How are you doing, guys?
Spike; Doing great, thanks. How are you doing, Chris? Which one of your homes are you in? 

Chris; Hello! I'm at home in Spain.

First off, through circumstances that are well documented, most of the original Quireboys got back together a few years ago;  what was it like? 
Spike; I think what happened was; "well, now what happens?" I mean, it's hard to get fired from the Quireboys, especially when you started the band! But everybody was so supportive, and the one that was the most angry was Guy Bailey; he was foaming mad! But that's all in the past now, and this has been a joy to do. I'm so glad that Chris asked me to do this, just to hear Guy play the guitar and getting to hear his voice again. 

Chris; Thirsty was originally Guy's side project which started around 2014, and he did three albums, working with a Russian poet called Irina D. She would write lyrics based on stories and real life histories that she'd read that moved her, and Guy set them to music. He composed some really good music, and he asked Simon Hanson of Squeeze to play the drums, and he asked me to play the bass. At this point Spike wasn't involved at all, but fast forward a number of years, and as you know, Guy tragically died two years ago, and Irina and I had an idea of putting out a compilation of the best of these three albums as Thirsty as a tribute to Guy, because that was really the last work that he did in the last decade of his life. I said it would be great to get Spike to come along as he could maybe duet on one of the songs and we can just record him and it'll just make the album more interesting.

So you invited Spike into the project?
Chris; I asked Spike and he said he loved the idea, so we went to a small recording studio off Archway Road, and as soon as he started singing on the very first song - and this is probably the first time that Guy's guitar and Spike's voice have been together in many years - the whole room was just electric. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, and it sounded so special. We thought; "well, let's try another song, and another", and before we knew where we were, we'd pretty much got a whole album of Spike singing along with Guy's guitar doing the Thirsty songs, and they really go to a different place. Spike did such a good job of like, thinking how he was going to sing each song. One song he does in a falsetto, which is not something I've heard before. It sounds marvellous, and the whole record just came out so well. It was giving me shivers.

Spike, what was it like for you to be recording those songs? 
Spike; Well, none of us ever lost touch; me, Chris, Nigel [Mogg], and Guy. If I was around his house, he'd play what he was doing, and he showed me a couple of videos of Thirsty. He'd been in another band called The Peckham Cowboys, I think it was, which was pretty good, but he was like, "oh, listen to this", and I didn't really take it in that much, to tell you the truth, because we never really talked about music, me and Guy, it was just having a drink and a laugh, and I was like; "oh my god, do I have to listen to this?", and try to listen to my new album.

But honestly, you've got no idea. When I went down there, everything just flowed out of me. I could hear him, and it did give me shivers when we were in there doing it. One song led on another, and I went; "listen, can I do my take on this?" Originally I'd done the duets, but then I said, "can I do my take of how it would go?" because we wrote so many songs together in the Quireboys, and a lot of obscure songs we didn't really release, so when we were doing it, it was second nature to me, because everything's in my key.

It sounds like it brought back a lot of memories.
Spike; I felt he was there. I think about him all the time now, and me and Chris have just been to America together with the Quireboys, and we were talking about that. As we're getting older, it's a bit like my father, and then Guy; you start thinking about everybody a bit more, and the things that we've done. Me and Chris were saying that nobody knows what me, Guy, Chris, and Nigel went through when we started that band all them years ago and what happened in our lives together. It just drew back so many memories, and it was great to hang out with my old mate again.

The album sounds really great. It's got such a great production. 
Chris; We had Chris Kimsey helping with the mastering and the mixing and doing the remixes with Spike's voice, and he goes way back with us. He mixed our second album 'Bitter Sweet and Twisted' [1993], and he was involved in all of the Thirsty albums. One of the reasons it sounds so good is that he loved Guy, and he did the project because he always loved Guy's songwriting, his guitar playing, and he loved Spike's voice from when we worked together before. He really brought it all together, and the final mix is so strong because of him. Obviously he's like a Rolls Royce producer.

Spike; Yeah, Chris Kimsey is one of the nicest men in the world. The last time I spoke to Chris Kimsey, I was at Fish's house, actually, and we rang him up, and he was at a party in the garden. I didn't know he produced Marillion.

It's a really personal album, and you guys are tied right back to 1990 and 'A Bit of What You Fancy'.
Spike; We started in '84, '85 I think, so we know each other so well, and I've got to tell you, Irina's lyrics are just outstanding on this, and I could see where Guy was coming from on the songs. I hadn't heard it a lot before, I must admit, but once I got into it, I was like; "oh my god". If he was alive, he'd go; "sing it like this. Sing it there. I'll do this, I'll do that", and I did sing in falsetto on one of them, and in the back of my head I was like, he would have said to do that, because he knew I could sing falsetto. I was just after doing the last Quireboys album, 'Wardour Street' [2024], and all that was such a massive part of him, and his knowledge of everything, but keeping everything basic and simple. That's why I love the Thirsty album; there's not one song this over three minutes, I don't think.

Chris; I know! That was his great thing; it had to be a three minute song, and he would just kind of shape it. That was part of his songwriting thing. He would get it all in three minutes. He thought, if you couldn't get it in three minutes, it wouldn't be good enough.

Spike; Chris, if you remember, '7 O'clock' didn't have a chorus for years, but anyway, it was like; keep it short and simple. 

Anyone not familiar with what this album is about, they might think it's this remorseful, sorrowful thing, but it's anything but; it's got rock and roll swagger all over it.
Chris; If I had to describe it to any Quireboys fan, I would say that it really has got the essence of the Quireboys from the earliest days. It's got the magic of Guy and Spike being together, it's got Guys's song writing ability, but what's a little bit different from Irina's lyrics is that the themes are a bit different, so it's not the sort of rock and roll stuff that we did traditionally back in the day. It's the essence of the original Quireboys, but with something a little bit different, and I think if people give it a listen, they'll really like it, and they'll understand.

I'm glad you mentioned Irina's lyrics. The title track, for example, 'God Bless America', has got a real standout lyric to it.
Chris; It's incredible, isn't? It's a real life story. It is the story of Rosemary Kennedy, who was the older sister of JFK. She was a debutante when Joe Kennedy was the British ambassador in the '40s and the '50s. When she was a teenager she was subject to mood swings and would lose her temper occasionally, and it gets quite extraordinary. Her father, Joe Kennedy, who was thinking about perhaps she might go out and get pregnant, or she might do something to disgrace the family name and upset her brother's political careers, and without telling her mother, he arranged for her to be lobotomised by a surgeon called Mr. Watts. He lobotomised her while she was still conscious, and this is the absolute truth, he asked her to sing 'God Bless America' while they were drilling, and when she stopped singing 'God Bless America', they stopped the drilling. Then she was left incontinent with the mind of a two year old. You couldn't make this up, but if you wanted a metaphor for how messed up the United States is, you couldn't really imagine anything like it. So the song tries to distill the essence of that story in two minutes.

You've also got 'Albatross', which is now one of two songs in rock about Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with the other being Iron Maiden of course.
Chris; I don't think Irina had  heard the Iron Maiden one. I don't think I've heard the Iron Maiden one, actually.

Spike; I'll have to listen to that. Has that got Bruce Dickinson on? Actually, Steve Harris was on the [Monsters of Rock] cruise.

One of the tracks I really love is 'Mercury Rising'.
Chris; I actually wrote that one. That wasn't a Guy song. The backstory to that is the bass line of the main thing is a riff I heard when I was on an airplane. I was on a flight back from the USA, and I heard an African track with this bass line, and then I kind of put it away, and I figured it out. Then for the other part of it, it's a strange thing, as it's actually in a five four time, and that is from a song called 'River Man' by Nick Drake. I just put the two things together, and I ran into Guy and Guy would normally never do anything in five four, but I said; "just do this", and so we put it down instrumentally, and then, as always, Irina came up with some great lyrics. And Guy's guitar part with the slide, what he did to it is quite extraordinary.

Spike; I never knew that until today, Chris. The last song that I heard you write was 'You Can't Hide From My Heart' [early Quireboys demo]. That was a wonderful song.

Another track that jumped out at me was 'Chaos'; it's got that great spoken word intro from Guy reciting Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress', and there's some serious shredding going on.
Chris; Well, Guy just had that book on his shelf, and that literally just came from that. I said; "just read the prolog", so he read it, just have something over the intro. But his guitar playing is absolutely fantastic. It's some of the best guitar playing I've ever heard him do. And the backing vocal, there's a little bit of Lynn Jackman in there, and she's obviously a great singer, and Spike has done a wonderful job with the lyrics. I mean, it's come out marvellously.

Spike; You know what? I never knew that either. I bought Guy that book, actually, for Christmas.

While we're talking guitars, would Guy have used open tunings?
Spike; Never used open tunes. No, we never did.

Chris; He would always use regular chords without numbers [fifths or sevenths, eg].

Spike; When I was doing the new Quireboys album, I said to Luke [Morley]; "I can't get my head around open tuning", and I was trying to play in open tuning, and Luke went; "did you ever write any songs in open tuning with Guy Bailey?" I went; "actually, no". He says; "well, why the fuck are you trying to start now?!" I was like; "good point!" You've got to remember, when we first started, there was just one guitar. There was only Guy, and Luke had seen us play with just one guitar, and then obviously there's been a couple of people, obviously Tom Gold was in, and then Ginger joined, but even when we would do that, Guy would go; "look, you play this bit, and I'll play this, but do not deviate from what I'm showing you to play". Guy was so knowledgeable about music and different things like that. His thing was always; "let's not go to the minor if we can help it", or; "let's not use chords with numbers in". 

Chris; His style was based on a kind of rhythm and lead joined up thing, and I know what he listened to, because I knew his record collection when he was younger. He would listen to Steve Cropper on Otis Redding Records, and he'd listened to Wilco Johnson on Dr. Feelgood, and Keith Richards, and so it would be a kind of rhythm and lead in one, joined up. That was very much his thing,

Spike; That was the whole reason when we got the Quireboys back together, just have one guitar again, to let everything breathe. That's how Guy always wanted it, and I think it sounds a million times better with just one guitar anyway, because that's how it always was to me.

Chris; Very much about Guy's sound. That's what I love about the Thirsty record; because you have got that thing where Guy's sound is the way he plays, which was so much a part of the songs that we started with.

Spike; You hear people talk about this all the time, especially guitarists, but Guy'd got his own sound, and it didn't matter what guitar he played, it would sound like him. He would plug into his 25 watt combo with that Pacific [guitar] and it's a bit like when you hear Ronnie Wood or something. When Ronnie played on my album ['100% Pure Frankie Miller', 2014] and there's no effects, nothing. It's just how they play. When we used to play the Quireboys and have the Marshall stacks, sometimes he'd just have his 25 watt combo behind. You can definitely tell Guy, I mean, even Luke says that not many people can do what Guy did, because when you are so brilliant at the guitar, you always overplay but his solos, when you listen to the solo of 'King in New York', 'I Don't Love You Anymore', or things like, they're so basic, and just beautiful, something you whistle, something you sing.

Chris;I think that's because he's such a good songwriter. He composes, so when he does a solo and he's playing his guitar part, he's thinking like he's composing.

Spike; When we did '7 O'clock' with the "bap bap baps" and the "woos" and all that, I would never have thought of that; that was all from him.  And he knew the harmonies, he knew what to do, even with a cigarette in his mouth.

I wanted to talk a little bit about those early days. Spike, I can see a gold disc for 'A Bit of What You Fancy' behind you.
Spike; There's a platinum one there as well. Actually, I took that out once, with Krusher [Joule, DJ, designer and Journalist] - actually, no, that's my mum's one - but with Krusher, we took it out when I first got it, because I give Krusher one because of Kerrang!, and we took it out and played it. He says, "do you think it'll play?" So we put it on, and it was Nat King Cole 'Unforgettable' [laughing] You've got to remember that Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra build Capitol Records [who the Quireboys were signed to]. You can always tell on the gold album how many grooves are on it, and to see if there's the same amount that's on your record. But that's what they used to do. I don't know about the CD. It would be a bit sad if they gave you somebody else's CD!

What was that like having that success? A number two album, and four singles, signed to a major label.
Spike; Yeah, Phil Collins, I'll never forgive him {Phil Collins's '...But Seriously' kept the Quireboys off the top spot in February 1990]. We done Top the Pops with him as well. The shite, keeping us off number one! In fact, what Chris says the whole time to me was; "you know what the problem with the Quireboys was?" Me and Guy only wrote number twos [laughing]!

Hey, man, can you imagine it? I mean, I moved to London, working on the building site. I got Guy a job on the building site with me, that's how we first met. But you didn't expect it, we just went with the flow and had such a good time. We have had the best time when me, Chris, Nigel, and Guy was together. The last time the four of us were together, it was just hysterical, because nobody knows what we went through, from them real early days of being in the back of the old van and playing universities and doing everything that you can.

Chris; We did. I would also say that it wasn't just like suddenly being on Top of the Pops; we kind of took three years, and every time we went around, there'd be more people at the gigs. Then we got the independent deal, we were on the Chart Show, we were up in the indie charts, and then all the labels in the States wanted to sign us. We were opening for Guns n' Roses when they came over and did their first year growing up bit by bit, so we didn't suddenly go; boom, 1990, Top of the Pops. It was growing up over every year, and it got stronger and better.

You played at Donington in 1990 with Whitesnake, Aerosmith, Poison, and even Jimmy Page was there; what was it like backstage?
Spike; Me and Jimmy ended up being really good pals, especially when we're doing the second album.

Chris; Don't forget, our road manager was Richard Cole [former Led Zeppelin tour manager], so we had a very good intro with Jimmy Page.

Spike; Richard and Guy were best pals. They were always very close for years. Yeah, Richard Cole was wonderful. We went through a lot of tour managers.

Chris; Yeah, but he lasted longer than most of them! Yeah, you always got paid, more or less immediately whenever he went into town. 

By the time you came to the second album, 1993's 'Bitter Sweet & Twisted', Grunge was in the mainstream, and the whole musical landscape had changed.
Spike; Honestly, that did not affect us at all. You've got to remember, we'd been playing for years. I was 17 or something when we started, and we had not stopped touring, and we had not stopped recording and doing the whole thing, and me and Guy were going; "we're gonna die". I mean, we could have carried on if we wanted to, but we all needed a life, we all needed a break. We didn't split the band up - it wasn't anything like that - we just went; "you know, what? Let's have a break for a while", and then that turned into what it did. Chris has got a wonderful life now, I've still got a wonderful life, but we all always remained friends. We could have carried on. It wasn't the Grunge thing that stopped us at all, and that album still sold loads. I mean, it sold great. That album was no problem with the record company or anything like that, we just were knackered, man.

Yeah, it sounds exhausting.
Spike; Imagine being on tour all your life, in hotels; that's all we done. All our girlfriends left, we had nowhere to live, and we were just constantly on tour and constantly working. We can't really call it 'work', it was the best life in the world. I got the band back together [in 2001]. I did call Chris, I called Guy, I called Nigel when he did the Sanctuary album ['This is Rock 'n' Roll', 2001], and a couple of things before, but everybody was; "why? We've done it. We've been on tour forever", and it's hard, you know? it's hard to get out of that whole thing. I obviously love it - that's why I continued.

Bringing things back to the present day, and you must be excited to be getting 'God Bless America' released.
Spike; Yeah, we're going to do a couple of videos, actually, because there's a couple of my favourite songs that I want to release.

Chris; 'God Bless America' is going to be the single when the album comes out, and so we're going to make a video, and we're going to push that and promote it together with the release of the album. I'm very excited about it. I think it'll just kind of grow, hopefully, by word of mouth, because I think it's an exceptional record. Spike sings so well, Guy's songs are so good, and the lyrics are strong. I think it's a great record, and I hope it'll just have a life of its own once it gets a push.

