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A dimly lit club in Spain. Mark Kozelek stands alone with an acoustic guitar and begins playing What’s Next To The Moon. The audience hears a melancholy folk ballad. Nobody hears AC/DC. Nobody hears hard rock. One listener later swears it’s a Leonard Cohen song. Only afterwards comes the reveal: the songwriter they’re admiring is Bon Scott.

When we caught up with Kozelek at his hotel, he played haunting acoustic arrangements of Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer and Riff Raff. But the songs became something altogether different. Reflective. Fragile. Almost haunted. Yet somehow they lost none of their power.

Best known as the founder of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, and recognisable from his appearance as bassist Larry Fellows in the film Almost Famous, Kozelek built a career mining heartbreak, isolation and the darker corners of the human condition. A gifted and often polarising figure whose own life and career have not been without controversy, he heard something in Bon Scott that many others failed to see: not a frontman, a writer.

“There was just something sinister and dark,” he said. “There was just something so ragged and raw about it. Honestly, the Bon Scott era is only the era of AC/DC that I’m really familiar with. For me, Highway To Hell and Powerage were the best records.”

Kozelek was listening for storytelling. Years later, he found himself returning to Bon’s songs with nothing more than an acoustic guitar. What began as an experiment quickly became a revelation. The songs didn’t resist the transformation; they welcomed it. “I found that the Bon Scott lyrics were just so conducive to folk-style playing. The lyrics just sort of fall out and fall into this place for me that’s just very comfortable to sing them.”

Song after song underwent the same strange metamorphosis. Take away Angus Young’s guitar. Take away the amplifiers. Take away the high volume. What remained were vivid characters, detailed observations and complete stories. “They’re very poetic and very descriptive. He tells an interesting story in all of his songs.”

The more Kozelek played them, the more he realised he wasn’t reinventing the songs so much as uncovering another side of them. “The Bon Scott songs translated naturally to what I do. I always connected with the storytelling. The lyrics stand on their own. It’s as if they’re my songs.”

Perhaps the greatest validation came when those recordings eventually found their way back to AC/DC’s inner circle. “Malcolm Young heard the record and liked it. Brian Johnson was supportive of it as well.”

A songwriter known for intimate folk confessionals had taken some of the loudest music ever recorded, stripped away nearly everything that made it recognisable, and earned the approval of the men who knew those songs best and had played them hundreds of times.

The remarkable thing wasn’t that Mark Kozelek could make AC/DC songs sound like folk music, it was that Bon Scott’s songs were strong enough to survive the transformation.

Mark Kozelek’s album of AC/DC covers, What’s Next To The Moon, was released in 2001.

When they were finding their feet as a band in the industrial town of Fagersta, Sweden, The Hives would look to New Jersey garage punks Electric Frankenstein for clues to unlock the vast potential bubbling away in their rehearsal space.

“We could never figure out what they did – every part either twice or four times as long as you’re supposed to do,” guitarist Nicholaus Arson told Vice. “It was kind of a joke, like, to see how long you could play the riff before you felt like you needed to go to another part. You have a riff, you play it for 10 seconds, and then people expect you to switch to a different riff. But if you keep going for a minute, people go bananas for that.”

The band already had an arsenal of catchy riffs in their locker, but there was something about their single Hate to Say I Told You So that made people go absolutely bananas.

When the band first went into the studio to record their second album, 2000’s Veni Vidi Vicious, producer Pelle Gunnerfeldt said an early version of the song sounded like “a Swedish ZZ Top or something”, according to vocalist Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist.

“He didn’t like the song,” the singer told The Guardian. “He thought it was boring trite rock, so he made all these sonic changes like adding the swooshing effects, which were all the way through the song at one point. I got him to remix some songs with me and we changed the arrangement. Having less of the swooshy, fast guitar made the end more intense.”

Veni Vidi Vicious was released in April through Burning Heart (the one-time home of fellow countrymen Refused), with Hate to Say I Told You So following as a single in November.

“It’s pretty easy to get, it’s total spinal rock,” Almqvist later told Entertainment Weekly. “There’s nothing intellectual about it. It hits your reptile brain. Plus, it’s fairly monotonous, and I think people need that on the radio.”

Following the closure of Creation Records, Alan McGee launched Poptones at the turn of the millennium, just as the garage rock revival was picking up steam. After watching the video for Hate to Say I Told You So on German TV, he quickly signed the band to his label and repackaged the Fagersta five’s first two albums (including their 1997 debut Barely Legal) and an EP as a compilation album titled Your New Favourite Band, which peaked at number seven in the UK albums chart.

“The title was ballsy and funny because we didn’t actually have any hits, but maybe if you say something enough people start believing it,” remembers Almqvist.

Following the single’s re-release in February 2002, the band’s profile in the UK gathered pace, helped along by an exhilarating appearance on Top of the Pops later that month.

“We were an underground punk-rock band; a hit in our world was 500 people having our record and 400 of them we didn’t know,” Almqvist told Louder. “We expected it to do that but not to be so massive.

“When we put it out, contemporary music made no sense to us, it was only a year or two later when The Strokes and The White Stripes got popular that it seemed like we had a place in the popular world,” he added. “Becoming famous overnight was like old-school Frank Sinatra, New York New York — it was awesome! You go on television and everyone sees you.”

The band was later caught in a major label bidding war, and went on to sign a deal with Universal Music, worth a reported $10 million and praise from boss Jimmy Iovine.

“They created a buzz on their own,” Iovine told Spin once the ink had dried. “I respect that. I will pay for that. I will let them drive.”

The song is their most popular song on Spotify, with over 303 million streams, and remains an integral part of their set 26 years on. Not bad for a “fairly monotonous” song.