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The profile · researched 25 September 2026
Six cannons, one flat cap: inside DC/UK, the AC/DC tribute that outgrew its own name
For most of two decades they toured Britain and 20-odd countries as AC/DC UK. A rebrand in 2025 dropped the AC, and the autumn 2026 diary is the first proper test of whether the audience followed the new spelling.
Two decades, and a name they gave up
The act now billed as DC/UK spent almost all of its working life as AC/DC UK, and the change of name is the single most confusing fact about them. Their own website carries two accounts of when it began: the home page says the band formed over two decades ago and calls them one of the UK's longest-running AC/DC tributes, while the about page dates the first incarnation to 'well over a decade ago'. Neither page names a founding year. What is documented is a long stretch of graft on the British circuit — a Raw Promotions review from 2017 catches them selling out a 250-capacity room and playing one unbroken set of over two hours, which is roughly the shape of the show they still play.
The rebrand in 2025 dropped the AC and left the ticketing world split in two. Academy Music Group sells the October and November 2026 shows as DC/UK (Formerly AC/DC UK). Ticketmaster still runs an artist page under AC/DC UK. ANGUSalive in Angus files the Forfar date under ACDC UK in the headline and DC/UK in the body copy. Songkick's page, still under the old name, lists nothing upcoming at all and stops dead at two shows in October 2025 — at the O2 Academy Islington on 4 October and the O2 Academy in Birmingham on 11 October — against 95 shows logged and 1,180 people tracking the band. Anyone searching the wrong spelling could reasonably conclude they had packed it in.
Who plays whom
Most AC/DC tributes have to pick a side: the Bon Scott records up to 1980, or the four decades of Brian Johnson that followed. DC/UK run both through one singer. Gavin Bolt fronts the band as Johnson, flat cap included, and also takes the Bon material. LeftLion's reviewer singled out his reading of The Jack — and had seen Bon Scott sing it with AC/DC at Cleethorpes Winter Gardens in 1976, which is about as unforgiving a comparison as a tribute vocalist can invite.
The rest of the line-up is cast rather than credited. There is an Angus in shorts, cap and blazer with the duckwalk intact; a Stevie Young on rhythm guitar and backing vocals; a bassist standing in for Cliff Williams with Angus's school tie knotted round the mic stand; and a Phil Rudd at the back who, according to the same review, lives down the A52 in Derby. The band do not publish the players' real names on their site beyond Bolt, which is telling about what is actually being sold: the costumes and the catalogue rather than individual reputations. The Derby connection runs deeper than the drummer — Alan and Lisa Woolley of Raw Promotions in Derby, in their thirtieth year of promoting when LeftLion spoke to them in 2025, have put the band into East Midlands rooms repeatedly, including the Flowerpot in Derby on 29 August 2025.
Cannons, a bell and an inflatable Rosie
The production is the pitch. A full-sized DC/UK show carries six fully firing cannons, a Hells Bell, an inflatable Rosie and oversized Angus caps mounted on a wall of Marshall cabinets. Venue pages reproduce that inventory almost word for word — the Robin in Wolverhampton and Reid Hall in Forfar both print the same list — which makes it clear the hardware is the booking document as much as the stage plan.
It scales down for smaller rooms, and the band's own wording ('a full sized show') quietly concedes as much. At Rescue Rooms in Nottingham the cannons were being hauled onto the tops of the Marshall stacks by roadies while the band were still setting up, and the smell of the charges was still hanging in the room after the last chord of For Those About to Rock. Reid Hall in Forfar on 26 February 2027 is advertised as the band's biggest production to date, with tickets from £30.
As close to the real band as a tribute gets
Part of DC/UK's standing rests on who has stood next to them. They have shared a stage with Stevie Young, AC/DC's rhythm guitarist since 2014; with Bob Richards, who drummed on Play Ball and Rock or Bust material; and with Tony Currenti, the drummer on the Australian High Voltage. Simon Wright, AC/DC's drummer across Fly on the Wall, Who Made Who and Blow Up Your Video, is listed on their site as still to come rather than done.
