track; it was a shared rite of passage, proof that the dark heartbeat at the center of Back in Black still pounds with undiminished, thunderous authority.