Spike; Honestly, the lyrical content is just incredible, I think, and when you listen to it, it's not what you would expect from me, put it that way. Irina is a brilliant lyricists, and the stories to be told, and they're just really great, catchy, lovely, brilliant songs with the style the Quireboys in there. It's the essence of the band, because of me, Guy and Chris on it. 

Are you looking forward to getting out and playing some of these songs live?
Spike; I want to, definitely, but at the minute I'm going to the studio with the Quireboys. We're going to record some new songs for the tour, we've got some festivals to do, and we start touring in October, so I'm going to get a thing out for that. We're going to have a record release party for the Thirsty thing, and we'll try and play a few songs at that. I mean, Guy was my best friend, man, so I want to keep everything alive for Guy as much as I can. He was loved in the music business by everybody. He was probably the one of the funniest men you ever could wish to meet in your entire life, and he was so intelligent, so wonderful, and we both miss him like crazy.

Thirsty Quireboys' 'God Bless America' is available on 19th June 2026. Order here.

Today on this Ozone Monday, I'm joined not by Prunella Scales, but by Skid Row, founder, song writer, bassist, and now for the first time a solo artist, Rachel Bolan. Hi Rachel, how are you doing?
I'm doing well, man. That was quite the intro! That was very clever.
​
I thought to myself earlier this year when Prunella Scales passed away; what's Rachel Bolan's opinion on that. 
All of us, like Tommy Elwood, and I, we were texting back and forth; "Oh my god, it's the end of an era, man! Prunella Scales died!" You know, we were all such big fans of that show [Fawlty Towers].

We're here today to talk about 'Gargoyle of the Garden State'; which, of course, is New Jersey. You're rooted in New Jersey, aren't you?
I am. I was born and raised here. I moved out for about, I don't know, twenty-five years, and you know, you could take the boy out of New Jersey, but you can't feed them good pizza anywhere but here!

The press release states that the album is "a bold, deeply personal debut, rooted in grit, attitude, and storytelling spirit"; it's a very personal album to you, isn't it?
It is. It's not only personal experience, but it's people I know, their personal experiences as well, and then you know, mash some kind of political statements in there, or political opinions, I should say, and a lot of fun; mash it all together, and that's what we have.

Was the idea of a solo album a way to take the pressure off the Skid Row singer search?
​One didn't have anything to do with the other; it's just the timing was worked out. While we we're looking, we're taking our time, and we have the luxury of time this time. I had some songs and I played them for Nick [Raskulinecz, producer] and he was like; "yeah, let's do a solo record", and it was just that matter of fact. I was like; "okay, let's see if the label wants to do it", and they said yes, thankfully, and now here we are, We started it, I guess, a little over a year ago, and now we're getting ready for the release in a couple weeks,

You were obviously, very famously thrust onto the scene in 1989 with tracks like 'I Remember You', but you've always had this punk spirit, which is all over the album. 
Yeah, you know, I'm the fourth out of four kids, and when I was growing up, each room had their own thing going on. There was the British invasion in my one sister's room; like Chicago, and Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, from my brothers, and then my other sister, it was Melanie, all the singer songwriters, James Taylor, stuff like that, and then I listened to all that, and then I got older and started to form my own musical opinion, and when I heard punk rock, I was so drawn in, and by the energy and probably the simplicity to a lot of it, and it's coming out now in my writing, and I guess I was into the new wave. I was into a lot of stuff, and a lot of people that I've been talking to that have heard the record are like; "wow, your influences are really showing, this is great!". And I wear them like a badge of honour. I'm not trying to hide it, I'm not trying to say I came up with something new, it's just the stuff that I'm doing is my way, which is new.

'Anything But You' kicks off the album, and it's great to see you playing guitar in the video; what was it like playing guitar on the album?
It was fun, you know. I'm a decent guitar player at best. Did I hit all the notes on the barre chords? I'm not going to put money down on it, but it came out of me, so it was a lot of fun doing that. When I left for Tennessee, I drove down, and had a bunch of stuff, like twelve guitars and basses, and Nick has an arsenal of guitars down there, and I played so many different guitars, even if it was for tiny little parts for texture and accents. That part was really fun, to just build with the different tones, and not having to explain. It was fun too because I knew what I had in my head, and I just played it. I didn't try this or try that; I just did it, and what worked, worked, and what didn't, we scrapped.

It sounds like you really enjoyed playing guitar.
Yeah, playing guitar was a lot of fun, and that particular [Gibson] Les Paul, I've had for years. It's a reissue, and the headstock has been broken off twice, but it's still that magic guitar, and it's my favourite six string that I have, without a doubt.

​You're playing some solos on the album as well; do you enjoy playing the leads?
Yeah, well, I did the leads, but what I'm calling leads was the one on 'Anything But You', which was just creating another melody line. I'm not a lead guitar player. I don't even go there. I left that up to the professionals, but then there's another song called 'Devil in the White' that I just had a guitar part, and it fit in the section that we were calling the lead section, so that was really fun to do. It was another avenue to create, but the real lead guitar players, the solo stuff, I left up to Damon [Johnson] and Nuno [Bettencourt] and [Skid Row band mates] Snake and Scotty, because that's way above my pay grade, that's for sure.

In the video for 'Anything but You', you're wearing the face chain. You retired that for the longest time, but it's been back a while now. What was it like to reclaim that? 
Yeah, it's been back for a little while. I think Johnny [Solinger, singer 1999 - 2015] may still have been singing with us, and we were playing a festival called Rocklahoma. You could blame Scotty Hill for this, because before that, we'd have a big gig, like a gig in London or in New York, and he's like; "man, you got to bring the chain back, just bring it back!" and I'm like; "man, I don't even know where they are anymore", it's like; "so make a new one, you used to make them all the time!" So one day we're playing Rocklahoma [presumably, 23 May 2014], and I didn't say anything to anybody, and it's like; "okay, time to go to the stage", and I like, run into the restroom real quick, and I put it in, and I walked out with my head down, and just walked straight to the stage, and we all got together, just to, you know, for the pep talk, and everyone's like; "no way, you got to be kidding me!" So ever since then I've had it in, and yeah, I wanted to carry that into my solo career, for sure.

​I have to ask, is there a failsafe for some guy grabbing it or something? Does it break easily, or what?
No, my failsafe is a right hook. If someone goes to grab me, that's my failsafe; a right hook or a left uppercut, a nice bolo punch.

Hi guys, how are you doing today?
Nigel; Yeah, really well, thank you. It's nice and sunny here in west Wales.

Mathew; Really great, thanks!

You're back with your first album and a decade. First off, what took you so long?
Nigel; Well, you have to wait for great things! Plus the fact that we didn't have a record deal, and we've been busy. The problem when you've been in this industry for so long, releasing new records, it goes against because people want to hear the old songs. So, new music - apart from this new album, which is brilliant and we're very proud of this one - in some ways it's a thankless task, because everyone just wants to hear the songs from the '90s, and especially talking about radio.

Mathew; And also the last record, 'What We're Fighting For' [2016] wasn't the most enjoyable process. There were some great times in it and there was some amazing tunes on it, but of all the albums, it was probably the least enjoyable that we recorded, and the whole process. So I think that puts a dampener on it. But you find your enthusiasm again, and this one was so joyous and full of so many great moments, and it was probably one of the best albums we've ever done, so it reignited our love for it again.

This one sounds unmistakably like a Dodgy album; it could have come out in 1997 a couple of years after 'Free Peace Sweet', for example. 
Nigel; Yeah, I agree. I mean, I don't think music for bands and song writers has changed that much, really, and for us, especially, I mean, you can get AI to do all your stuff nowadays, but for us, it's like, it's who we are; you know, put all those things together, and the alchemy comes out as Dodgy, as a new Dodgy album. It's just wiser. I feel it's a little bit more, as a record, a little bit behind the beat, whereas Dodgy used to play really pushing it. And I think it's more a more self-assured record.

Touching on a point you made about people wanting the older songs, you've got tracks on this album that are going to slot right in.
Nigel; Yeah, they do live.

Mathew; Yeah, live it's amazing. The new tracks, we've been playing them live. Before, perhaps from the albums that we've made since we took a sabbatical for about eight or nine years, and we came back, and we did 'Stand Upright in a Cool Place' [2012], which was a real departure. It was really acoustic and very cool and woody and so playing those songs mixed in with the other songs, some of them fitted in, and again, the last album that we made as well [What are We Fighting For', 2016], some of them fitted in, but all of these seem to work so well. We really loved doing a lot of harmonies on this one, so we're going back to the harmonies.

It's kind of a trademark really, for Dodgy to have those big harmonies, isn't it? It was part of your defining sound of the '90s.
Nigel; Yeah, definitely. It made us stand apart from the rest of the bands that were going in the early to mid-nineties, really. The harmonies was our infatuation with the West Coast of America, CSNY, and with The Beatles and all that sort of stuff.

On the whole it's quite an upbeat album; what was your mood going into it? 
Nigel; I think with the musicality, when Mathew and I get together to do a new album, it's just a process of going through all the ideas in my studio and getting a short list and then breaking it down, and then finally deciding on the ones we want to do, and then magically, finishing those, and then going in the studio and playing them to the guys. So to be fair, over the last fortnight, we've never played these songs before live. There were a couple of them we had played live - 'Hello Beautiful', 'Summer Forever' - but we hadn't played 'It's Not the End', and we hadn't played any of the others until the first gig in Norwich at the start of May, and they fit like a glove.

The album opens with 'Hello Beautiful', and there's a real upbeat vibe over this minor key verse.
Nigel; I think that's the trick is like, you start them off with a minor and then you hit them in the chorus with the with a relative major and it's like; "hey, happy days!"

And of course, you got the horns in there as well. 
Nigel; Yeah, that's brilliant.

Mathew; Yeah we're blessed because we had a very good signing a couple of years ago, Graham Mann, who's a multi instrumentalist. He can play everything, but he plays keyboards and trombone with us live, but he can also do string arrangements and horn arrangements. Yeah, he's brilliant, and I remember right at the start of this, the album, I was saying to Nigel; "it would be lovely to get some real strings on this to give it a warmth and a depth", and it really does. Graham fitted in with us really well, and he knows what we're looking for.

Nigel; Yeah, he's great.

Mathew; He does great little things. One thing I do remember is, right back at the start when we were collating songs and coming up with things, and I was going over to Nigel's in west Wales just to see what songs were about, and Nigel was playing in his studio, and he loves to jam a lot of electronic music - he'll get a loop going and then just go for like, seven days, just playing around with loops and adding things and beats and things - and Nigel said; "do fancy doing a new album". And I was like; "okay, is it going to be like this then? Is it going to be electronic, dancey kind of stuff?", and Nigel was really sure, and he went; "No, I want to make a Dodgy album. I want to make an album that sounds like Dodgy".

Nigel; But you're right, though, because the songs did come from that; they came from the electronic stuff, but I never see it as finished, especially when you've got a band; you don't want to just go with electronics; you want your band to do it. But some of the tempos and the grooves were established on drum machines, but 'Good Enough' was too, so it goes all the way back.

Going back to why it's taken this long to release 'Hello Beautiful', and in the '90s, you released three albums in four years; does that seem like a crazy workload now?
Mathew; Not as crazy as Led Zeppelin who did like, four in eighteen months! But yeah, we can look back and go; "God, we did a lot!", but it's what you want to do. If what you like to do is to go out and rear sheep, it's what you do. But it's a whole different environment now for releasing records, and we don't have a machine behind us that are saying; "right, come on; tour here, we want another record here, we want another single here", which kind of gets your momentum going, but now we decide when we do things. And it was lovely. It was perfect. We just gave ourselves lots and lots of time. I think what we kept saying to ourselves was, no one's screaming out for another Dodgy album, so let's just make it as best as we can and be happy with it. With the last album, suddenly there was a deadline, and we didn't want a deadline; we wanted to be able to do things at our own pace, and that's what we did. And we gave ourselves lots of time, and you can hear it.

Nigel;  Yeah, you can hear it, and I feel as well that in those ten years, we've been doing a hell of a lot of gigs, constantly each year - I'd say, between forty and sixty gigs a year - and you become more confident with your stage craft, with your vocals, and knowing what key to write songs in. It's like, you can only learn that when you're actually doing it, so I think the experience is starting to show with this band, finally,

I'm glad you mentioned Led Zeppelin, because the second single, 'It's Not the End' starts off with this real John Bonham beat and sound.
Nigel; Yeah, Nick [Brine]'s brilliant at getting drum sounds, he's fantastic, the engineer, producer. He's brilliant. Over to you, Mathew!

Mathew; Well, the thing is that Bonham 'When the Levee Breaks' is so recognisable, it's so definitive that, no, it's not necessarily what I was going for because that wasn't necessarily the sound. I've said this from when we finally got to the finishing line with that song, but that song told us where to go. The song had its own personality. It was saying; "no, it needs to sound like this", and right up until near the end of the of the recording of it, it wasn't going to start necessarily with drums, but it had such a pace, and such a pulse to it. And [Andy] Miller came up with just such a simple but effective guitar line that goes all the way through it that you've just got to get that pace at the start. I mean, I wasn't thinking of Bonham, but it's more like a metronome, it's more like a more like a drum machine, and Nigel was really insistent that we have no cymbals on that whatsoever, and that it just kept that insistence.

Nigel; I have a philosophy about cymbals, especially because I know about drum machines and stuff like that, and it's weird if you listen to the records that you really love; you could probably count them on one hand how many crash cymbals are on it. What happens when you hit a cymbal? It signifies the end of something and the start of something, and I just didn't want that on 'It's Not the End', so it just started and ended when it should without these big pointy bits in there.

Mathew; And it's got a real mood to it, and I think you can really hear that. It's the moodiest song, and not as in a bad mood; it sets such a mood right from the start. It's got a bit of an '80s vibe to it, I guess, early '80s, maybe.

Nigel; Yeah, Talk Talk, maybe.

Mathew; Yeah, Talk Talk, the Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, even Foreigner. We don't mind that. We don't mind a bit of '80s.

Have you always felt that way about cymbals, Nigel?
Nigel; No. I don't like them, necessarily, because when you're on stage and they're really loud and you can't hear yourself sing, but I did lose a bit of love for them. It's just experience, and then I started going; "oh, that's a thought". and then I started listening to all my favourite records and going; "there's no cymbals on them", which is really weird! And then you've got Mathew on 'In a Room'; I counted, and I think there's 346, cymbal crashes.

Mathew; 347, actually.

Nigel; Oh, is it? Sorry!

'In a Room' has one of the best drum fills of the entire '90s.
Mathew; It was done on a stinking Guinness hangover, so that's what Guinness can do for you. But yeah, it's a funny story. Hugh Jones, the wonderful producer from the album, he's produced so many amazing records, from Echo and the Bunny Men, The Damned, Thin Lizzy, Icicle Works, and he says; "of all the records I produced, what do you think people come up to me the most about?", and he says; "that fucking drum fill in 'In a Room"! I go; "I'm sorry, mate!"

On the other end of the scale, I really love 'Call it What You Want', with its acoustic picking and harmonies; it has sort of a Creedence vibe. 
Nigel; Not many people know this, but for years and years I've been a big Bert Jansch fan, and we got Bert Jansch to support Dodgy once. I was into Bert and Nick Drake, and I really like folk music, acoustic folk; Townes Van Zant, Blaze Foley, American country folk, and there's a guy called Jackson C Frank who wrote a song called 'Blues Runs the Game', and he was what they were all into. So, Nick Drake, his first demo he sent to a record company, it was three covers of Jackson C Frank songs, and the story of Jackson C Frank is amazing; it was him and Paul Simon that came over into England in 1961, '62 that started that whole Folk Blues explosion in the early sixties from American side of things. So, yeah, it's a nod towards that old sort of style, really, the finger picking thing.

