374 Bagpipers Break World Record with Epic AC/DC Performance at Melbourne’s Federation Square

Melbourne’s Federation Square doesn’t ease quietly into a big moment; it roars into one. On a spring afternoon that felt like half a street party and half a massed parade ground, 374 bagpipers in tartan and black vests gathered shoulder-to-shoulder to take on AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll).” The plaza’s jagged architecture framed a sea of chanters and drones, with onlookers packed to the edges and up the steps. You could feel the anticipation in the way people held their phones high, waiting to catch the instant when hundreds of reeds would ignite into one mighty chord. Moments later, they did—and the square shook with a sound that was at once ancient, unruly, and unmistakably rock ’n’ roll.

The performance was the centerpiece of what organizers billed as “The Great Melbourne Bagpipe Bash,” a record attempt fashioned as a civic pep rally for AC/DC’s long-awaited return to home soil. It wasn’t just large; it was meticulously orchestrated, with arrival call-times, staging lanes, and volunteer marshals guiding pipers to their marks in the crush of late-day crowds. The choice of song tied the spectacle back to a formative chapter in Australian rock: the band’s breakthrough single that welded hard riffs to the skirl of bagpipes and introduced countless listeners to an instrument that could snarl.

If the sight of hundreds of bagpipes in Fed Square felt symbolic, the location doubled the symbolism. Just steps away, in the mid-1970s, AC/DC filmed the famous clip of “Long Way to the Top,” playing on the back of a flatbed truck rolling down Swanston Street as city life rattled around them. The square has since become a public living room for the city—outdoor cinema by summer, big-screen sport by winter—but on this day, it was a stage for a very loud love letter to the band that put Australia’s hard-rock grit on the map.

And this wasn’t merely a stunt. When the last drones faded, organizers announced that 374 pipers had performed simultaneously—enough to claim a new world record for the largest bagpipe ensemble. The mark toppled a decade-old high-water line set by 333 pipers in Bulgaria, the previous best codified by record-keepers and long treated as a near-untouchable bragging right in piping circles. In Melbourne, the number wasn’t just exceeded; it was smashed, the kind of emphatic margin that sends a cheer through a crowd before the figure is even repeated.

There was a local wrinkle to the verification. The Australian Book of Records—an organization that has documented feats from the quirky to the monumental since 2012—confirmed the total and bestowed bragging rights on the massed band. Guinness World Records, which recognized the earlier Bulgarian feat, said it had not been approached to assess Melbourne’s attempt, a formality that didn’t dampen spirits one bit on the ground. To everyone present, the record was less about certificates and more about the noise, the togetherness, and the thrill of making a city landmark hum.

Among the pipers were living threads to AC/DC lore. Les Kenfield and Kevin Conlon—members of the Rats of Tobruk Memorial Pipes and Drums who played alongside the band in that original truck-top shoot—returned to lend their breath to history a second time. For fans crammed into Federation Square, spotting the veterans was like seeing a human bridge spanning half a century of Australian rock. When Kenfield talked about only later realizing how big that 1970s moment had become, you could sense how this new gathering gave the story a fresh ending, written loud and proud.

The range of ages on the cobblestones told its own story. Teenagers in brand-new kilts stood next to veterans whose pipes have outlasted multiple reed cases and uniform revisions; organizers said the oldest participant was 98. The bandrooms that fed players to the square represented suburbs and towns across Victoria, with interstate visitors sprinkled through the ranks and accents from overseas in the surrounding crowd. For a song about the grind of paying dues, the sight of all those lifetimes of practice culminating in one shared downbeat felt perfectly on-message.

Before the headline number, there was plenty of practical magic to make 374 instruments behave like one. Pipers queued for tuning checks, drones were corked and uncorked, and reed tweaks passed along the lines like pit-lane adjustments before a race. Campbell Wilson, Senior Pipe Major of the City of Melbourne Highland Pipe Band and one of the organizers, had flagged the biggest challenge days earlier: bagpipes are essentially four instruments in one, so multiply that by several hundred and intonation becomes a Rubik’s Cube with wind. Hearing the final chord lock into place was its own minor miracle.

