It’s not easy making a great music video. Murphy’s Law reigns supreme and there are countless variables that could threaten to turn your shoot into an utter disaster. Everything from the artist showing up on time, to the endless technical concerns, are working against you. However, no amount of calamities, technical issues, or outright fuck-ups can quite account for what the hell AC/DC just released as their video for ‘Play Ball’.

In what is inarguably the worst video of the year, and a strong contender for worst of all time, the first single from the band’s 15th album, Rock or Bust, is set to a montage of clips from the lingerie bowl (no, really), a pair of nuns playing soccer (yes, really), snooker trick shots (we don’t know either), archival footage of grid iron (yep), and the band performing in front of a green screen, which is apparently something they’d never heard of until recently.

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We don’t know who decided that releasing this video to the public, instead of, say, burning every copy of it to its lowest ash and throwing it into the ocean like the body of bin Laden, was a good idea, but whoever it is, they are a bad person. Assuming one of the world’s biggest touring acts has a whole entourage behind their every move, it’s hard to lay all of the blame on director and longtime AC/DC collaborator David Mallet, though he’s certainly a candidate for it.

“The spirit of ‘Play Ball’ is sort of a melange i.e. mess up of all-sorts of outrageous videos of people playing ball plus a rather good performance from the band,” he said of the video. If by “outrageous”, Mallet means ridiculous and confusing, and “a rather good performance from the band”, he means stiff, awkward, and highlighting the fact that at 59 years old, Angus Young looks rather perturbing dressed in his iconic schoolboy outfit, he’s absolutely right.

All in all, it seems AC/DC are about as good at making music video as drummer Phil Rudd is at paying his working girls. Instead of looking like a big-budget production worthy of an iconic brand name like AC/DC, the video more resembles the kind of thing you’d get from one of those “Make Your Own Movie” green screen setups they had at interactive children’s centres in the ’90s. As you can see below, it’s up for debate just which clip looks worse.

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