Mathew; In turn, weren't they coming because they loved David Graham and all that?

Nigel; Jansch, loved David Graham.

You mentioned 'Summer Forever' earlier, and  it's classic Dodgy single material. Is that what you were going for; the vibe of 'Good Enough', 'Staying Out for the Summer' etc?
Nigel; The story that song really, is I had the lyrics for that song, or most of the lyrics for twenty years, and one day last October, I just woke up and went; "you need to finish that song now, for this album". I'm one of those people that leaves everything to the last minute anyway, and I just went; "don't reinvent the wheel. What's your favourite chords off a Dodgy song that you're playing live?" And we do this song called 'Waiting for the Sun', and it goes down so well live. People don't know it, and I get everyone to sing along to it, and I just thought; "use those chords". So obviously I didn't use them in the same sort of order, but I use that key, those shapes, and literally, it was the last song we did on the album. It took no time all to write because it was already written. You just have to put it together, really. And yes, it does sound like a classic Dodgy song, but it's a perfect radio song. Coming in at 2mins 58secs, it's perfect.

How long did you spend recording the album, and where did you do it ?
Nigel; The whole thing's been recorded in Wales. I did some of my acoustics and vocals at home here in west Wales and then the rest of it was done down near Merthyr Tydfil, at Nick Brine's studio, at Flip Flop records' studio, We started it in July of 2024. We did one session then, then we went back again in the new year of 2025, and we did five songs. So literally, it's taken us about, I'd say, to record it, twenty days, to mix it, another twenty days maybe.

Mathew; But spread out. And we went to a studio called Red Card studios. It was near Brecon Carnarvon in mid to south Wales, and yeah, we really liked the idea that it was all done in Wales. It's been infused with the magic and the wildness of Wales.

Nigel; Yeah, and the release date was May the first, which is a very important date in Wales. So we stuck to our guns on it, really. We didn't have to go to London and release it when they said it was; we had May the first pencilled in for ages.

I wanted to touch on some Dodgy past, going right back to your debut 'The Dodgy Album' in 1993; how was it working with Ian Broudie as a producer?
Mathew;  I think we didn't really know what sound we really wanted until we got to 'Homegrown' [1994]. We also didn't really have the confidence. We were cocky, and we were very ambitious, and we could certainly play and write songs, but the styles were all over the place a little bit. I mean, listen to the first three independent singles we released; one's a dance track, one's a blissed out track, one's a rock track, one's got a bit of reggae in it; we were taking from everywhere. We went into the studio and Broudie was like; "right, I need to make it a little bit more compressed and compress the sound of what you're going to sound like, so we can't have the reggae bits, we can't have this bit here". He did the right thing by making a bit more of a unified sound than it being all over the place. I think that's what Broudie did. It was great to work with him, and he's such a fascinating, interesting bloke, and he's very good at making decisions. He's very good at saying; "no, it's got to be like this, and it's got to be like that".

Nigel; Even if they're wrong,

Mathew; Yeah! But by 'Homegrown', again, what Nigel says about going out on the road, it infuses you with confidence; you can make better decisions, and we also knew what we wanted to sound like a bit more.

Nigel; I also think Matt, with the first album there was a lot of things going in; from the Atari Cuebase [recording software] that Simon [Rogers, keyboards] was doing, and sort of fakey, that would only fit in 1993 for me. 'Homegrown', I knew, personally, what I didn't want; I didn't want those sounds because they dated it. The idea for 'Homegrown' was that it would never sound dated because it was using instruments that had been around forever, and that's why it stands up, really. 

Mathew; Yeah, absolutely, it's more of a classic sounding record. But yeah, we loved recording with Ian Broudie, loved recording with Hugh Jones, but as I said, I think we were more aware of what we wanted. We were really on a roll by the time we got to 'Homegrown' and 'Free Peace Sweet'.

You came out at the time when Britpop was exploding, but I never thought of Dodgy as a Britpop band; was that a help or a hindrance?
Nigel; It's one of those things, isn't it, with the Britpop thing; it was like a media thing, and then there was a uniform for it, which was Adidas trainers, and we never really went down that route. So I just think we were a little bit before it really. I wouldn't have minded the success of some of the Britpop bands. I think we just were, at the time, quite sort of like militant.

Mathew; If you look at Elvis Costello in the post punk time, he was happy to be wrapped up and swept along and all that, but listen to Elvis Costello songs, and that's not really post punk. It might be a bit angular and stuff, or a bit angry, but it's that kind of thing where there was a great movement in the '90s, and it was the last great time before the internet came along and homogenised stuff. It was a good time to be around, definitely.

You mentioned success there, and if you look at 'Good Enough', it's had at the time of the interview, 29.5 million plays on Spotify!
Nigel; That is success, yeah, that's good. 

Mathew; There's another version of 'Good Enough' on there as well from a different album; It's  from the best of and it's got several million plays as well. That song really crossed over, and it keeps generating more and more plays, and people keep coming back to Dodgy, and it's great. Long may it sail!

Did the did the fact that it was featured in the movie and 'Sliding Doors' give it more exposure?
Mathew; It wasn't a massive movie. I mean, yeah, it was nice it was in there, and it featured quite prominently, but it wasn't exactly Avengers [laughs]!

As well as the new album, you have a tour celebrating 30 years of 'Free Peace Sweet' coming up; are you looking forward to that?
Mathew; There's some songs on a 'Free Peace Sweet' that we wouldn't normally play live in festival sets or even in little fan club sets and I'm really looking forward to playing those songs. Songs like 'One of Those Rivers', 'Prey for Drinking', 'Jack the Lad'; there's some great songs on there that that we wouldn't play, and that was the joy when we did it live a few years ago, in full. It was incredible that the audience and band alike were like; "wow". What a great feeling.

What's next for Dodgy? 
Nigel; I think we're just going to take it one step at a time, really. I think that's probably the best way to do it, because I don't want to plan too far ahead. I just want to enjoy it, rather than trying to get over the year and get to the end of it. I just want to enjoy every day, really.

Dodgy's 'Hey Beautiful' is available now. 

​Hi Chris, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, thanks.

You're back in action with Nuclear Messiah.
Oh, man, I'm really busy with that, and the new OHM record, and they're releasing New Yorkers on vinyl, and there's just all kinds of stuff, and a book. We're writing a book, me and Matt Bearing so there's a lot going on. I'm blessed, man. I truly am, from the first two Megadeth records to this moment right now.

You mentioned the New Yorkers, which was a band you were in pre-Megadeth with Gar Samuelson; how do go from that kind of swing jazz to 'Killing as my Business'? 
Well, when Gar joined the band [Megadeth], the way he explained it to me was; "it's super intricate. it's really fun to play. It's just like what we're doing, just super heavy and distorted and fast", and it didn't matter; wherever Gar went, I was going to follow, because I had been playing with Gar my whole life, and I just wanted to be in the band with him. And I really liked playing with Dave [Mustaine] and [David] Ellefson. 

With the New Yorkers a world away from what Megadeth was, would you said Megadeth was your introduction to metal?
I considered Led Zeppelin kind of metal, and Jethro Tull. I didn't listen to a lot of British Invasion metal, so when I joined Megadeth, that was like my first introduction to that music. But that was the first introduction anybody had to that music, because Dave had invented a new thing with those records and I just tried to keep up, man!

When you were recording those two Megadeth records, how did it work? Did you also do the rhythm, or did Dave just do all the rhythms? Or were you just doing leads?
You know what? I almost didn't do any leads on the first record. Oh god. I can't remember his name right now, but somebody got in Dave's ear from the label and said; "you've got to let Poland do more solos", and so Dave did. But I had just joined the band two weeks before we went in the studio for the first record, so it was kind of like, really, just a tornado, man; we were in, we were out, and then we were on the road. It was the second record that I got to do all the rhythms on.

Those rhythms on 'Peace Sells' are super tight; I'm thinking of that spider cord in the middle of 'Wake Up Dead', for example.
Yeah. man, Dave is really creative, and he has a way of, like, even on the first record, I noticed that when I was going out with Ellefson doing the Kings of Thrash. When I had to relearn the music, I was like, there's certain things he does here and there and that's what makes the song. And it doesn't amount to anything but one or two notes for a second, and he does that a lot. It's genius, man.

I think part of the genius on 'Peace Sells' is the way your solos bounce off each other; he's very abrasive, and you've got this real smooth, fluid style.
It's kind of like that thing the Allman Brothers had, and a lot of two guitar bands, that's the thing; they're two entirely different styles of playing and it just adds to the music.

Bringing things up to date, you're bouncing off a lot of guitar players on the Nuclear Messiah album. Talk to me a little bit about how this project came about?
I had worked with Brian Perera​ [Cleopatra Records] in the past, and I loved working with him. I loved that guy, loved that label, so he ran it by me and I agreed to do it. I mean, I thought it would work, but it seemed impossible, and then it just started happening. He would call up and go; "yeah, we've got all these different people", and he'd say somebody like Bumblefoot, and I'd be like; "you've got to be kidding me, man!', and to got to the point where I was like; "wow, this is really turning into song", and every time a song would be finished and I'd hear it, it was just taking on a life of its own. 

It's almost like playing with a load of different bands,  because there's so many different people on it.
Well, Derek Hughes and Jurgen Engler [producers] somehow recorded everything so that it sounded like a cohesive record. And there's other producers involved that I found out later, but everybody involved in the production end of it really did an amazing job making it a record you can listen from the beginning to the end and not ever scratch your head. It just goes right through.

Was it recorded using the Pro Tools, Logic type approach?
Yeah, it was all done remotely, and the thing is that everybody involved has decades of record-making experience. and they just knew what to do and what not to do. And it comes across in the songs. Like when we did 'For Mad Men Only', I thought it sounded really good, but when I heard the final mix, it's just something. I love the snare sound on that song, and I heard this keyboard part that you know, none of that was on there when I did my tracks. Every one would become my new favourite song. The first one was 'Ride the Sky'. I fell in love with that vocal. Arthur Brown's vocal on that just kills me every time I hear it. But then I heard like, Sebastian Bach's 'Look at Yourself' performance, and I was like; "this is crazy!". This was fated to be a great record. It was destined to come out.

Speaking of 'Look at Yourself', you even have Uriah Heep's Mick Box on that one.
Man, his solo on that song is just crushing. I mean, come on, Rick Wakeman? When he told me Rick Wakeman was going to be on the record, I was like; "you've got to be kidding me, man!" That's when I was like, I almost started to get nervous.

The album features Glen Drover, David Ellefson, and Marty Friedman; it's like a feast of Megadeth, isn't it?
You know what? It was the right thing to do. Those guys added to it. Everything they played was fucking really good, and they made the record that much better.

Have you and Marty ever appeared on the same track before?
I think we've been on on other stuff together, but Chris Adler's drumming on that song ['Electric Burn'], come on man! The whole record is filled with moments like that where it's just like, impossibly good,

In a weird way, Marty Friedman did actually replace you in Megadeth as you recorded the demos for 'Rust in Peace'; did you hear after it came out, or had you no interest?
I heard bits and pieces of it, but my mind was in a totally different place when those records came out. The most recent record that I listened to by Dave was 'Dystopia', and I love that record. I haven't heard the latest one though.

Back to Nuclear Messiah, and Alan Davey of Pre-Med features heavily; he's got quite a unique style, where he plays lead bass, doesn't he?
Yeah, and during the solo of 'Ride the Sky' it sounds like we're all in the same room jamming. There's so many great moments on the record, I can't say enough about it. It has nothing to do with me, being honest. It's just a really good record, and everybody gave their best, and that's why it's so good.

Jonathan Kane from Journey is another name who features.
I thought he did great man, and it as kind of out of his comfort zone. We've put some videos out, and I think people know what it sounds like. I think they want to have the record and hold it in their hand and play the vinyl. Randy Burns is producing as well, and he actually finished mixing the latest OHM record, but he brought a turntable into his studio, and he said he hadn't played a record in like, three decades. And he said, as soon as he put it on and listened to it, he forgot how good vinyl sounds, so I'm starting to understand why this big vinyl resurgence has happened.

With a project like this, it's clearly studio based, but is there a part of you or the label that thinks maybe you could put together a core band do a couple of dates?
Oh, of course they're thinking that, and I'm sure there'll be some kind of shows at some time. I mean, ideally - and it would probably never happen - if we could get everybody at a NAMM on a Friday and Saturday at the House of Blues in Anaheim and play the whole record and record and video at the whole thing, yeah, that would be awesome. But logistically, that's probably never going to happen.

You mentioned that you're working with on a new OHM record.
Steve Lukather's got a great studio. I don't think he owns it anymore, but it's called the Steakhouse in North Hollywood, and Carlos Cruz had done a lot of drum tracks in there and he just raved about it, and out of nowhere, he said; "I'm booking the studio. I'm paying for it. I don't care. Not another word about it". So yeah, when we went in there, I wasn't sure what to expect, but the board was made in 1970 for EMI London, and it's a magic console, man. As soon as we played through it, I was just like; "wow!" I mean, I've played through a lot of neat boards, and I never played through one that sounded like this one. We were there for four days, and we made ten songs. Randy [Burns, producer] actually just sent both sides this morning. I just downloaded them into the studio here, and I started playing it, and I'm like; "this is such a great record". Randy Burns is such a good producer.

How would you describe the sound for people who aren't familiar with what OHM is about?
I guess you could call it experimental, but it's basically just bare bones; bass, drums and guitar, with a little bit of doubling here and there, and some clean overdubs. It's my core thing, my labour of love, I guess. I don't make any money doing it, but it's what I love doing.

I suppose it's difficult to talk about this, but Nick Menza's passing onstage with OHM; as well as being tragic, there was something beautiful about that too.
Well, I'll tell you a story. A couple months before we did that show, when Nick passed that night, we were rehearsing - we rehearsed a lot - and out of nowhere, something came up about death, and Nick said; "I had a friend that told me, when he dies, he wants to die having sex with his wife" and Nick goes; "I was so pissed off. I said; "so you're going to traumatize your wife for the rest of her life?! That you're just you flopped on top of her dead, right in the middle of that moment?!", and Nick goes; "I'm not going like that. I'm dying on stage playing my drums". He said it twenty feet away from where I'm sitting and he meant it. He was a one of a kind. What a great human being.

How did you end up working with Nick in the first place?
Well, we were going to start a heavier band, and we had James LoMenzo [bassist] come in, and James just didn't feel like there was any money in it so he bowed out. Then our drummer in OHM had passed away, and after a while we asked Nick if he wanted to do it, and at first he was like; "I don't know if I can do it", and we were like; "dude, you can do this all night long!" So we came in and we started rehearsing, and he brought muscle to the band, and he just made us sound less eclectic and more intense, and just better, all the way around.

It sounds like it all came to a great place.
Yeah, I mean, you know,  it's been hard. I don't do well with death, and I don't think anybody does, but you know what, I'm just thankful I had that time to play with Nick, and Gar, all of them,

I wanted to talk a little bit about 'Peace Sells'; what was it like the first time you saw that album cover?
Oh, I liked it. I liked it compared to the first cover. I was like; "yeah, we got it right this time!" But the photo session was very bizarre because they put makeup on all of us.

Yeah, you've got eyeliner on, right!?
Yeah, and we had an interview, like, an hour after that photo shoot at Capitol Records [presumably, the clip below!], and I forgot to go wash my face. I just forgot, and so they're interviewing, and I saw the interview somewhere, and first of all, I cringe [shakes head] Anyway, back in those days, I was a young and dumb, but anyway, I'm looking, oh, my god, I've got eyeliner on! Man! But, I mean, we didn't know what, you know, they're telling us what we're going to do, and we were like; "okay, we'll do it!" The gas flames in front of us, we were all kind of like; "really, you're going to have that?!", because that's real; that's real flames for the photos.