Then came the downbeat. A conductor’s hand sliced the air, the drones bloomed like the opening of a jet engine, and “Long Way to the Top” leapt from folk tradition into street-level rock theatre. Phones bobbed as people tried to decide between filming and simply basking, while the rippling overtones bounced off the angular walls of the square. For a few minutes, Melbourne sounded like Glasgow on New Year’s Eve and a stadium encore rolled into one, a mashup of pipes-and-pub euphoria and rock-show catharsis. You didn’t need a kilt—or even to know the difference between a chanter and a drone—to feel it.

The post-song coda turned the square into a giant ad-hoc ceilidh. On a fan’s request, the army of pipers launched into “Happy Birthday,” turning an in-joke into a communal sing-and-skirl; moments later, “Amazing Grace” wafted over the plaza, softening the edges of the afternoon with a hymn that even the most casual listener could hum. If the record attempt was the formal program, these add-ons were the bonus tracks—the musical wink that said, “We came for AC/DC, but we brought the whole repertoire.”

For many, the day doubled as a pre-game party for AC/DC’s return to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the band’s first Australian show in a decade and the latest thunderclap in their globe-stomping “Power Up” tour. You could spot it in the T-shirts—classic fonts, lightning bolts, and Angus silhouettes—and hear it in the conversations: ticket blocks, setlist guesses, and travel tales. The pipers gave the city an overture; that night, the band delivered the main event across the Yarra, cannons and all.

What made the record click wasn’t just numbers. It was the Melbourne-ness of it all: a world-class public square, free and central, that delights in being a stage for whatever the city dreams up. Fed Square had invited pipers publicly weeks in advance—“be part of a record-breaking moment”—and the callout traveled from bandrooms to social feeds to group chats until it materialized as bodies and instruments under open sky. In a city that treats live culture like oxygen, this felt like exactly the kind of lark everyone would show up for.

There was also a neat symmetry between the city’s cultural hardware and its rock mythology. AC/DC’s original truck-video captured the scrappy bravado of a band muscling into the world by any means necessary. Decades on, a civic remix of that spirit—ditch the truck, keep the audacity—gathered hundreds of pipers to stamp the same idea with communal swagger. Where the 1970s clip piggybacked on Melbourne’s streets, the 2025 redux let the city piggyback on the band, sending noise and nostalgia back through the laneways that birthed them.

Travelers and superfans added another layer. Some had hopped flights from the United States to catch AC/DC on home soil, stacking museum visits and MCG pilgrimages into itineraries shaped around riffs. Between selfies with kilts and detours to AC/DC Lane, the day felt like a cultural exchange conducted at maximum volume. The bagpipe bash gave them a story that’s hard to top: “We came for the gig and left with a world record ringing in our ears.”

If you’ve ever played—or tried to play—bagpipes, you know the physicality of it: the breath control, the squeeze, the balance between power and finesse. Multiply that by hundreds, layer in city acoustics and adrenaline, and you’re asking for chaos. Instead, Melbourne got coherence and theatre, the sort of disciplined pandemonium that leaves sound techs grinning and kids agog. It was a world record you could feel in your chest, the kind that turns numbers into goosebumps before anyone reads the tally aloud.

And that’s the legacy: a day when a city’s affection for a band met the stubborn, joyful craft of piping, and the result was something bigger than either alone. The Bulgarian benchmark will remain a proud chapter in piping history, but Melbourne’s message—loud, cheeky, and unmistakably local—was that records are made to be chased, and songs to be shared by as many lungs as will try. Long after the square emptied and people drifted off toward trams, pubs, or the MCG, the echo of that massed chord hung in the Melbourne air like feedback after a final chord. It felt, fittingly, like the top.