There is also a screen credit. The band appear in Sylvester Stallone's Expend4bles as the house band in Barney's bar, and they quote Stallone's on-set verdict — 'You Guys Are Pretty Good' — at the top of their own home page, alongside Classic Rock's description of them as one of the best AC/DC tribute acts, Benji Webbe of Skindred calling them an absolutely banging band, and a line from Planet Rock's Wyatt. LeftLion's write-up is blunter and more useful: a thoroughly convincing set, from a group of accomplished musicians doing a sterling job.
The stages that built the reputation
The festival record is unusually heavy for a tribute act, and specific. Graspop Metal Meeting gave them the 7,500-capacity metal dome stage directly after Iron Maiden. At Stone Free they closed the Indigo stage at the Millennium Dome after Alice Cooper. Herning Rocker in Denmark put them on the main stage in front of a sold-out 15,000 immediately before headliners Nephew, and they played Bospop on a bill topped by Santana. The Undercover festival in Warsaw went out on Polsat television to a reported five million viewers, and in 2023 they headlined the Legends of Rock festival in Portugal to 5,000 people.
Closer to home the band trade on a couple of pointed geographies: multiple sold-out nights at Glasgow's O2 ABC, yards from where If You Want Blood You've Got It was recorded, and sold-out nights at the Cavern in Liverpool. Over 20 countries is the running total they claim. None of it makes them a recording act — there are no DC/UK records to discuss, only a catalogue that belongs to someone else — so the live diary is the entire body of work.
The diary as it stands, September 2026
Five dates are on sale. The autumn run is a pair of consecutive nights in the Academy Music Group rooms — O2 Academy2 Birmingham on Friday 16 October 2026 and the O2 Academy Islington in London on Saturday 17 October, doors at 18:00 and a 22:00 curfew, which points to an early, hard-stop evening rather than a late one — followed by O2 Academy2 Liverpool on Saturday 14 November. None of those venue pages names a support act.
Beyond that the calendar stretches into 2027 and northwards: Reid Hall in Forfar on 26 February 2027, sold on the promise of the biggest production the band have toured, and the Robin in Wolverhampton on 3 April 2027. Behind them sits a 2026 that kept them in the rooms they know — a return to Rescue Rooms in Nottingham in July and the Flowerpot in Derby in September. The pattern is consistent and modest in scale: 300 to 900-capacity venues, one support, cannons on the Marshalls, repeat. What has changed in the last eighteen months is administrative rather than musical, and the risk is entirely in the listings — a band with this much history is currently discoverable under three different spellings of its own name.
The show, now
A DC/UK show runs just over two hours in one continuous set, with no interval and barely a pause for breath. The Rescue Rooms night reviewed by LeftLion in June 2025 opened on Shoot to Thrill and worked through Rock and Roll Damnation, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, High Voltage, Thunderstruck, The Jack, Hells Bells, T.N.T., Whole Lotta Rosie and Let There Be Rock, then feigned an exit, came back through Angus's solo into Bonnie, and finished on Highway to Hell and For Those About to Rock with the cannons firing off the tops of the Marshall stacks. Gavin Bolt works the room constantly as Brian Johnson, in the flat cap, arms swinging; the Angus appears in schoolboy blazer, shorts and cap and does the duckwalk. Staging scales to the room, with the six cannons, Hells Bell, inflatable Rosie and oversized Angus caps reserved for the full-sized production — Forfar in February 2027 is billed as the largest version yet, from £30. The October 2026 Birmingham and London dates and the November Liverpool date list no support act, and Islington runs doors at 18:00 to a 22:00 curfew. Crowd response at Rescue Rooms was two hours of devil's horns, chanting and singing, with the drummer throwing sticks into the balcony at the end.
Researched from dcukthetribute.com · dcukthetribute.com · leftlion.co.uk · academymusicgroup.com · angusalive.scot · therobin.co.uk · songkick.com · rawpromo.co.uk