Really?! I thought it was superimposed.
Man, they lit that shit! A very strange day.

What did you think when you first heard the album? It sounds so good, and it's a leap from 'Killing is My Business'.
You know what? I made the mistake of listening to 'Master of Puppets' before I listened to 'Peace Sells', and when I heard that production, I was just [crestfallen]. I didn't listen to the record again for probably ten years, but then when I did finally revisit the record, I realised it doesn't matter what it sounded like; it's something entirely unto itself, and there's never going to be another record like that second record, man. That's a moment in time, and when you have two guys steeped in metal and two other guys who want to be famous fusion artists; that's what happens. I don't think any of us knew that that was happening. I think we were just trying to do our thing, but it was different, and I think why it caught everybody's ears, is because it was like nothing else that was happening.

What are your favourite songs on 'Peace Sells'?
Oh my god, I really like 'Good Morning / Black Friday. I like 'The Conjuring'. I mean, I like all the songs probably. There's not a song I don't like on the record, but my favourite songs are probably 'Good Morning / Black Friday', 'Devil's Island', and 'Peace Sells'. 

There isn't a bad track on it. I mean, even, the 'I Ain't Superstitious' cover.
Yeah, that was Jay Jones, our manager we had at the time, that was his idea for the first and second record to do 'These Boots' and the other cover.

There's a real swing to it, and you're soloing all over that; it's nearly back to free form, isn't it?
Yeah. It was a great song to play live, too, because we would extend it a little bit, and I would have fun. And it was fun, man, fun.

​What gear did you use on 'Peace Sells'? On the liner notes its says you used a B.C. Rich Warlock.
I played that and an NJ series Bich. Those guitars, they have a preamp that Neil Moser had invented, and that's the sound. It's that preamp hitting a little Rockman X100 into any amp. I would hit that and then go into any amp. So, like, I could put it through a Marshall half stack. You couldn't even turn it up past two, it was so loud! But that was the tone. And then there was a Twin Reverb at the Grinder when it was still there - that's a studio we worked out of - so I plugged it into that, and I sat right next to it with headphones on, and that's how I got the solo to 'Good Morning', and the first solo I did was so good, and I said; "Randy, play that back for me", and he goes; "oh, we didn't record that". I was like; "oh my god!", so ever since that moment, I always record everything. I don't care what anybody's doing, we record; if you're playing, I'm recording it. It's like; "shit, man!" But yeah, that was the sound, man, those preamps and those guitars were awesome, man.

So do you still have those guitars?
No, you know, when I left the band, they didn't give me anything. To be perfectly honest, they settled with me later, but I never got any gear. 

Did you work on anything for what became 'So Far, So Good... So What!
Yeah, I think like, at sound check we would go through some of the songs because Dave, he writes songs all the time. He wrote the songs for that record probably right after 'Peace Sells' was made. I remember having to go through a couple songs during sound check; 'Mary Jane', maybe, and something else I can't remember. My favourite on that record is 'Hook in Mouth'. I really love that song. What a great song. I wish it wasn't about that subject [the PMRC}, because that's the only thing that kind of puts it in a timeline, you know? But musically, and arrangement-wise, it's freaking genius, man.

Chris and I discussed his time with Megadeth on 1990's 'Rust in Peace', here.  

Dave Mustaine clearly had a lot of respect for your playing, because he asked you back for 2004's 'The System Has Failed'. 
That record, now, that's a great record. It was a lot of fun, man. I brought my whole rig with me, and Ralph Patlin was the first engineer, and he let me set it up, you know, have my moment. I played through it, and he goes; "you know, Chris, maybe you should try this amp over here?", and he's got a late '60s Plexi head Marshall with a matching, same circuit cabinet, and as soon as I played through it, I was like; "yeah, we're using that!" So it was so much fun working with him, and even with Dave at the time. It was great.

Shortly after that there was when the lawsuit over the use of your parts on the Megadeth reissues, specifically the bonus tracks on 'Rust in Peace' which featured your playing,
You know, I swear to God, I called at least twelve times trying to get the manager to get on the phone with me. And then when he told me that he thought I would do it for the fans, and I said; "well, is everybody else doing it for the fans? I just want to get paid for my tracks, man", and here's what he said, he goes; "Chris, that's not the point". Okay, all right. The manager was so rude to me that that I just called Owen Sloan, my attorney, and I said; "you know what, Owen?", and even he told me; "dude, you sure you want to do this?" I'm like; "I just want to do it out of principle".

Another record I wanted to touch on is your 1990 solo release 'Return to Metalopolis'.
Oh, talking about that record, a year and a half ago, Randy Burns calls me up, and he goes; "hey, do you have the two inch tapes from the 'Metalopolis' sessions?", and I said; "yeah, I kept it in a good environment this whole time". He goes; "here's some money. Go to this address, have them take the tapes. They're going to bake the tapes. They're going to send it to me digitally, and I'm going remix and remaster it", and wait till you hear it, man! It's kind of on hold because we made this OHM record, but I forgot all about that when I mentioned all these other records. That record is going to be so killer, man. I told Randy; "I don't want it to sound like the first time it came out. I want to do stuff to it. I want to make it something entirely cool and different; same songs, but better".

Everything about that album is cool; the cover, the typeface, the long hair.
We did a photo shoot and we couldn't find anything we liked, and so somebody at Capitol put it on a computer screen and just totally tweaked it out, and we looked at him, and we're like; "that's cool", and he goes, "well, the only way we can get it off the screen is to take a photo of it", and that's the way they did it.

Your brother Mark Poland plays drums on the album.
My brother is an amazing drummer. I knew I wanted him. When I wanted to do it, I approached him, and I said; "dude, I can't make this record without you", and so we started making demos and got a deal and then got Randy Burns to produce it.

After you left Megadeth, did anyone else approach you about joining their band?
No, not at all. Man, you know, and like, I don't have grudges, I don't hold grudges, but, Mustaine, the whole 'Liar' thing, the whole thing; "Chris stole our equipment", that whole thing was talked about so much that nobody ever called me. Not only that, one time I walked into Carvin [amps] and I was like; "hey, man, can you guys endorse me? I need a couple of two by twelve cabs", and this guy looked me right in the face and he goes; "we don't work with people like you". I just walked out the door. So, I mean, there was a lot of shit that was said that actually, kind of was not okay. But it was BS, anyway; I never pawned anything but my own gear, then once me and Gar would pawn - he'd pawn his cymbals, I'd pawn a head, and maybe a guitar - then Scott Menzies [Megadeth crew member] would go to the pawn shop before a tour would start, before rehearsals, and get it out of pawn, and then we'd play blah, blah, blah. And, yeah, that was all it was. He [Dave Mustaine] was just upset, man. Yeah, he was really upset with me.

Back to the present, and what's in your immediate future?
We've got to get on top of the book [forthcoming autobiography 'Now Leaving Metalopolis']. Me and Matt Herring, we've got to wrap the book up after we turn in the new OHM record, which I think is going to be called 'Cosmic Wind'. That title, Carlos came up with that. But I want to work on 'Metalopolis', I want to get that dialled in, and then I want to try and talk to Brian Perera [Cleopatra Records] about my catalogue and see if we can work something out where we can get all these records available,

Yeah, you've got Damn the Machine as well.
Yeah, that one's owned by Madonna, the publishing, and I don't know who [which record label] owns it now. A&M, I don't even think it's a label anymore. But I'd like to, down the road, maybe it would be great to buy it or whatever I don't own of my my stuff, but I don't have any money, so...

Nuclear Messiah's 'Black Flame' is available now. Order here.

Today on eonmusic, I am joined by Bruce John Dickinson from Little Angels; I bet you never heard thought you'd hear that phrase used again.
Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's funny actually, it's like living in parallel universes; I've got one for running the music colleges, and then the other foot involved in the whole Little Angels stuff. But, you know, it all comes back. We seem to have reverted to the same dynamic we had when we were kids at school, the way we're working and the level of enthusiasm. When a band works well, there's that chemistry and it becomes a little unit, and we've definitely got that feeling again, so it's just great. The response has been amazing. It's very unexpected and very appreciated as well. I thought we'd maybe sell 400 tickets in each show, so for people to be so interested is an amazing thing. I think all of us are just taken aback by it really, and a bit humbled by it.

You do all seem genuinely excited; what is it about this time around that has got you all so fired up?
It's probably the age we're all at, and the audience. You realise that life's fairly finite, and you also realise how precious these things are. You also get a little bit better at working out what's important in life and what isn't, so I think it's that, and it's just the fact that you can do it. Imagine looking at sixty, being on the runway to sixty, and being able to get your old band out of retirement and go and do gigs like we do; it's an amazing privilege.

Have you played together yet?
Not yet. The last time we played together would have been the Isle of Wight festival [2013]. That would be the last show we did. I've played with Mark [Richardson, drums] a bit. It's just getting us all in one place, because I live in the Shetland Islands, Mark Plunkett [bass] is all over the world, and people are dotted about. Grant [Kirkhope]'s in L.A., the trumpet player. We've got all the rehearsals scheduled though, and we do a lot of stuff, just figuring things out. We've got a set list planned out, and we buy in gear for the tour, so it's an excuse to be buying amps. I've got a big weakness for amps, and not so much for guitars really, because, you can only play one guitar at a time, and you can't really beat the guitars I've got, so I'd only be buying another version of a guitar that I've got. But amps is endless variation, and they're always just the old '60s and '70s style ones I like.

What's it been like for you to sit down and go through the songs; does it come easy, or do you have to relearn it all?
I like to really get under the skin of a song and the part so I can forget about it. So I like to get it to a point where, if I want to go off-piste, I can. For me personally, I like to have a very solid foundation so I'll learn the records as they are, and then I'll see if I can put a bit of how I'm feeling at the moment into it. I've reverted back to a more aggressive playing style, like the album one ['Don't Prey For Me', 1989]. People forget how by album three ['Jam', 1993], the whole grunge thing meant it was very difficult to do any guitar solos, as such. You were trying to exist in a post grunge world, and we couldn't really make the album like we did with the first album. That's a bit more post-Van Halen, post-New Wave of British Heavy Metal. That's where we were born, and then we had to try and survive through all the changes. So I've reverted back to that; a bit more aggressive, a few more notes.

Guitar players styles do change over the years, and you've come a long, long way; you had b.l.o.w, and obviously you've been teaching for many years. 
Yeah, I had 12 years I didn't have a guitar in the house and didn't touch it. I was still teaching because I  was operating like a tennis coach. I'm a bit all or nothing, so I don't like to pick a guitar up every three days and play for an hour, so I either commit to doing it properly, or I just don't do it at all, which is a failing, really. It's just not a healthy way of doing it really, but certainly, there's been a few pivotal things. We worked with an engineer called Ian Taylor, an amazing producer, and he's best known for 'Still Got the Blues' by Gary Moore, but before that record he was engineering some Little Angels stuff, and Gary Moore is a big influence on me. I come from that line of that British Blues as a style. I get told off for calling Gary Moore a "British Blues player" because of his Irish roots, but what I'm talking about is British Blues as a style. It starts with Clapton's and Peter Green's interpretation of people like Freddie King. Now the Americans, the closer you get to Texas, the more they seem to swing, and I think when an English player does that, it's always a Steve Ray Vaughan quote, so I tried to not do that, because I come from York, Scarborough, and the English playing style, which I would like to be in the line of, which is Clapton, Peter Green, Jimmy Page, Gary Moore, then souping it up.

So those influences, but more contemporary?
Yeah, then John Sykes souping it up further, but for me, the minute you lose the blues, I'm gone. I'm out. I'm not interested. So that's why I can really see the appeal of Iron Maiden; I really like it, I love the concept, the guy's are fantastic, and it's an amazing thing, but for me I'd always air to Sabbath because of the blues, because of 'War Pigs', and I just need to feel that rooted connection into the earth a little bit, rather than what mode someone's learned on YouTube that day.

So it's all about the feel?
Peter Green spent one year playing single notes and listening to the sound as the pick. It's the string, so the angle of my pick, I hold the pick weird. It's very bad for technique. I hold it with two fingers and I get the string very flat, like ninety degrees, because that's where you get the mid frequencies, which I need to cut through from the horns and the hi-hats and the keyboards; my space is there. My pick tilts, and I'll get into the hi-hat area and the horn section. So that playing one note for a year, just for hours at a time, was trying to get the balance, like George Harrison. And I'd stopped shredding, so my hand position went from that to that, the Hendrix one, and you could only get a big Gary Moore sound with that leverage.

That's a fascinating amount of attention to detail.
Predominantly it's about that hand position, and then I lost the use of a hand like eighteen months ago, with nerve damage from my neck. If you look at some of the Little Angels clips I'm always flinging my head about, and it caused nerve compression, and I got into real trouble with it in the late '80s. Quite a lot of it affects down my arms, and managing it's been fine, and then it flared up and I lost the use of my hand eighteen months ago. I did a lot of work to relearn guitar. My mate, Martin Goulden, who's very much an absolute shred monster, he gave me this routine to put my playing back together, which was much more disciplined and more Paul Gilbert style, so I got a bit of that, and that was fun. So that's the component part. So essentially, I just want to be Mick Ronson, and I want that woody cello through a jet engine sound. I just want to do what Gary Moore did with Peter Green; I want to do that with Mick Ronson.

I've always been fascinated with your signature 'Eat My Dust' Gibson Les Paul. Tell me the story about that. 
I had a belt sander to that one because I don't like finish on guitars. They sound better without it, and I would never have modern Les Pauls. I've used Gibsons all my life. Never buy a modern one; the woods different. It's farmed wood most of the time, and they can't cut down rainforests anymore. It's fair enough, but the use of PVA based glue, it doesn't work, it doesn't resonate properly, and thick, gloopy finishes, you've just got to get them removed. So these are all nitro finishes on the old ones.

What year is that guitar? When did you make those modifications? Why the skull? I want to hear all about that guitar.
It's a '78 Les Paul Custom, and I found it in Unit Four, which is an amazing little second hand shop in Scarborough, and it's still there. It's called something else now, and I should know it, but Chris at Unit Four had it in the back. Les Pauls were really out of fashion as it was before Guns and Roses really, and everyone was playing stuff like super Strats, which I was playing this at the time. Anyway, I found it, and it was just because of Thin Lizzy, really. I really, really love Brian Robertson, and his sound and his taste and his use of wah is quite similar to how I like it. It just reminded me also a bit of Peter Frampton. I just wanted to pretend to be in Thin Lizzy, so I bought it, and it had an awful metal nut that someone had put so it couldn't stay in tune, so I sorted that out

When did you get it? 
I must have got it in '89 or something like that, but the paint had already started to chip off a little bit within a few gigs, and the back was going, and the neck paint was coming off because I was playing eight hours a day then, so it was all just wearing off. And then Charlie Cutforth did the designs; he's the artist who did all the devil logos on the band's artwork. So we were around his house, we were doing all this stuff, and it was just an afterthought. He just used a pointy screwdriver and he just did it; no sketches or anything. I think I'd seen some patch in a hippie shop with a skeleton riding a Harley Davidson, and it said 'Eat My Dust', and I just thought it was funny, so we put that on. My other thing is fishing for wild fish, so the fish bones just sort of came out of that. But there was no thinking behind it. We just did it, and it became a thing.

It's so iconic, and this is an odd one, but fast forward maybe five years after Little Angels split, and on this Saturday morning kids TV show I'm sure I spied sone guy plying that guitar; what's the story there?! 
So that's Chris Leonard. He was a guitar student back in the '90s, and he got that TV gig, and I think he was on some kids TV morning show in the house band, and he didn't really have a great guitar so I sold him that for £300 quid. And then his mum rang me up and told me off for selling him an old guitar, even though it would be worth a couple of grand even then, probably! Anyway, Chris went on to be in a band called Son of Dork, which is an offshoot of Busted or McFly or something, and then eventually it came back to me. I had to pay a bit more than £300 quid to get it back.

It's funny you should mention that because I was flicking through an old copy of Classic Rock from 2002 and in it you say that there was a point where you were selling guitars every week.
It's the life of a musician. We had an award-winning album and then we owed a big tax bill, and that's that roller coaster thing. It's one of the things that you have to confront head on if you want this life; everyone wants to play music for a living, but you've got to take the other side of it, which is you might not know where your mortgage is coming from in two days. You've got to hustle a bit. So I was doing that, but I've got no reverence for material things, really. I love that guitar, and there's a lot of sentimentality about that one in particular, but if the house burned down, I'd just get another old one. They are tools, and I think that's why '70s instruments work for me, but '60s don't, because the minute you refresh them you lose so much money, so you can't chop them about, and I like to have that relationship with the gear. That guitar is not easy to play; you've got to fight it, and I don't like guitars that are easy to play, like a PRS. A PRS is always lovely, in tune, the intonation is better, it's more solid, it's more consistent, but it doesn't have that character and the mojo.

As a guitar scholar, it must have been amazing to get to tour with Van Halen in 1993; did you get to hang with Eddie? 
Well, I mean, that tour, you don't forget stuff like that. I stopped tapping for that tour because I thought it was disrespectful. I'd still do quite a lot of my version of it, but I changed my playing style as I felt it'd be disrespectful with me doing that. The first gig, we were late, got lost. There was no sat navs in them days, so we all puffing and panting getting there. Then from the moment we started we had a very close relationship with Eddie, and looking back, it was partially because he was still partying quite a lot. The rest of the band were all going the gym and being sober, and Eddie wasn't. We were young and daft, and if Eddie Van Halen wants to party with you, what are you going to do? So it was really wild, and it was just fantastic.

It sounds like a lot of fun.
It culminated with Wembley, and underneath the stage on both sides, there's a big walkway that Sammy Hagar would run around on, and there's lots of guitar solo moments with Eddie, and Michael Anthony had a bar built into the stage, so every night we would go to Michael Anthony's bar, and he would be the barman, so he would do you Jack and Coke, and it would be half pint of Jack Daniels and half pint of coke. That was the times we were living in, and it had become fairly normal by then. So I'd had one of these Jack and Cokes and then suddenly got pushed out on the stage to play 'Alright Now 'with Eddie Van Halen, which was great. Now, the weird thing is, I'd never learned that tune particularly, but looking back, to my horror, the version is not quite right, so I would have liked to really nailed it, but we sailed through, and it was great.

I wanted to clear up the whole 'Spitfire' thing; was the album title really changed to 'Young Gods' so as not to cause offence due to the Gulf war?
It was. No, I'll tell you exactly what happened. There's two things happened. One, the nervousness around the title actually came from the record label. Corporate entities tend to be very risk averse, and I think it was nonsense, really. I don't think there was enough of a connection to the Gulf war to be a problem, but they were really sensitive about the way it would be displayed in HMV or whatever, so they kind of vetoed it. And you've got to be careful pushing that stuff through, because we didn't feel strongly enough about the title 'Spitfire' to really fight for it, because what if you'd have got it wrong and record hadn't been displayed, kind of thing? So that why the title had to change, and 'Young Gods' was probably one of the pivotal songs on the record, so 'Young Gods' it became.

And then 'Boneyard', there was a story at the time that it was banned by Radio One because of the "we're all going down to the boneyard" thing and the war happening, but in reality, I think it probably just didn't get on the playlist. They didn't like it, so they didn't play it. It's not really a Radio One record. It's probably a bit heavy for them. I think the record company and probably us just thought it was easier to say it's been banned, than it didn't get on the playlist. 

Listening back to 'Boneyard', and it's a real shred fest for you; you're soloing all over it!
Yeah, sorry about that! I think that it's really good not to think in terms of rhythm and lead. I did a lot of listening to Jimi Hendrix, and the minute you start going; "this is rhythm; this is lead", it's less excited. I think a lot of those leads are incidental little bits around the rhythm. It certainly is live, but that record was made in a period when you would run 48 tracks, so you had two tape machines, two, two-inch tapes synced up, running together, in the days before computers, and put a lot of attention to detail. it's kind of lost art now of, if you did an edit, it was a razor blade and tape. So generally, you had to play, and you didn't want to be chopping up the tape too often, With Mike Lee, he was such a virtuoso drummer that he never really made mistakes, and everything he did was a keeper, which is very, very rare, so you had such a solid foundation, and it's very easy to play guitar if you've got an amazing drummer. You sound better than you are.

What are your favourite songs to play, and what  is the key Little Angels album for you?
'Young Gods' is great. I mean, just looking at the set, and everything in that set I enjoy playing. There isn't anything that I wince about. I do play some things slightly differently. The one that I regret is, I don't like the solo on 'Kicking Up Dust', which of course, has become the one that Planet Rock play all the time. It was a bit disjointed. I did it, and it sounded good on the day, and then we moved on, and it's always a bit clunky to me, that one. So I've tried to redeem it with something more coherent live. But yeah, I think I like them all. If I just pick one, it'd be 'Young Gods'.

I didn't realise how the change in the musical landscape had been a factor in your splitting, given that you'd had a No.1 album with 'Jam' and sold out the Royal Albert Hall at that time.
There was a few things going on. So Toby [Jepson}'s got a slightly different view, but I think people forget how utterly fundamental [Nirvana's] 'Nevermind' was in changing the face of the music industry completely, and it made it very difficult to exist in a rock band. Bands like Bon Jovi were struggling, Mötley Crüe was struggling, Motörhead could barely do a pub gig. People forget that the whole New Wave of British Heavy Metal, it wasn't cool. Suddenly people were cutting their hair off. If you had long hair, little kids would point at you and shout; "eighties' metaler!" and laugh and run away stuff like this. Everything was so changed that you the only way to survive it would be to ride it out for ten years and then reinvent yourself, as Thunder did, for example.

So did that, in part lead to your decision to split up?
Yes, but also we were apart; personally and creatively. I wasn't really having any influence on the writing. I think Toby needed to make some solo records, and it was great that he did. It wasn't in me to contribute, and I think a big factor was lyrically, Little Angels was all about being young and getting out of a small town, and once we'd done that, we all had separate lives with families and stuff emerging, and when you get us back together, there wasn't a single thing to say, whereas I think there is now we've all got back. So it's funny, at the beginning of your adult life, and towards this stage, which is the more mature end, all our lives are in a similar place. Our kids have grown up, and we're celebrating this, really, but in that intervening bit after 'Jam', I mean, we made that record, which I don't like, 'Ten Miles High', everyone's trying to put suits on and trying to work out way of being, after the grunge event, and it was a struggle, whereas before, we didn't need to discuss anything like that because we just did our thing. Suddenly our thing didn't exist or work anymore. So that's it really, and it was to finish at the Albert Hall.

You went on to form b.l.o.w. which was completely different. 
It was, musically. No overdubs. I like the sound of it. In fact, I didn't keep all the records, and I've been buying them all off eBay again to learn them, and someone sent me a copy of 'Man and Goat Alike' [1995], and it's a great sounding record. It's very done in a '60s style, and we used a producer, Ken Thomas, and he'd done a lot of the Peter Green stuff, so I was in my element. It was very free, creatively, but it got a bit too free by the end. We made a record called 'Pigs' [1996], and probably 30% of it's really good, I'd say, but at the end of that second album, it was such a crazy lifestyle I just needed a bit more structure in my life, really.

Little Angels did reform once before, in 2012; how come that one didn't last? 
Because we all had other stuff to do, I think we just sort of parked it. We had a great, great time, and it was amazing. The Download performance was weird because we nearly didn't do it, because Europe were on before us, and they missed their slot. We got there with about an hour to spare, and then I got a call from the lads and they were stuck in the traffic, so I was pacing about, and I think they got there with no more than five minutes to go, so they had to just walk straight on the stage. I think that probably helped the nerves because no one had time to get nervous for that show.  It's a funny thing to walk out in front of 80,000 or 90,000 people if you've not been doing gigs for twenty years, but the muscle memory kicks in and the dynamics. We did a lot of gigs in the old days, so it just all came back. 

You're doing a lot of gigs this time around, and the tour has been extended; what are your feelings now that it's all in place?
I'm just really looking forward to it. The thing I love more than anything else is that sound thing, so, I've got a little like micro rig at home, and I want to get the big heads out and go into a rehearsal room and get going before we get there with a band. I know it sounds daft, but there's not many guitar players or musicians who get a chance to really do it properly these days, so we're planning the tour, and it's proper old school; there's no in-ear monitoring, and we're going to have a spotlight. I've missed that, gig spotlights, and it's backdrops; the rock and roll stuff! There's zero concession to it being 2026, so we've got an old school sound man who can mix exactly the same as we used to, and wedges at the front of stage and all that.

Are you in for the long haul? 
I think very possibly, because we're enjoying it so much and there's none of the kind of pressures that you get with being on a major label, and the expectation to get on Radio One. I always say god bless Planet Rock, who keep the dream alive for all of us. And as long as people want us and we're having a good time, I think we were very keen to keep looking at what's possible.

So is there going to be new material?
I think the big question mark is on new music. We've got some songs that were lurking around from the old days, and some of them are really good, so we might revisit them. I've always got a bundle of riffs and song titles, and Toby's always got song titles, and Jimmy [Dickinson]'s very prolific, but the thing that we've got to do is maintain the standard of what we did back in the day. I mean, for me, I have to record on tape. I'm not interested in Pro Tools [digital recording software]. I don't mind dumping it onto Pro Tools after being on tape - that's fine - but I'm not interested in recording using a Mac. I want a proper desk, and proper outboard gear and all that. And a lot of those great engineers are still around and have still got those skills, so there may well be some new music, but it depends on the chemistry in the room when we get together.

Little Angels hit the road in November on their 'Big Bad & Back' tour. For dates and tickets, visit www.littleangelsofficial.com

Hi Eric, how are you?
I am good. Thanks for having me. 

I see you're sitting in the studio; are you cooking up something?
Oh, I have been off and on. The last few days I haven't been but, yeah, we've been kind of off and on working on some new songs and stuff.  I've recorded, I guess about fifteen things or something, and I'm just trying to see if any of it's any good.

You're based in Texas, aren't you?
Yeah, Central Texas. There's a lot of music here, a lot of different variable type of music. It's great.

That brings us to the tour, the 'Texaphonic' tour 2026. I mean, first off, killer name for the tour, right?
Well, thank you. 

Your last UK tour was about 2013.
it's been a while. I haven't been in a while, but I'm sure looking forward to being there this summer. It's going to be great. I'm glad that we also have a gigs for a couple weeks in England, which I'm really excited about. Instead of just coming in for London for two or three days, we're going to get to go around and do gigs in different places, which I'm really looking forward to.

It's your most extensive UK tour ever; what was the impetus to do that?
Well, the promoter that we're working with is doing that. The other times they were just saying; "oh yeah, we'll play London, then we'll go off to another city", and so this promoter made a point to try to book other towns and stuff, which I was really excited about because, you read the stories about bands that go all around England and playing, I'd I'm like; "I want to do that!" I mean, I want to play London, it's great, but I want to play the other places too.

There sadly isn't an Irish date.
I've got to ask why that isn't the thing. We kind of turn it over the promoter and he just tries to do his best to get gigs where we are offered, at least a way to make enough money to make it worthwhile to where we don't lose money. So I think he just kind of picked and chose the gigs that seemed to be working at the time, and that's usually how that happens. But I wish we were coming to Ireland. That'd be great. I was there a couple of times. I was there working a long time ago with Carol King. I played with her for a while, and we played there. But yes, beautiful. I wish we were going there. That would be nice.

You've just touched on your session work there with Carol King, You also worked with Christopher Cross; what were those session days like for you?
You know, I learned a lot just being around great song writers like that, and just kind of watching them work and what was important to them and how they put things together. I was lucky to get to do that, and it was pretty inspiring to see and to be around people that write great songs like that.

I wanted to talk to you about the Fender Strat. What attracted you to the Stratocaster? It's got to be the tone, right?
Well, it is the tone, and it's the fact that they're so versatile. It kind of covers a lot of ground. There's other guitars that maybe, if you take one particular sound, they might be a little bit more interesting or more usable, but they don't have the variability that Strat has.

You've had a number of signature models over the years, haven't you?
I have, yeah. I like the latest one, the Virginia model. It's like the fourth model. I've done like four different models, trying different pickups, different woods and different things like a rosewood neck or maple neck and that kind of thing.

Were you at the NAMM Show this year?
Not this year. We're going to be in Anaheim where the NAMM show is in April. Yeah, we didn't make the NAMM Show this year.

I'm quite fascinated by your tone; you're very keen on the bass, and you don't like a lot of treble cutting through which I think gives you some uniqueness.
Well, It does, and I think sometimes I run it a little too bassey. I've been trying to kind of inch the treble up a little bit because it got a little out of hand. Everybody's like; "it sounds like it's in the bottom of a swimming pool!", so I'm trying to get that together. But typically I like a more kind of smooth, or kind of woody kind of lead tone. I like that. It's because some of my favourite records from the old days - you know, early Eric Clapton and BB King and Jeff Beck's 'Truth' record - some of them were kind of that real reedy, kind of smooth tone. I like that sound.
​
I was watching an interview with you recently, and I was almost relieved to hear that even someone of your calibre still worries about your sound almost on a nightly basis.
Yeah, it's a crazy. I'm always chasing. It always seems to kind of change a little bit, or you always figure out some way to make it a little better. There's kind of no end to it, in a way.

You won a Grammy in 1992 for 'Cliffs of Dover', but you had been a solo artist for a long time before that. 
Well, since the early '80s, we just played every single club we could get to and just tried to make a living and stuff. And it was just a slow build. A lot of the songs on the 'Ah Via Musicom' [1990] record I'd had around for a few years, so I had the opportunity to play them in in clubs and kind of tweak them as I went along, which was good for trying to get the focus of the tune just right. 

You recorded 'Seven Worlds' in the late '70s, but it wasn't released at the time; did you see the ceiling and think I'm never going to punch through it?
Yeah, there was lot of frustrating times, a lot of doors slammed, but there's always a second door if you look close enough, and it kind of comes for you where you least expect it sometimes. But I think the thing that is really sustaining for any musician is just to find the type of music, the instrument, that you love, and then you if you love it, then the rest that stuff is real secondary. That's why we were always trying to get things going, or you know; play a better place, or get a record deal, all this stuff, but we also were like; "you know what? We just enjoy playing. It's great", so that you feel nurtured in that way, regardless.

'Cliffs of Dover' featured on your second release; why did you wait and not put it on 'Tones' [1986]?
Well, we actually tried it on 'Tones'. That record, 'Tones' was produced by a different person [David Tickle], and he just selected the songs to put on the record. It was his decision to not put that on there at that time, which is probably a good idea, because then I had a few more years to tweak the song.

Does it amaze you the impact that it's had; 85 million plays on Spotify, 19 million on one version alone on YouTube, at the time of this interview?
I never really thought about it when we put that song together. I never really thought that song would be one that everybody would gravitate towards, but for whatever reason, that was the one that everybody liked. I think it's, you know, the melody is kind of simple and memorable.

It's taken on like a really deep and sincere meaning for people, hasn't it?
Oh, yeah, somewhat, yeah, I guess it has. And there's a lot of guys out there, seven, eight years old that play it better than I do, too. They're the kids, you know, they're the man; "you just played that perfect!"

It's a song that always comes up in the list of top guitar solos; what is that like for you to feature in a list like that alongside your heroes like Jimi Hendrix?
Well, it's an honour to be part of it and be included in the bunch with all your heroes. That's really nice because those are the guys that really forged ahead before me, and kind of wrote the book. I'm kind of just rereading the book, but those guys wrote it, and I have a lot of respect for all those heroes of mine. 

Back in 1995 you were part of the original G3 tour with Steve Vai and Joe Satriani; what was that like for you?
it was great. You know, I learned a lot listening to those guys. They are great players. We just did a reunion about eight months ago, and that was a lot of fun too because we hadn't done it in years. But, yeah, it was cool. It was a nice opportunity.

There was a couple of tracks on the 1997 'G3: Live in Concert' album where you all three of you were playing together.
Yeah, I was nice. I think people resonate with it, the energy, when you put more than one person together. You're going to get a band that has several people that you want to go see that are kind of sharing the spotlight. It makes it more interesting, in a way.

Is that what brought you back for the G3 reunion?
Joe wanted to get together to do a few weeks of touring, so he calls up; "hey, y'all want to do a reunion?" I said; "sure, yes, let's do that!", and his son, ZZ, did a documentary on it. 

Were you a fan of their work, of 'Surfing with the Alien' and 'Passion and Warfare'?
Yeah, great, great playing, and those albums, both great. 

Similarly, you've been working on the Experience Hendrix tour, on and off for the last 15 years or so.
Yeah, because I love playing Hendrix songs anyhow, and I play them in my own set, or when I'm just kind of hanging out at the studio, just practicing, I play. So somebody said; "hey, you want to go out and play all Hendrix songs?" I'm like; "oh sure, I do that anyhow.!Yeah, let's go do that."

There's some cool characters involved that, including Zakk Wylde, for example.
Yeah, he's great, and that was what was kind of cool about the tour, is everybody had a different interpretation and it's really interesting, all the different kind of concepts and takes on his music. It's nice as you don't have to carry all the weight, and then also the camaraderie musically, and just fraternally hanging out.

You've had a history of working with some great artists; has anyone approached you in recent years to work with you?
Ah, you know what, not recently. No, I haven't had any offers to go out, but that would be fun to do.

Is there anyone you'd like to work with? I'm guessing you wouldn't mind working with likes of Paul McCartney, for example.
I'll do that. I'll take his call. And I would have always been a fan of Stevie Wonder. I love him a lot.

Back to the tour, and I'm guessing the set list is going to be all encompassing?
Yeah, there'll be a little bit of blues rock stuff, straight ahead, new stuff I'm writing. and I'll do some old songs. I might do a couple of jazz tunes, kind of reworked, and then maybe a country tune. It'll be kind of like a smattering of everything, I think.

What's happening next for you?
Well, I'll be busy through July and then I'm doing a master class in Scotland [Guitar Dreams 2026, 12 - 14 August]. I'll be playing with Guthrie Trapp and Mike Stern. We'll do like a little masterclass thing, and then I come back home and do another masterclass with Tommy Emanuel. After that, I'll probably try to get back to working on some more songs and try to get some recordings going.

Have you any idea of a release date for a new album?
I might be putting an EP out really soon, and then finish, because I have about six tunes that are finished. They just need to be mixed. They're kind of a different; more of a straight ahead blues rock kind of thing, but I think I might put those out as the EP, and then I have a whole 'nother set of songs to do a record when I get back off the Europe tour.

Are you looking at a digital release only, or will there be physical copies as well?
Probably mostly digital, but hopefully some physical copies too that we can sell at shows and stuff. If anybody buys those anymore, I don't know. 

Do you still have your Grammy and your gold discs?
Yeah, I still have them. Some of the records are on the wall here in the control room, but the Grammy, I think it's upstairs in my tech room or something. It's here somewhere. I should get a necklace. I'll wear it as a necklace or something!

Eric Johnson’s Texaphonic 2026 UK tour runs from July 22 – August 4. Tickets available from The Gig Cartel.com and www.ericjohnson.com

​Hi John, it looks like you're in your KISS Museum today!
Yeah, I'm in one of them.

Didn't you open your house a few years ago to show off some of your stuff?
It was not my house but it was my collection and it's wonderful because the KISS fans started loving KISS when they were little kids just like myself, so to open the museum up to people to come and touch the outfits or the boots or to look at things like certain posters they had or certain mirrors when they were kids, it was so emotional for them. We got to play the KISS pinball machine, and we got to do all this fun KISS trivia, so it was an experience that people had so much fun with. I was there answering questions and telling stories, so everybody had a really, really great time, but it was emotional for a lot of people.

We're here to talk about the UK tour you've got coming up, which is your biggest ever; first off, what took you so long?
I know, right?! I've been so busy, but actually I'm so busy this year, but I was adamant that I was. I told my agent; "I've got to get over there. This is what I want to do!", and we made it happen. I was talking about this before, but I want to come back every other year and just keep doing this because I love it there so much, and I have such a good time. I'm just so excited to come, I really am. I'm so, so excited to get there and play.

I was looking at the dates, and you're in the Underworld in London, for example, which is not the same as the big stages you share with Mötley Crüe.
Actually, I love it. I love it, and I'm being completely honest, I love these small venues because I am so close to the people, and that is so fun for me. I love playing small places because it's so much more pressure than playing a big place because you're right here with the person; you know when they're pounding on your foot, or they're like, jumping on the stage, and it's just it's so much fun. I've always loved playing venues like that. And it's funny you bring up Mötley Crüe because we played the Underworld [in 2023], and then we played the next day at Wembley Stadium. It was so weird, but fun.

Mötley Crüe in there must have been mind blowing for you, with like, 200 people in there.
Oh, it was the best. Yeah, I think it fits like 500 people, but it was so much fun, and there were so many people in there. I remember Tommy [Lee], because I've never seen someone so red in my life because he got so hot. I almost wanted to take a picture of him because he was so red. I've never seen anyone so red in my life! I was like; "are you okay, dude?" He was like; "whoa, it's just really hot!", and so, yeah, it was a wonderful gig, man. Someone actually made a bootleg vinyl of it and I have it, and it sounds so cool.

That's kind of cool, as bootlegging is a dodgy word, isn't it? But you wanted one for your collection!
Yeah, it's the best. I love when people do that.

You're touring in support of latest album 'Ghost' which came out in 2025, and you've doing a big chunk of that album live.
Yeah, it's so fun because we're going to do a live record too. So I love it, man. I just love playing these songs that we're playing every day. We're adding shows, and I think we're going to tell what shows are being added, but yeah, if you look at the dates after these other shows are going to be added, we're playing like every day, which is super fun. I love it. I don't want any days off.

Some of the tracks are so incredibly complicated and a world away from even the DLR Band stuff, which is where I first became aware of you.
Yeah, I just am obsessed with practicing and learning and things like that. Let me ask you something about your CD. 
There are a bunch of CDs that, Dave Roth made those CDs. If there's a sticker, if it feels like like paper on the CD, then Dave did that, because I was with him when he was doing all those CDs. He did that before independent was a thing. He was in his back house making those CDs. It was incredible to see. I was like; "whoa", and that's how far along his thoughts were. He was like; "people are going to, if they want the CD, they can get it this way", and that's what happened. I thought it was so smart. It was brilliant, and he was so ahead of his time. But yeah, to answer your question, I just love to practice, and I love to learn, and I love to play. It's so much fun.

Listening to the album today with fresh ears, on 'Black Light', is that a nod to Tom Morello in there?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I love Morello, and I am the first to say I am influenced by all guitar players. I think being influenced is one of the most important things in the world because you can watch something on TV that will change your life forever until the day you die, or see a movie, or do something, or taste food that will take your life forever, and that's what happened with me with guitar. I saw there was a TV show and there was a kid playing guitar, and I was like; "oh my God", and I'm still, it's all I do all day; from just that TV show that inspired me that long ago. So yeah, like, you'll hear Morello, you'll hear  Yngwie [Malmsteen] , you'll hear anything, and like, I love being inspired. It's my favourite.

Something I love about you as a player is, when you came into Mötley Crüe, you played those solos and parts exactly as they were recorded. 
Yeah, it's our childhood, you know? Those solos are embedded in our brains, and I wanted to play them just like how they were written, just how Mick [Mars] wrote those solos. I wanted to play them because they're perfect. You can't change them. It just is not right if you change them, because they're burned in my brain and your brain like that, so I just wanted to play them just like how they were written. It's just like if you see a piece of sheet music, and you're doing a session and you're reading, you're playing, and you're like; "that doesn't really work", and change this like that; no, you don't do that, you you play how it was written. And yeah, those solos are perfect. So I love it, and it puts a smile on my face every time I walk on that stage.

The fans want to hear certain songs, but I'm a big fan of the '94 album [with John Corabi], and I think 'Generation Swine' has got some great tracks on it like 'Glitter'.
'Glitter' is great, yeah!

Have you ever tried to get the Mötley guys to play some of those songs, or have you jammed them in rehearsal?
Every time at rehearsal, I'll play 'Red Hot', I'll play 'Ten Seconds of Love', 'Bastard', 'Take Me to the Top', 'Louder in Hell', 'Glitter', 'Generation Swine', anything. I'll play all these songs all the time, and it's so fun. I love it. I love it. Love it, love it, love it. So, we're going to hit the road this summer, and I don't want to reveal what the setlist is, but it's exciting, so I'm super excited.

Even 'New Tattoo' is a beautiful song.
Oh, it's great! Yeah, it's awesome.

I want to talk to you a little bit about your guitars, specifically that Perspex Telecaster that you have with the liquid in it; it's visually stunning. 
So, it's really interesting. I was at the NAMM Show, which is like a music convention that all these celebrities go to, and it's been going on since the '50s, and I was doing an autograph session, and this guy came up to me, his name is Ken Meyer, and he goes; "I build guitars". Just imagine if someone came up to you and was like; "I build guitars. What guitar would you want, out of any guitar?" And I said; "I don't know, maybe a light-up guitar and a lava guitar", and he goes; "done. I'm going to do it for you", and I was like; "oh, that was weird!" And then he left and I just continued my autograph session, and then I get a email at the management, and he's got a prototype. And this guy, Ken Meyer, is such a brilliant, brilliant maker. He was a fireman in Michigan, just a fireman, and he worked with his dad, and they would just build these guitars, and he figured out how to do this. It took a couple tries, but the liquid inside there is antifreeze, because when you travel with it, and it's freezing, that liquid would freeze, but now antifreeze, which doesn't freeze, it's green and it looks really cool, and it doesn't freeze. So how smart was that!

​Hi Paul, it's been a while since we last spoke, which was around the release of the Dio album.
That's a maybe two or three years, so yeah, it's been a little while.

You've been busy since then though, haven't you?
Well there was the whole Mr. Big farewell tour, which was about two years, and we did an album and a single, and yeah, I enjoyed the music and the people. There were a fair amount of days off on that tour, and I've started to go to a lot of zoos. I visited so many. I never did that before. I'd always just stay in my hotel room, and I thought; "I'm going to start going to the zoo in every country I can find it". So I saw rhinoceroses and emus and ant eaters all over the world.

Speaking about the end of Mr. Big, I was flicking through an old issue of The Guitar Magazine, and 'Lean Into It' [1991] and just been released, so that was before the success of 'To Be With You'; did you know it was going to be as big?
Well, as we're making it, I was really excited about it. We had done the first album [Mr. Big, 1989], and we had had some really good opportunities for touring, because we were a support band for Rush on their 'Presto' tour, and so that was amazing. We were playing in arenas and there were great audiences, but my instinct - I don't know if the rest of the band felt this way - but for me it felt like we were playing great, we were singing great, but the songs weren't quite connecting as much as they could. So to me, the focus of 'Lean into it' was we've got to get some songs that have stronger melodies or just better songs, somehow. So I think we accomplished the mission. I mean, I thought the songs on 'Lean into it' were really a step up from the first album.

We're here to talk about your new album 'WROC', which stands for 'Washington's Rules of Civility'; what a crazy concept, putting Washington's words to your music!
Well, I had to sing about something, and when you're a teenager or when you're in your early 20s, you can sing about, you know, "I'm trying to find that girl". and it sort of makes sense that the standard rock and roll subjects fit right in when you're that age. I'm in my late fifties, so I'm not going to be singing about this. I still love that music, but I thought; "what am I going to sing about?", and on previous albums, I had songs like 'Everybody use your Goddamn Turn Signal' [2016], which is kind of 'old guy' rock, criticising small annoyances. And I thought, well, I could do more of that, but I found that although I really enjoyed doing that in the studio - because it was a good riff, and it was kind of a funny lick - I felt when I got that on stage that it didn't really unite the audience in a feeling of like; "yeah, we're all pissed off at people that don't use their turn signals" together. It just didn't quite land the way that it could have.

So you wanted something more unifying, lyrically?
I thought; "well, what are the lyrics going to be about?", and I had read the Washington Rules of Civility decades ago, and somehow it just popped into my head. I was actually on the airplane flying back from the last Mr. Big Show in Japan, and so I didn't have the book with me, but I was having a conversation with AI, and first of all, I couldn't remember what it was called. I was like; "this is some George Washington thing", you know; "these be rules of etiquette", and it pulled it up. Then it was; "what are some of the rules? Can you make that into a lyric?", and I'm sort of bossing AI around to do it, and as I was having this conversation with AI, I started to really like the result.

That was a great jump-off point; it obviously inspired your creativity!
I like the  general theme of being polite and civil, and so I got at home and started putting some of the music together, and I've never had such a good time writing songs in my life! I really enjoyed the process. I was just a little concerned because obviously, it's an unusual thing to sing about, so I brought a couple of musicians over, the guys that ended up playing my album; Timmer [Blakely, bass] and Doug [Rappoport, guitar], and I just watched their faces as we're playing the stuff and I'm singing it, just to see if they're looking at me like this is crazy or if they're smiling and happy, and they were smiling and happy, so, okay, that's a good sign. 

You're talking about uniting audience, and the message in a song like 'Conscience is the Most Certain Judge' is universal.
Yeah, but I haven't played them live yet, but I think the stuff will go over really good. It's also it's going to be fun to put the harmonies together because that song, and many like it, are deceptively simple, where you know you can hear it, you can hum the melody, but when you try to put those harmonies to it, they're crazy. I really sat down and really worked those out, and when you get them right, they're beautiful. So that's one of my favourite parts of the record, just the work that I put into those harmonies to navigate the chord changes, because the chord changes, I hope they feel natural as they go by, but there's actually a lot of modulations and surprise chord changes in there that are unexpected, especially when you have to sing the harmony part.

The album was recorded in just four days, was it? Was it done live?
Yeah, we did it live and then I went back and I re-sang my lead vocals because I knew I could do better. Then on the very last day of the recording sessions, I had all the guys in the band - Nick, Doug and Timmer - sing the harmonies, and then I also sang the harmonies to thicken them up with my own voice. So basically the music is live, and I was singing in the studio just in case I got a good one, but when I'd listen to it, it's like; "I can do it better if I have another chance". 

Is it nice to go back and do something really sparse like that, and just going and do this in four days; is that refreshing for you?
Well, I don't know if sparse is the right word, because I did have a second guitar player so that thickens it up a good deal, but I think with that instrumentation; two guitars, bass and drums, you get an immediate sense of how expansive your part or your playing needs to be to fill up the space. Doug's a great soloist if he needs to be and a great rhythm player too, and so I love that; having a live band where we kind of feel that out, rather than having a bunch of carefully overdubbed things, and you just keep overdubbing, because as you do that, you sort of lose the character of the of the players themselves, and I think with more live instrumentation, you can really hear the fingerprint of the of the musicians and you hear their style more.

It's the opposite of say, Def Leppard's 'Hysteria', where they spent two and a half years producing it.
I mean, those records are amazing. but I think the thing I like about this is it's as a unique, and in a way, you never quite know what you're going to get, but you know when you've got it. You know you when you go in and you play live after maybe three takes and you get to listen to it, you go; "oh, it's almost there", and then immediately you know what you need to work on, whereas with overdubbing, sometimes you don't really know what's wrong with it until you finish it, and then it's too late. Live, it's really obvious what's not right and you can fix it immediately because you have another chance, and then often, not only is it right, but often it's magic! I mean, one of the moments to me on the record that's magic is at the very beginning, where I do this little Phrygian dominant solo and I end on a chord, and the whole band is with me, and the way that chord tunes up and resonates is so beautiful. We probably did that intro five times, and that was just like; "oh, listen to that chord there! I'll never get that again in my life!". and that stuff is just wonderful when you get when you get those.

What was the longest you've ever spent working on an album? Was it one of the Mr. Big ones?
Well, it depends. The early Mr. Big ones, we'd play live in the studio, but then often we'd go back and recut. The goal with it playing live was to get a good feeling drum track, and usually we wouldn't use a click. With Pat [Torpey], you had great time, and then we might go back and recut the guitar and the bass later on. We got more live as it went.

I would say the things that actually really took me the longest might be something like the Dio album, where I played all the instruments, and if you do that, nothing's live. I was also copying a previous recording, so I'm being really meticulous about listening and not just playing what I feel, but I'm trying to get that Vivian Campbell  part right, then trying to get the Dio part right, so that was much more a built-in-the-studio kind of thing.

I can see the double-neck guitar sitting behind you that you use in the video for 'Conscious is the Most Certain Judge'. 
I bought that when I was living in Las Vegas, so it was probably late '90s. There's a picture of me playing that guitar in the back of the 'Burning Organ' [2002] album, so it's probably around then, like, 1999, 2000, somewhere around there. It's such a good instrument. The twelve-string on it sounds amazing, and I actually used it on a few of the songs. I used it on of course, 'Conscious is the Most Certain Judge', and I used it on 'Let Thy Carriage', and then there was one more, 'If You Soak Bread in the Sauce'. The titles are so funny! I love it!

One of the tracks I love is  'Go Not Tither'; it's such a driving rocker.
Well, that one I wasn't going to put that on the record at first, because I didn't have the whole song finished. I just had the main part, and I thought; "oh, that's just kind of normal, it's like a Deep Purple riff", and of course, I love Deep Purple riffs, but I wanted something that was a little more me. I thought that anybody could write this riff, but then when I combined it with the with the arpeggiated chord part that goes to the six, eight groove, that change kind of made it into a song for me. And as I wrote the verse, it came with some other changes and it just became more melodic. Initially, when it was just straight ahead, sort of blues rock, I couldn't find something that really felt like something unique from myself, so that took a little bit of punching around. But I love singing that one because I had a couple of really high screams and notes that actually work for my voice, and then the rest of it kind of goes down low so I don't kill myself.

You're using some great guitar tones, from the dry sound on 'Conscience is the Most Certain Judge', to whatever it is you have going on on 'Go Not Tither'.
Oh, that's probably an MXR Stereo Chorus, which actually, in Mr. Big, I was using that all the time because I found on the Mr. Big tour that the majority of my rhythm playing was playing like soft arpeggiated chords with a lot of distortion, which reminds me of Randy Rhoads. When Randy Rhoads would play 'Goodbye to Romance', where the arpeggiated chords are, he's got this fire breathing tone, and I think Randy used an MXR Stereo Chorus, and it's such a good sounding pedal for that.

Didn't you attend a Randy Rhoads seminar in the early 1980s?
Yeah, I mean, it was amazing that he did. I think it was the only seminar he did in his life, and it was in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, which is the little town I grew up in. So I was like; "of course, I'm going to that!" He mostly answered questions. He wasn't really prepared as a clinician because it was just a one off, but he was nice enough to come and answer questions. He worked hard, and he did, I don't know, four or five seminars that day, because they couldn't fit everybody that wanted to come and see him. So they'd bring in one group of people, and then get them out, get another in, so I heard that as the day went on, he played more and more, but I didn't see those.

I was about to ask if you got to watch Randy up close.
Well, I watched him up close at the show because I got down in front that night at the arena, but the other cool thing was he spent some time with the guys at the music store, and then afterwards, because I knew the music store guys, they were like; "yeah, Randy showed me how he played..." you know, 'Steal Away (The Night)' or whatever, and I got the right fingering from them because Randy showed them.

That must have been really cool, as a guitar student.
Yeah, I used to go to concerts with binoculars, and I'd have really specific things in mind, like when Eddie Van Halen played the song 'Loss of Control'; it's an open string riff for the A and the D, but then he goes to C, and he gets this ferocious tone, and I got to see how he does that. You know; "is it third position or eighth position?!" I'm there, but I was just waiting for him to do that part; "oh, it's eighth position!". I'd get all kinds of questions answered.

You sent a tape to Ozzy Osbourne about joining his band when you were 15, didn't you?
Well, I didn't have Ozzy's address, so I sent the tape to Mike Varney [Shrapnel Records founder], because he was the only person I could find that had a public address that you could send something to. I had a cassette of a bunch of copy songs that I played with my band. We were playing 'Rock Candy' by Montrose, and I had a long, unaccompanied solo, and Mike called me back right away, which was, to me, really exciting. Like; "wow!" You know, a guy in California has a record company, and he's calling me on the phone?! So I was thrilled, but when he found out I was 15, he was like; "Ozzy doesn't want a 15 year old in the band".

The Shrapnel label was a hotbed for guitarists joining big bands; Marty Friedman's went to Megadeth and Jason Becker to David Lee Roth, and you must have had so many offers; who approached you during that period?
Well, the thing is, I was in a band [Racer X], and actually, the person who approached me was Billy Sheehan, and that was Mr. Big, so that's the one I did. But before then, I can't really remember any because I was so into Racer X, and we were a really a strong unit. Billy was really a hero of mine. I used to go watch him play in Talas, and of course the playing he did with David Lee Roth was great, but I was mostly a Talas fan. I used to see them all the time.

What was it like when you first got together with Billy Sheehan?
I think when we got together, we were both pleasantly surprised that we knew so many of the same cover songs; everything from heavy metal - we're both big fans of Accept - but we also were fans of Motown, and of Hendrix and almost any song. We'd learned from the same stuff.

What was it like when Mr. Big went on to become achieve huge success, particularly in Japan where it was apparently like Beatlemania?
Yeah, we couldn't leave the hotel. Pat and I, we were sneaking out of the parking garage because the hotel was surrounded, and we'd run through the train stations, and we'd go through the kitchen a lo, and they would let us in through the employee entrances. We got so many cool gifts, and after the show our hotel room be filled with all the letters and gifts and stuff, so it was really cool. But I remember getting back, and at the time I was living in Las Vegas, and I just walked into the grocery store to get some chicken breasts or something, and I remember thinking; "this is actually really good for my personal sanity to not have that Beatlemania happening everywhere".

That sounds intense.
It was really fun. I'm really happy about it. That was wonderful, but if that was happening everywhere you went that could mess with your head, so it was nice to go back to Las Vegas, where nobody cares who I am; I'm just some tall guy with scraggly hair. So it worked out well; enough fame and rock star experiences to satisfy that that itch, but enough sanity and humbling experiences so you don't become crazy.

Now that the farewell tour is done, do you miss playing with Mr. Big?
Well, that's a good question. I mean, because we were together for a long time, that's an experience that I've had. I know what that is. There's some great things about it. Sometimes I get bowled over a little bit because Billy is such a commanding musician. In fact, I think a lot of the stuff that I've learned on how to be a showman were from where I'd be on my side of the stage, I look over and Billy's arms go wildly and he's playing one note he's so animated, physically, and it was like; "well, I've got to keep up, hold up my end of the deal here", so I'd get something going on as a performer. But I think now, I look for different things just because I don't want to do the same thing in my whole life. I really enjoy playing and jamming with different musicians. I jammed with Steve Morse at the NAMM Show recently, and that was that was so much fun. I had such a good time playing with him. We didn't even have bass, and I just stomped on the ground so we'd have a drum beat. Two guitars, and that was it.

We've got to talk about the costume, because it goes in nicely with what you're saying about the showmanship. 
It was kind of a last minute decision because at first I thought; "the lyrics, that's enough", but then I hired a guy to shoot the videos, and I thought; "well, if it's on video...", and plus, it solves hair problems! If I've got a hat, I don't worry about the hair. The trick was, I'm really tall, and the place that made the clothes, you can measure yourself and they'll custom make it, but the boots - because I'm about a size 14 or size 15 shoe - I ordered them on Etsy, and they came just in time. They made them in Turkey or some Eastern European country, and they're great, but it's not easy to find size 15, eighteenth century riding boots.

You're going out on a US tour shortly; are you going to wear the gear, and how much of the album are you going to play?
Well, it could change as we see how it goes over, but my initial plan is I'll have the hat reserved for the new songs. Maybe it'll be sitting on my amp or something, so people will see it there, and then at some point, I'll dramatically place it on my head, and then we'll do the new material. So that'll signify that these are the WROC songs.

That's a great visual cue!
Yeah. but I must admit, the shirt is kind of a piratey shirt, so that reminds me of Yngwie [Malmsteen] a little bit, you know? He looks kind of like a swashbuckler.

Have you any plans to bring the tour over to Europe?
The people that book gigs are working on that, so hopefully they'll have some good news for that soon.

What else have you got coming up? Are you still teaching?
There's an online school at Artist Works that I've done for13 years, and I've done more than 16,000 lessons there and they're all in the archives, but it got to the point where at the same time I'm making albums and preparing for tours, and I just couldn't juggle all these things at once. So I've actually stepped back from doing the teaching. At some point I may rethink that or return to teaching, and actually, when I go on the road, I often do a VIP thing where there'll be some one-on-one lessons available for an unreasonable price. But I love teaching. It's just there's only so many hours in a day.

Is your focus then completely on the album and I'm being a solo artist these days?
Yeah, and it's a lot of preparing for the tour. I really want it to be a great show so I've got the new stuff, which I'm really happy with, but also I know people expect to hear their favourite stuff from my past, so I've been working up these medleys that have all the highlights. So, you want to hear 'Fuzz Universe, you want to hear 'Silence Followed by a Deafening Roar, 'Technical Difficulties', 'Scarified'; I want to make sure all that stuff's in there. I might shorten the songs so there's enough time to do all of them because if I do all the favourites, we're going to run out of time. So that's the thing. just putting all the highlights together. That's takes a lot of practice for both the band and myself, because the highlights are usually the things that are hard to play.

Does it take a lot of work for you, personally to stay in shape to play those?
Yeah, I've been coming down every morning and just really working, and it's an amazing exercise, because when I first do it, I don't normally work on technique that much, and for this, if you practice, you actually do get better [laughing]. I'll sit there, watching my hand, going; "wow, I forgot I could do that!" That's kind of a fun thing to do, is to dust off the old crazy technique songs.

'WROC' is released on 27 February via Music Theories Recordings. Pre-Order/Stream here. 

Hi guys, how are you doing? 
Chris; We're great. Thanks for having us.

Jarle; Yeah, thanks for having us. It's a good day in Norway.

Chris, I gather you were a fan of Jarle and Vreid; how did you come to be involved in the project? 
Chris; I was in Sweden, actually, and my family and I were traveling around Scandinavia on our road trip, and my wife found this really big supermarket outside of Karlstad, and she's like; "oh, there's a really good record section here". They had this giant black metal section, and so me and my son were like, showing records and talking about them, and we put it online, and we called it 'Black Metal Supermarket', and one of the records I held up - and I said it was one of my favourites - was Windir [precursor to Vreid], and one of Jarle's friends ended seeing the video, and he said; "oh, the guy from Jackass likes your band", and so Jarle wrote to me on Instagram.

So Jarle reached out to you, Chris?
Chris; Yeah, and he said; "I have a festival that we do [Tons of Rock, in Norway], and Metallica is playing, and you're welcome to come", and so we were actually meant to go home, and we decided to stay. We went back to Oslo and we went to the festival. We had the best time ever, and hit it off with all these guys, and became very good friends with Jarle, and here we are, really. So we've been in Norway for the past few summers, and last summer we were here for like three months, and the summer before that. So we kind of live here part time, almost.

How did the song 'Loving the Dead' come about?
Jarle; Last summer, when we were here, we were also working on another project, a documentary that me and Chris and a few others were doing where we started to look into underground, and rock and roll history and stuff like that. And while we're working on that we went to the studio, and I went to show Chris; "I got these new songs ready for new album. I have one song is a bit different, and I think it is going to be some different vocals". The whole song was lyrically inspired by like an American, California serial killer vibe and it had a David Lynch kind of feeling to it, and I said; "you know, I see some movie here; maybe you can participate?", and Chris liked the idea. Then we had a couple of beers, and he was playing the songs, you know, Chris played guitar and jamming on it, and as it developed during the autumn and we recorded the song, we brought in Agneta [Kjølsrud] from the band Djerv that did the vocals, really tremendous work, and that kind of opened a new dimension to the song.

With the song really taking shape, the video for the video must have come back.
Jarle; Yes, and then I called on Chris again and said; "we've kind of finished off the song. We're ready. Remember this summer where we talked about this crazy idea about music video?" and he was like; "cool, when can I come over?" So then he came over in January, and we went into a Norwegian church and tried to make something that we've never done before.

Chris; Yeah, the song sounds like a soundtrack song, so the video is like a short film, really. Like, it just looks like a scene out of one of these movies; like a David Lynch movie kind of mixed with a lot of these movies that are just like, fucked up. It's like Eyes Wide Shut or Silence of the Lambs; any of these movies that are kind of freaky that afterwards you're like; "what the fuck did I see?!" In the last Jackass movie, we did a Silence of the Lamb's bit just to be weird, but yeah, the video it's like a little film. It's almost like a musical interlude of a movie. I think.

The song is an epic, coming in at eight minutes long, and the video is a real film noir;  I'm guessing seeing the video puts a slightly different perspective on the song, Jarle?
Jarle; Yeah. and the cool thing was, I haven't made a lot of music videos on the last albums, and I like to. For me, making something new is not just about making the guitar riff or whatever; it starts often with a riff, but then to think; video, visual design, lyrics; it's a package. When we went into this and we found this great church in Oslo, and I was like; "oh, can we use this? Like, a Norwegian, metal, black, call it whatever you want, we can use a Norwegian church, and we can bring Chris into this". Then all these ideas started to play, and to see how it's kind of developed, we had a script, set, but still, to see everyone from Agnes to Chris to myself and the director; everybody just kind of followed the intuition of the idea, it was amazing.

And that freedom created something special?
Jarle; When I kind of look back at how a lot of the movies in the '80s or '90s were made, that kind of aesthetics, I think they followed some of the same ideas. You know, when I looked into David Lynch, I'm pretty sure that everything wasn't planned.

Chris; For sure.

Jarle; And when I talk with Chris, this is how I make music. I hate; "oh, we're gonna make the album sound like this"' Fuck that! It's like, I have an idea, and I know where my music has come from, but I go in with approach of trying to create something and see how it leads me, and when we were talking about Jackass, that seems to be pretty much the same approach.

Chris; Yeah, it's good to have like, a rough idea, and then you just start, and then it just things take a life of their own.

I'm guessing that keeps you on a bit of a creative edge, in that it could fall apart at any moment, or it might go either way.
Chris; Yeah. and also, music videos are kind of, like, I don't want to say a lost art, but at one time, really, every song had a cool video to it, and now, I guess because of MTV going away and all these things, it's just not a thing that people put a lot into now. So it's cool to do these things, because it's such a good medium for making things. Quentin Tarantino movies or things like this, they have these interludes where all these things happen just to music, and those things are so cool. So, yeah, it's really cool to do these, because you can really do whatever you want. It was really fun to make though.

Jarle; I think looking at metal and extreme metal and all that kind of old school rock and metal, it's always been a genre that's likes to explore, and also very much about the visuals.

Chris; It's so much about a visuals.

Jarle; It's like, you know, vinyl never went out of fashion in these genres, and there's cassettes coming back and everything. It's always been about something else, more than many other genres. I think it does come from growing up in the '70s, and especially the '80s and early '90s, with this kind of music video approach to it. It's how so many of us discovered music, and you might not like the song, but you love the video and that kind of combination. It's always fascinating.

It was filmed in a Norwegian church, and I mean, that's very black metal, taking me right back to all that stuff in the '90s with Varg Vikernes; it's so evocative, isn't it?
Jarle; Yeah, it's very special environment to play in and to be in, with the Norwegian history and everything, of course, but for me, to be in a church like that, it's about a bit of respect, but also that kind of childish rebellion coming back over and over again. I cherish so much, individuality and freedom and do whatever you want, and for me, I'm not a very religious person, I'm never going to become a very religious person, I think, but still, I respect when you are in a church. To see that's that room, the aesthetics of it, I love that. 

Chris; It's definitely connected to black metal. I mean, just interviewing all the bands when we were shooting for the documentary, like, so much of black metal is a reaction to growing up in Norway at that time, just kids, kind of not fitting in and rebelling and against that part of society and just trying to really just be the opposite of it - like, not being into Satan - just being the opposite of everything else that was around them. They're definitely connected, but I think Norway, as an outsider that has somewhat kind of embraced that, Black Metal has attracted a lot of people to Norway. When you ride the train from the airport, there's a little video it shows these people on their way from the airport with corpse paint on, and that's pretty cool. Like, they recognise that.

Oh yeah, they're all going straight to the Helvet basement, aren't they?
Chris; Yeah, it's people from all over the world, and people actually do come here to visit and follow the roots of the music that they like.

The album is called 'The Skies Turn Black', and that song is a tribute to Ozzy Osbourne; what are your memories of Ozzy, and what did you make of the Back to the Beginning concert?
Jarle; I didn't meet Ozzy, but I was the promoter for the his last shows in Norway at the Tons of Rock Festival on both the last Black Sabbath, and last Ozzy show, actually, which was in 2016 and 2018. Ozzy was royalty, so you didn't intervene with him, but of course I was observing him and what he was doing there. He's been one of my strongest influences, and being at Back to the Beginning, is, speaking about religion, one of the most [shakes head]. For me, I've dedicated most of my life to rock and roll and that's my real passion in life, heavy metal or call it what you want, but to see all those bands, to see the audience and to see also himself that night, that was like, wow. I sat down on the train the next day, and I was going actually to London to see Slayer.

I was at that one as well.
What a weekend, you know?! And this was the weekend after Tons of Rock, so that worked for me! But for me, this was like I was the biggest fan boy in the world at that time, and they were, like such a good experience and I started writing some some lyric lines about this because it made such impression on me. And just a few weeks later, I was on vacation. I was in Italy, and I got a message that Ozzy died, and was just completely shocked. Even though you could see the state of him, I couldn't understand it. He was gone, so I sat down the next day and just listened to Ozzy and I wrote this song in obligation. It's a thank you to Ozzy, but it's also about whole world of Heavy Metal since the late '60s. For me, it's like, Back to the Beginning, Ozzy was the ritual master, but we kind of visualised what it's all about, and yeah, it was goosebumps. So it was just a thank you, and feeling delighted to be a part of this world.

Chris; I think it's crazy that Ozzy hung on. You can tell he hung on for that concert.

Jarle; And to see the documentary about him that just came out; all that pain and everything he was fighting through, he just so intensely wanted to say farewell, and then it was like a perfect love story, which, you know, it's a sad ending, and he's gone, but still, it's like it's the most beautiful thing ever.

Back to the video, and what are your final thoughts on it before it's unleashed?
Jarle; Well, I hope it's something special. It's not just the standard thing, so if you want a few minutes of enjoyment, it's amazing,

Chris; Yeah, just have fun. To me. it's just like, you can do anything you want; don't worry about having to do the same thing every time you do something creatively or whatever. And who cares? That's what Jackass is kind of about, and also, just having fun with your friends, really. That's what all these things are about, you know? That's what making these things is. If you have fun making it, you know it's going to be good. We had so much fun making this, so that's what it's about.

Chris, you've been busy with Jackass five, which is coming out now in June, haven't you? Tell me a little bit about that. 
Chris; Well, I can't tell you much about it really because I have to start in like, two weeks. Jackass moves very fast once we start and yeah, we're starting filming right when I get back. We're going to really make this one count, though, so do really cool things. It's not covid anymore, so we can do stuff with the public also, and that's going to be awesome, and it won't be so rigid. I mean, the last movie. I think it worked, but it was really hard to film during that time, and we were one of the only films that was being made. But, yeah, if this is the last one, then I personally want to make it really funny.

Watch the video for 'Loving the Dead'  above. 

Hi Alex, 2025 was a monster year for you, with your trio's album coming out, as well as a Testament album.
Yeah, and I also had a film score come out. The film is finished. It's doing film festivals right now, but, yeah, it was a very productive year for sure. I'm still catching my breath.

Is this early part of the year a good time for you to let your hair down?  I mean, we're obviously going to get to Metal Allegiance and NAMM, but is it good to get a breather?
There really wasn't much of a breather. By the first week of January I was off to tour with my trio and did about nine shows, and then straight to NAMM, and I played with several different groups around NAMM, and then had rehearsals, and I just got back last week. So this this month, February, is a little more open, but I'm just now kind of starting to feel normal again.

You seem to be someone who actually enjoys the NAMM show. I've spoken to some new people, and they're like; "no, it's too much!"
I do. I've learned to enjoy it. I used to get overwhelmed by it because it does take a lot of energy, and it can be overwhelming. You know, it's very noisy, it's very crowded, and most people who are there are affected by the noise and the crowds, and many of them feel like the people you were describing, so you pick up on that too. But having done it for a number of years, I've learned how to go into it, I know what my limits are. I know to take breaks, and I know to have snacks and get a certain amount of rest.

That sounds like a sensible approach.
I don't usually do the crazy hotel parties that happen at night. That's a big thing too. A lot of people, I think, get sucked up into that whole social scene and get hungover the next day. I have a good time and all, but I'm at the hotel if I'm playing. I actually played with my trio [jazz band the Alex Skolnick Trio] and Chad Wackerman [jazz fusion drummer] at the Marriott, and that was a lot of fun, and that was a semi-late night, and a few cocktails, but I didn't go crazy. The other nights I was pretty much taking it easy unless I was playing. So, yeah, you learn how to pace yourself and learn how to have a good time with it.

Of course NAMM Show brings the annual Metal Allegiance gig, and 2026 was no different; that gig seems to be a lot of fun for you.
Yeah, absolutely. The Metal Allegiance show, it's almost a festival within a single gig, because you have so many people from so many different bands and everybody's having a good time. It doesn't come with the pressure of having to carry a whole concert as one band; every song practically is a different line up, and it's fun. There's a lot of overlap with the line ups, but it's just a different experience. It doesn't happen that often, so you don't get burned out on it. It's not the same show night after night because it's very occasional, so it always feels fresh and exciting.

Speaking of fresh and exciting, Metal Allegiance released a new single, 'Black Horizon' with William DuVall on vocals, which has to be the heaviest song he has ever sang on, and that's saying something when he works with Jerry Cantrell!
Yeah, well, I think Alice in Chains  and Jerry Cantrell have a very specific sound, and William, he's embedded in that now after so many years, but you can take his voice and put it in a slightly different context, and it works really well. I mean, one of the reasons why I think he came to mind for that song is there's a slight Alice in Chains vibe at times - not the whole time, but just enough so that it would work - but at the same time, it goes to these whole other places that you would not expect his voice to go, and it goes there beautifully.

His melodies and his singing style really translate well, and it's one of the strongest songs I've heard from Metal Allegiance.
Yeah, I think so too, and to be honest, these were parts that we weren't sure about at one time, partly because we were overwhelmed. We've had so many singers, especially when you put the two records together, it's a crazy amount of voices and a crazy amount of parts, and I think we maybe got a little bit overshadowed with all that music, and in retrospect, those parts that maybe didn't seem as exciting. Hearing them recently and hearing them fresh, I think we got new appreciation for the music, and then putting his voice there just made such a difference, and it must be said, what he did with it just blew us all away. I mean, he not only came up with melodies that sounded great that we wouldn't have thought of, but the whole lyrical concept and the development of it, and going places over the music where we couldn't have imagined it going. There's parts where it just builds and you would think maybe the vocals should take a rest where other singers might just leave it blank, but he took it to places and it just works so well. So we're all very grateful and very excited by this song.

Were you a fan of what he did with Alice in Chains? I remember when I first heard 'Black Gives Way to Blue', I was blown away, and that doesn't always work; you don't always get a Brian Johnson coming in after an iconic singer. 
Yeah, absolutely. That is one of those rare examples where, yeah, Brian Johnson; that's a perfect example; where somebody comes in and starts a new chapter and it works, and it builds off the other chapter, and they can go back and do the other songs that the original guy did and it works as well. I saw the band on a tour. They were at Madison Square Garden with Mastodon, and it was amazing, and, yeah, I remember there was a huge buzz about it, like; "hey, they're back! You've got to hear what these guys are doing!"

I guess there's a little overlap there with the Clash of the Titans tour the back in the '90s, where Alice in Chains opened that tour, and so did Testament.
Yeah they did it in the US, so never on the same bill as Testament as Testament had played on that tour in Europe. In a way they were like the link between late '80s metal and what you might think of as '90s music, and '90s hard rock. You know, it wasn't considered as different as you might think reading about it in the magazines and the press. They were part of the Seattle scene, the Grunge scene, whatever, but, yeah, all the metalheads I knew were big fans of the band, and you talked to those guys, and those guys loved metal bands as well. They just sort of took it in this other direction.

Obviously, Mike Portnoy is playing drums on the song, and there's a kind of a simile with yourself in that people always wanted to see you back in Testament, and Mike Portnoy...
Yeah, I know where you're going with it.

Yeah, people always wanted to see him back in Dream Theater; have you ever discussed that with Mike?
I haven't, no. I should talk to him about it. I'm happy for him. It does feel like, as an outsider, he's home, he's where he should be. And I understand people having those perceptions. I was lucky that it worked out where, with Testament, there was enough growth and maturity to sort of; "alright, let's give this another shot, let's try a fresh slate", and it worked. All these naysayers said, you know; "oh, he's plays jazz now, he's not even going to last one record"; I've been there over twice as long as I was there the first time around. So it's so funny, but back to the original point, I do understand that, and it's great when that can work out. It doesn't always work out. As a Kiss fan, I was heartbroken that at least Ace, but hopefully Ace and Peter, I thought they they'd find their way back to the band somehow, and it never happened. Michael Schenker and UFO, I wish that could have happened, so very often, it doesn't work out, so it's great when it does.

I'm glad you touched on Kiss because I know you were a massive fan growing up, and at the start of Testament's career, you got to share the stage with Kiss, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest etc; what was that like for you, playing alongside your heroes?
Yeah, it was a combination of things. I had very mixed emotions about it, because yeah, on the one hand, these were heroes of mine growing up, but even before the '90s alternative revolution or whatever you want to call it, I felt like things were changing, and I just felt like there was less interest in these bands from consumers on a big scale like there had been. It was kind of sad to see that because when I was growing up, when I was a little kid, you know, 10 years old, Kiss were, as ​Tom Morello said; they were our Beatles, our Rolling Stones; that's what they were for us. And they were the biggest thing in the world by the time the Beatles had broken up. But the Stones always stayed huge, and I thought that would be the case with a lot of these bands. But by the time we were on a festival stage with Kiss, there's only Gene and Paul were left from the original line-up. They were doing music that's just... I don't know if they'd done like; 'Let's Put the X in Sex' yet, but just a lot of music that's just like; "well guys, no, this isn't the Kiss that I I knew". So seeing them in that setting, yeah, it was strange.

And then Judas Priest, by the time we played with them, they had done 'Turbo', and now they sort of made up for it with 'Painkiller' right? So I guess you could call it a redemption tour.

They had also used a drum machine on 'Ram it Down', which came in-between, so you're right, on the redeeming arc.
Yes, and it was great [the redemption], and the music was great, so it was different than Kiss, but you could also sense that a lot of the momentum was lost. Like, I had discovered them on 'Screaming for Vengeance', and then was checking out the back catalogue; 'Unleashed in the East'; "wow, oh my god!", all this great stuff, and it just seemed like; "wow, they're just going to go forward and keep building", and then a lot of the momentum was lost. And then we're supporting them in these arenas, but  when you're the opening act on a three-band bill in an arena, very often people are still filing in while you're playing and you're lucky if you have a decent crowd by the time you finish, but there were even shows where Judas Priest played and people were still filing in, and then it wasn't that full. So in a way, as exciting as it was to play with them, it was also just a kind of bit of a reality check.

I think by that stage, on one hand, glam and hair metal was the dominant genre, and on the other, thrash was on the rise too; was it exciting to be part of something that was seen as galvanising, and the kind of the rougher edge of metal?
Oh, absolutely! Absolutely it felt exciting to be part of a new thing. We were coming off of, like, power metal, and we loved Iron Maiden, we loved Ozzy and the Scorpions, and as a pre-teen or mid-teen, before I joined the band, I kind of thought that's the direction I was going in. I also loved all those guitar players, especially Randy Rhoads and Vivian Campbell and Van Halen, even though the vocals were very, you know, showbiz and, yeah, pop, glam, whatever, some of the music was heavy. Every metal head will tell you how much they loved Van Halen; Pantera swore by Van Halen, so all of that was a big part of it. But then with thrash, yeah, it just felt like this was sort of a whole new movement. 

We touched on the impact of Grunge earlier, but I wanted to ask about the Metallica effect. Testament's 1992 album 'The Ritual' was a lot more polished than previous releases; was there an influence of the label going; "we want this to be more commercial"?
I think that there were always hints like; "if you guys gave us a more catchy song we could do a lot with that", but in the case of that record, I just think it was time for something different. You know, we'd done so much music that had similar tempos, and they were great, but there was a common thread with so much of it. If I could do it over, I would have added in at least one song that could have sounded like one of the earlier records, because I think that sort of created this reaction that; "this records too slow!" I think if we had one song from one of the other records, like, you know, just a burning tempo, I think it would have been smart. But we wanted to try something different, and everybody was on board. It's not like, you know, there were these rumours, like, I pushed that; I pushed for musicianship. I wanted high quality solos. I felt like there's no reason our solos can't be appreciated the way the L.A. bands solos are appreciated; "just give me some stuff to play over where I can really stretch out". and, you know, 'Electric Crown' and 'Return to Serenity', I hear about kids learning those solos to this day and they seem to have had a big impact on people, and I'm glad we did it. And the songs too, I think pretty much on all the record the song writing is great. Eric's got some great riffs there. But yeah, we should have had one, thrown a bone to the earlier stuff.